Hello Alice: An AI-based virtual advisor for women entrepreneurs

Circular Board is a collaborative accelerator for female entrepreneurs – entrepreneurs who lead, aspire and build.

A support platform for women in business, the Circular Board offers mentorship, content, community and capital.

The Circular Board connects entrepreneurs with the resources they need to fuel growth.

Alice – born from the partnership between Circular Board, Dell and Pivotal – is an artificial intelligence platform for women entrepreneurs.

And Alice is on a mission: to make it possible or significantly more female founders to succeed at unprecedented levels.

But how did this partnership come about?

In 2016, Circular Board approached Dell with an idea. An idea the hoped would disrupt the start-up world by building an ecosystem exclusively for women founders.

Dell jumped on board to lend expertise and capital to create Alice.

Dell claims that women-owned businesses currently employ 7.8 million workers in the U.S. and generate $1.3 trillion in revenue overall but only 2% of women entrepreneurs in the U.S. have reached more than $1 million in revenues.

Dell, Pivotal and Circular Board have launched Alice and her partners to try and flip this stat to 98%.

"Alice is a female founder's best mentor, guide and consultant. The current start-up ecosystem continues to cycle resources among a very small percentage of well-connected entrepreneurs, making it difficult for less traditional founders to navigate," says Carolyn Rodz, founder and CEO of Circular Board.

Rodz says that Alice instantly filters millions of resources down to the personalised, verified content.

This enables founders to scale to the highest heights, no matter where they are located or who they know, adds Rodz.

So, let's meet Alice.

Alice is driven by data analytics and aims to connect women entrepreneurs in real time with the resources needed to scale based on start-up stage, location, industry, revenues and individual needs.

Alice aims to offer users the following features:

• A conversational user interface to express different areas where women entrepreneurs need help (e.g., financing, legal, marketing, technology)
• Static and machine learning based on user input
• Personalised dashboard with real-time modules based on user activity
• User profiles with data collection capabilities for personal and company demographics 
• An extensive library of resources, network of global experts and leaders and events calendar
• Robust search pages with stored results that sort and filter by location, industry, annual revenue, employee count, years in business and content publication source
• Bulk and single upload of resource(s) and mentor(s) by trusted partners and the Circular Board team of experts for easy content aggregation and suggestive analytics