About
The SWELL is a working community for women building businesses, based at SURF Incubator in downtown Seattle. Members work here through the week alongside other founders, and get access to specialist advisors, practical masterclasses and a small peer circle of women at a similar stage.
Origin
The SWELL started with a conversation between Seaton Gras (the founder of Surf) and Sally Revell (the founder of The SWELL) about what we kept seeing in the women around us. More women are ready to build than ever before, and the tools to start are finally within reach. It is faster, cheaper and easier to turn an idea into something real, and women are moving on that opportunity. Nearly half of new US businesses are now started by women, and 86% of women founders are already using AI in their businesses.
What is still missing, too often, is community. A real place to learn, work, ask for help and stay connected while building something that matters.
That part is personal. After years leading teams at Google Cloud and AWS, Sally Revell stepped into her own entrepreneurial chapter and found how isolating that transition can be. Her days were full, and her evenings disappeared into driving across Seattle to a scattered string of after-hours events, hoping to make one real connection.
The same gap kept showing up in those conversations. So many women were building serious businesses, often alongside caregiving and work and the rest of life, without a place designed for how they were actually doing it. Some wanted venture capital. Many wanted profitable businesses they could own outright. Others were still shaping an idea. All of them needed practical support, trusted relationships and a place built for them rather than around them.
“A place built for them rather than around them.”
Principles
You should get to define success for yourself, and then get real help pursuing it.
Keeping your equity is a legitimate, ambitious choice.
A business can have a head and a heart. Profit and meaning are not opposites.
We make room for rest, health, family, and the realities of life alongside building a business. Care includes caregiving for others and care for yourself.
Community works best in a real place, with real people, over time.
The name
SWELL stands for Seattle Women Entrepreneurs, Leading and Lifting. It is also the picture we keep coming back to. A swell is the energy that gathers before a wave, the rising water that lifts everything around it.
That is what we are building. Women lifting each other, building on their own terms.
And the S also stands for Smart, Superb, Successful — pick your S — that works too.
Location
The SWELL is hosted at SURF Incubator in downtown Seattle, thanks to venue partner and community champion Seaton Gras, who founded SURF in 2009 and has backed Seattle founders ever since.
The SWELL is a mission-based for-profit, and it is equity free. Nobody here is taking a piece of your company.
The launch crew
True startup style. Elbow grease, weekend paint rollers, borrowed ladders and a lot of friends who showed up. Teamwork makes the dreamwork, and this room only exists because these people said yes.
Thank you to everyone who lifted a brush, moved a desk or held a ladder.