Company: FemPeak
Website: https://www.fempeak.ai/
About Somi & FemPeak
Somi Arian is a tech philosopher and the CEO and founder of FemPeak, a platform that aims to raise women’s socioeconomic status through tools, training, and mentorship – supporting women so they can navigate the new business landscape, reach their peak potential and achieve financial empowerment.
Born and brought up in Iran in a very oppressive society, Somi was 23 when she came to the UK and studied at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she earned two master’s degrees in political science and the philosophy of science and technology. After university, Somi went into television, learned filmmaking, and became a producer. She then started her own marketing agency, Smart Cookie Media, a modern-day marketing agency for thought leaders, and from there, raised investment to build the FemPeak platform. FemPeak consists of a space where women can come to learn, network, find new business opportunities, and raise investment, so they can gain financial independence, reach their full potential and thrive. The platform consists of four hubs.
When Somi looked at the 10 corporations that run the world, she realised that none of them were founded, or even run, by women. When she was writing her book, Career Fear (And how to beat it), she realised that most of her references, at least 90%-95% were written by men. She wanted to know why.
In 2020, Somi launched the think tank for women in business and technology, a series of conferences with leaders across all industries to find out what factors were holding women back from reaching the top tiers of business and technology. Through the think tank conferences, she discovered six major areas that were holding women back: health, self-confidence, tech skills, leadership & entrepreneurship, family & relationships, and financial skills.
The FemPeak platform was born out of the desire to address these challenges.
Somi has been building her profile on LinkedIn and online for a long time, and has managed to garner a big following. So, when the idea for FemPeak came, she approached her network and raised the initial seed funding. VC funding is coming up in the next stage of the company.
At the moment more than 60,000 women have joined the mailing list, with almost 18,000 subscribed to the platform who are actively participating in events. Thousands of people are signing up for webinars daily and over 840 have upgraded to premium membership.
Somi’s ambitions for 2022 are to keep growing the FemPeak platform, the next hub is the career hub, which will act as a talent pool. Next, the FemTrade hub, a marketplace for female-led startups to sell their products and services, and after, the investment network hub. Key areas that FemPeak will be covering are: Web3, crypto, blockchain and the metaverse space, which Somi believes is critical to focus on as it seems to be where the future is heading and believes it’s vital that women have access to and are leading the conversations around these innovations.
