This month, with the glittering skyline of Abu Dhabi as a backdrop, SailGP – one of the world’s fastest-growing global sports leagues – will stage its grand finale on the Arabian Gulf. Amid the adrenaline and elegance of the racing high-performance F50 foiling catamarans slicing across the water, one of the sport’s most influential figures will be watching from land: Assia Grazioli- Venier, Founding Partner of Muse Capital and part-owner of the Red Bull Italy SailGP Team. “I wasn’t interested at first,” she admits with a laugh about the idea of investing in the start-up, high-speed sailing racing league. “I saw sailing, and I thought, it’s premium, it’s not accessible. It’s for rich people. But then I started looking under the hood and saw huge potential. This sport isn’t sailing like most people think about it. It’s foiling. It’s adrenaline – it’s Formula 1 on water. And it’s the only global league where men and women race on the same team.” That instinct, to open doors, to reimagine what’s possible, to make the inaccessible attainable, has defined Grazioli-Venier’s career.

As one of the few female venture capitalists in the world (Only 13% of U.S. VC decisionmakers are women, and 1% are General Partners according to a 2022 report by the venture capital platform AllRaise), she has built a career investing in what others once overlooked: women’s health, data-driven care, and the future of sport. “As much as we can all complain about not being as understood or heard, I always joke with my partner that we laugh all the way to the bank,” Grazioli-Venier says. “At the end of the day, we get to seize opportunities, huge markets that have been overlooked for centuries.” Muse Capital, which Grazioli-Venier co-founded with her partner Rachel Springate in 2016, has spent the better part of a decade proving that investing in areas she defines as “care, live, and play” can reap great rewards. “When we were raising our fund and telling our majority male investors that we were investing in women’s health care, they said, ‘Okay, but isn’t it niche?’” she recalls. “Eight years later, the company that’s giving back capital to investors is a menopause business. That’s a great proof point for us.” Grazioli-Venier’s passion for women’s health is deeply personal.

“I had breast cancer when I was 36. I’m 45 now,” she says. “We just announced two weeks ago that we invested in an amazing technology called BeSound, a device that detects breast cancer in dense breasts, which 50% of the population have. Mammograms don’t pick up dense breasts, and women die from being misdiagnosed.” For Grazioli-Venier, the motivation to invest in women’s health stems from lived experience battling endometriosis, fertility treatments, and the realisation that female biology had been largely ignored. “Women were excluded from clinical trials until 1993,” she says. “The data that’s coming in from these women’s healthcare companies is brand new. It’s sad, but also an enormous business opportunity, because these are data sets that have never existed before. And we’re living in an era of data and AI.”

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