Disappearing women 🫥

Start-ups co-founded and led by women continue to be underrepresented, especially in later-stage financing

If we look at all the equity deals we have been tracking since 2019 (that’s 2,808 of them in total, worth over $14 billion), 25% of the deals have involved a start-up with at least a female co-founder (which also means that in 3 out of 4 cases, the founder or founding team is exclusively male). 25% is encouraging, however these female co-founded start-ups have only attracted 17% of the funding over the period. In other words, when they managed to raise, they raised on average 1.5x times less than their exclusively-male (co-)founded counterparts…

If we focus on the gender of the CEO (technically a sub-set of female co-founded start-ups, as the CEO is almost always one of the co-founders), only 13% of the deals have involved a start-up with a female CEO since 2019. They claimed just over 5% of the funding though, which basically means that when female CEO managed to raise, they raised 2.5x times less on average than their male CEO peers… Has this improved over time? Nope. 2024 actually saw the worst ratios since we started tracking the data in 2019 (14% of deals, 3% of the funding). And the 2025 numbers so far (Jan-May) look even worse, with 9% of the deals and 0.9% of the amount raised going to female-led ventures.

But now that we have a sample large enough (at least when the deals are ‘labelled’, which interestingly enough, is only about half of the time), we have the opportunity to disaggregate by stage and see what it tells us…

And what it tells us is rather clear: the issue is particularly prevalent for later-stage rounds. Indeed, the more you progress on the funding journey, the less female-led and female co-founded ventures are represented. For instance, if we look at Series B and Series C deals together (to address the fact that the Series C sample* is rather small) - we’re talking about 106 deals with an average value of $40m -, only 14% involved female co-founded ventures, who raised just 11% of the total amount. And only 5% were female-led, and raised just 4% of the total invested. In comparison, at pre-seed stage, 28% of the deals (and 24% of the amount invested) involved female co-founded start-ups, including 15% (10%) with a female CEO.

In conclusion: ‘This is a pipeline issue’ is not really a valid excuse to justify the chronic underrepresentation of women. After all, investors have managed to fund 700+ rounds involving a female co-founded venture since 2019 (two a week on average over the period) and allocate $2.4b to them. The issue though is that as they mature, female co-founded and female-led start-ups struggle more than others to attract funding, especially large and very large tickets. To look at it in a positive way: early-stage investors have been building the deal flow. They could do more - we’re far off from gender equity - but there’s somewhere to start. And now there’s a missed opportunity that smart later-stage investors will surely know to grasp, eventually…

I am in Manila this week, but getting ready to dive into the H1 data - the way Scrooge McDuck dives into his money bin - as soon as I’m back. If you’re not already registered to our database, make sure you do so in time to receive all the updated data on July 1st. (Actually, Uncle Scrooge would probably use this link, because it includes a discount). Also, remember to sign in to our Linkedin Live on July 22nd if you haven’t already (and Thanks to the 400+ of you who already have). Paalam!