Not surprisingly, a href=”https://pitchbook.com/news/reports/q3-2022-pitchbook-nvca-venture-monitor” target=” blank” rel=”noopener”> New data from PitchBook shows that female-founded businesses in the United States are raising less money this year than last.
About 2.4% of all venture capital was raised by women in 2017, and this number is down to 1.9% as of the third quarter of this year. When we account for racial differences, that number drops precipitously. As of last year, all-female teams accounted for 2.4% of funded startups, with Black and Latina women raising around 0.05% and 0.004% of funding, respectively, and Indigenous Americans bringing in around 0.004% of funding in the US.
For a while now, there has been concern that when the venture market slows, investors will gravitate back to the deals and connections they know and trust from more seasoned founders, leaving behind those at the margins. There has always been a clear divide between those who have been successful at starting businesses and those who have not, but there is encouraging news on the horizon.
So far this year, funding for U.S. companies founded solely by women has surpassed that of all of 2020 by a small margin. (Since the current state of the market makes it only natural that current figures are low when compared to last year’s record high), last year’s results were exceptional. Thus far this year, 742 deals totaling 194.9 billion have been completed in the United States, with all-female teams contributing 3.6 billion. As a whole, 771 deals totaling 3.3 billion were closed by all-female teams in 2020, out of a total of 168.7 billion. It’s clear that the year 2021 was an outlier; 1,132 deals involving only women brought in 8 billion.
“There is no logical justification for why female founders should be impacted any more so than any other founder category, be it in a bear or bull market.” Pippa Lamb of Sweet Capital
The disparity between all-female and mixed-gender founding teams in terms of deal counts and funding raised is striking. Teams with at least one male co-founder raised 32.4 billion across 2,811 deals, while all-female teams only raised 3.6 billion. The percentage of funding secured by mixed-gender teams is roughly the same as this time last year at this point (17%).