A civil engineer’s startup is building bridges for women entrepreneurs in Asia

Woomentum founder Mouna Aouri Langendorf

It’s hard for Woomentum founder Mouna Aouri Langendorf to hide her enthusiasm when talking about her new startup – not that she’s trying to. Woomentum is nothing less than a passion project for the Tunisian-born civil engineer and entrepreneur. Just as its inception carried her out of a particularly difficult period of her life, she hopes that it will do the same for millions of female entrepreneurs out there.

Singapore-based Woomentum is a community-cum-crowdfunding platform for women who are founders and entrepreneurs. It aims to foster communication, resource sharing, mentoring, and early-stage funding among their startups. The site started out 18 months ago as an online community with a Quora-like set-up, where members can post questions and have others answer them or offer discussion. “Event”-type posts such as AMAs (Ask Me Anything) are also hosted on the site by members of Singapore’s startup community such as Zimplistic’s Pranoti Nagarkar.

“It’s very easy to build a crowdfunding platform nowadays,” Aouri Langendorf tells Tech in Asia. “What’s really difficult is to build a community [around it].” Woomentum’s first stage was meant to do just that. In addition, she organized a couple of crowdfunding events in Singapore to drum up support and raise awareness for her community. Startups pitched in front of an audience, which then pitched in money for the startups.

See: 12 women entrepreneurs who smashed the glass ceiling in Southeast Asia

The events didn’t rake in spectacular amounts of funding, but they proved the idea could work – which was the point. “It’s kind of a validation of the concept, of how it works when you create that spirit of support and community – you can actually raise real money, even over an event,” Aouri Langendorf points out.

Journey to the East

A civil engineer specializing in bridge design, Aouri Langendorf left Tunisia for Japan to enhance her studies, and worked for local and international construction companies there. After seven years, she returned to Tunisia, where she set up her own consultancy for foreign companies doing construction work in the country. But the Tunisian Revolution, which set off the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, drove her and her young family away in 2011. That was when she, her husband, and her infant daughter came to Singapore.

That was the beginning of a tough period for her. Depending on her husband for a long-term visa in the city-state and stuck at home with no job, she started doubting herself and her abilities. “I really went crazy because to me, working and being entrepreneurial is part of my identity,” she says. “I never thought my gender would cause me to slow down just because I’m a mom and because it was expected of me to be the one staying at home.”

Aouri Langendorf started to think she couldn’t possibly be the only one facing these problems. Reading up on the challenges female entrepreneurs face, she thought about creating an initiative to help provide solutions. Working out of The Hub Singapore co-working space, she received mentorship from industry figures like Golden Gate Ventures’ Vinnie Lauria and Jungle Ventures’ Jayesh Parekh. The feedback she got helped her take the plunge into Woomentum. “In that sense, my personal story and my passion for what I do led people to feel that passion and believe in [it], and really give me the feedback I needed,” she says.

Beyond Kickstarter

The crowdfunding aspect of the site is a recent addition, having come online just last week. Located on a separate address, Woomentum.fund is a service similar to the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The idea is, a founder goes on the site and submits her business idea as a crowdfunding campaign. After Woomentum approves and posts the campaign, it’s up to the community to decide whether it will support the project or not. Even the page layout will seem familiar to anyone whose browser landed them on a major crowdfunding site before.

Woomentum adds a few twists to that formula. On the user interface side, it features two additional call-to-action buttons that encourage users to engage in more ways than just the typical “Fund” button. Users can elect to simply “Follow” a project or company and receive updates on it, or they can “Influence”, in terms of giving feedback, sharing insights, or dispensing advice.

“There is at least 25 percent of people who visit [crowdfunding] sites to check out projects, but they don’t fund,” Aouri Langendorf says. “So what happens to this 25 percent? You need to capture them in one way or another. So that’s really something I believe is going to help a lot.” In her view, crowdfunding isn’t just about the funding part, but also about market validation and creating brand ambassadors for the businesses featured on the site.

Boosting the signal

Forging ahead