2025 IN REVIEW - All Else Being Unequal ♀♂
A look at the 2025 numbers with a gender lens once again reveals stark inequalities
‘Crumbs, basically’. That’s the title I’d chosen for one of my first gender posts back in late 2021. Controversial, some may say. Pretty accurate, if you ask me. The headline back then: less than 1% of the funding was going to women solo founders and all-women founding teams; 18% to gender-diverse founding teams; the rest (81%) to men solo founders and all-men founding teams. Yes, you read that right the split back then was ♀:<1% | ♀♂:18% | ♂:81%.
Fast forward four years, and despite a pretty dismal baseline, the situation has actually gotten worse: the split in 2025 was ♀: <1% | ♀♂: 8% | ♂: 91% . Technically, it is slightly better than 2024 (♀:1% | ♀♂:6% | ♂:93%), but there is no real cause for celebration here. Only if you look at grants specifically do you see women claiming a significant share of the total amount (♀:20% | ♀♂:42% | ♂:38%). Except grants only represented 1.5% of the amount ‘invested’ in start-ups on the continent last year ($46m out of $3.2b). If we’re looking for some silver lining: the absolute amount of funding invested in start-ups with at least one woman founder almost doubled between 2024 and 2025 (from $152m to $275m, +81% YoY).
Because one of the main issues is that ventures with a woman co-founder struggle to raise larger rounds comparatively, when we look at the number of individual start-ups raising at least $100k in 2025, the split is still very much unbalanced, but less dramatic: ♀:7% | ♀♂:17% | ♂:75%. That said, this is the lowest share of ventures with at least a woman co-founder we’ve recorded since 2021…
As the CEO is almost always one of the co-founders, the numbers look equally dreadful if we split the funding by the gender of the CEO. In 2025, only 2.2% of the funding on the continent was invested in ventures with a woman CEO: ♀:2% | 98%:♂. This is simply the lowest proportion we’ve seen since we started tracking the numbers back in 2019, after already hitting an all-time low in 2024 (2.3%). Once again, things are slightly ‘better’ when we look at the number of individual start-ups raising at least $100k in 2025: 14% of them had a woman CEO (♀:14% | 86%:♂). This is however lower than 2024 (17%) and 2023 (14%), and the share falls to 8% when we remove ventures who have exclusively raised debt or grants. This share, once again, is at an all-time low.
But let’s try and end on a higher note by celebrating some of the entrepreneurs and start-ups who have defied the odds and raised funding in 2025:
Women CEOs of start-ups with a woman solo founder or an all-women founding team: Petro Terblanche of Afrigen Biologics ($6.2m grant), Joanna Bichsel of Kasha ($4m equity), Ines Serra Baucells of Biosorra ($3.5m pre-Series A), Sona Shah of Neopenda, Claire van Enk of Farm to Feed ($1.5m seed)…
Woman CEOs of start-ups with a gender-diverse founding team: Nour Taher of Intella ($12.5m Series A), Emily McAteer of Odyssey Energy Solutions ($7.5m debt facility), Miishe Addy of Jetstream ($5m in debt), Aune Aunapuu of Yaga ($4.6m pre-Series A), Rocio Perez Ochoa of Bidhaa Sasa ($2.6m grant)…
While this is always a bit of a depressing post to write - and while the unavoidable maybe-women-are-just-less-talented-than-men comments will certainly infuriate us -, we continue to believe it is critical to shine a light on these numbers. And to try and contribute to the solution. As such, if you are a woman CEO or co-founder who needs access to our database, write to either Maxime or myself and we’ll happily share a 60% discount code with you to bring the annual cost of the database from $239 to just $100. Finally, and as a nudge to my 2021 ‘Crumbs, basically.’ visual, I have updated it below to show the evolution of the split since 2019… Max
