Fortune: Funding For Female Founders Stalled at 2.2% of VC Dollars in 2018
Fortune
By Emma Hinchliffe
January 28, 2019
In 2018, all female founders put together received $10 billion less in funding than one e-cigarette company, Juul, took in by itself.
It’s a stunning statistic—made possible by an unusual $12.8 billion corporate investment in Juul—but it shows how investors can go all in when a company or category catches their eye. That didn’t happen in 2018 for U.S. female founders, who raised $2.88 billion last year split across 482 teams, according to data from PitchBook and All Raise, the organization supporting women in venture capital and startups. That’s 2.2% of the $130 billion total in venture capital money invested over the year—the exact same percentage that Fortune reported for 2017. (And a decline from a 2.53% number PitchBook reported more recently for that year after recategorizing some 2017 deals.)
From a pure dollar perspective, 2018 did represent a step forward. As a whole, companies led by a single female founder or an all-female team of founders raised nearly $1 billion more in 2018 than in 2017 ($2.88 billion vs. $1.9 billion). Yet the percentage of the total VC pie given to female founders did not budge. One possible explanation: the increased frequency of so-called mega-rounds, which nearly always go to male founders and continue to grow the size of the VC pool. Take SoftBank and its $100 billion Vision Fund—of the Japanese firm’s top 25 investments as measured by PitchBook, only two went to a company with a female co-founder (both to Grab, co-founded by Tan Hooi Ling and not included in this data as a non-U.S. company).