Historically speaking, funding for female founders has been pretty paltry in the venture capital (VC) world. From 2011 to 2020, the amount of VC money going to female-only-founded startups never went above $4 billion. In 2020 — despite U.S. startups raising a record $143 billion — funding to venture-backed companies founded solely by female entrepreneurs dropped 22%. Only about $3.5 billion of VC money went to those female founders.
In 2021, it seemed to get better. 2021 was an exceptionally strong year for VC investments across the US, topping nearly $330 billion. U.S. startups founded solely by women received nearly $6.4 billion of venture funding, according to PitchBook data. But that’s only 2% of dollars invested in VC-backed startups in the US.
Overall, things seem to be trending upward. Startups are raising more and more money. The number of unicorns is growing every year. And both VCs and online startup investors are putting more and more money into startups. So why are female founders still struggling to secure venture capital funding?
In this episode of Angel Insider, Allison Brickell and Vin Narayanan discuss this question and more, including: Does the same bias exist in the crowdfunding universe? How can this problem be solved? And what is an investor’s role in all this?
Thanks for watching — and happy women’s history month!
P.S. Last week, we told you that our friends at KingsCrowd have created a data-driven startup fund just for accredited investors. They held a free webinar to answer investor questions about the fund. If you missed it, you can watch the webinar for free here. And if you want to learn more about the fund, you can check out this video.