Pitchbook’s latest report shows that all-women founding teams have raised 1.9% of all venture capital dollars so far this year, or $2.4 billion out of the total $125.85 billion allocated through Q3. That percentage is only slightly less than what was raised through Q3 last year, when all-women founding teams raised $4.1 billion out of $204.8 billion, totaling around 2% of capital.
This Q3 specifically, however, all-women founding teams raised 1.6% of the $36.7 billion venture dollars allocated this quarter — a year-over-year decrease from Q32022, which saw them raise around 2.1% of $46.4 billion. This isn’t new: The numbers allocated to all-women founding teams have hovered around 1.9% for the past few years.
“While there is no specific reason for why all-women-led company deal value hovers around 2%, it does indicate that there are no outsized deals going to all-women teams, which is keeping any positive movement of that data point out of the chart,” Kyle Stanford, lead VC analyst at PitchBook, told TechCrunch. “There is a relatively consistent number of deals going to all-women teams, too, though that is growing, slowly, so there is some movement there. Because these deals have all been on the smaller side, it keeps the proportion of deal value low and relatively stable.”
Mixed-gender teams are doing quite well, however. Companies with at least one female co-founder raised 28.1% of all venture dollars so far this year; last year, such teams only raised 18.2% overall. Mixed-gender teams have raised $35.3 billion this year so far, picking up $9.9 billion (or about 27% out of $36.7 billion) in Q3. This is almost on par with the $9.5 billion (or about 20.5%) they picked up in Q32022.
Overall, this quarter has been one of the worst declines for the venture ecosystem since 2019, when $37.8 billion was allocated to U.S. startups (all-women teams picked up $1 billion of that.)
At the same time, there hasn’t been much of a pullback in supporting women, as seen with the dip in funding to Black founders and overall backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion. But that doesn’t mean fundraising was easy.
Marusya Glazkova, the co-founder of SaaS House of Pitch, said she expected investors to treat her and her co-founder, also a woman, differently. “Even some of our connections would say something like ‘girls, you need to hire a male CEO,” she told us.
Regardless, she is confident she will hit her $500,000 pre-seed target by the end of the year, even though checks are more selective these days for everyone, she said. Ruby Gadelrab Tudor, founder of the health company MDisrupt, said that fundraising this year brought forth “unique challenges,” such as a tough macroeconomic climate, war, the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, and dropping valuations. She also noted that the due diligence and decision time frame process has been much longer. She announced the closing of a $3 million seed round earlier this month.
“We take pride in the fact that eight out of the 10 VCs who participated in our round are women, with seven of them being women of color,” she said. “In today’s landscape, we believe that good scalable businesses, with persistence and diligence, can raise VC, even if it takes a little longer.”
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