What $73.6 billion really tells us about female founders
Last year, US female-founded startups raised a record $73.6 billion in venture capital. In Europe, female founders secured €9.5 billion. The headline looks like progress, but we need to look closer.
The record that isn’t: what the numbers really tell us about female founders.
With the numbers published by Pitchbook in their All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem reports, the nuances of the stories and headlines show some interesting messaging.
When you strip away two of the companies from the US total, being Scale AI and Anthropic, over $30 billion disappears. AI has captured two thirds of every dollar invested in female-founded startups in 2025. It’s a dynamic that Leslie Feinzaig, founder of VC firm Graham & Walker, put plainly to Pitchbook: capital is concentrating around founders with a very particular profile, and structurally, fewer women have been given the pathways to build it.
“To the extent that there are women who fit that profile, they are partaking in those large, hot rounds. I just think that there’s probably fewer of them.”
The question isn’t whether female founders want a seat at the table. It’s who built the table, and who gets handed an invitation.
Outside of AI megadeals, female founding teams saw their funding fall. Deal count also dropped across both US and Europe. With female founders’ share of overall European VC activity trending down for the second consecutive year. This isn’t a story about record-breaking progress. It’s a story about concentration, and who gets left behind when capital narrows.
The problem starts before the pitch
Women hold just 16.5% of decision-making roles at larger European VC firms. In the US, it’s 18%. Majority-female investment teams remain the exception, not the rule. It is still an uneven surface. Access, network, all of it makes a difference before a single slide deck is opened.
Germany illustrates just how stark that gap can get. According to the Bertelsmann Stiftung Female Founders Monitor 2025 and EY Startup Barometer 2025, all-male founding teams in Germany received around 91% of venture capital in 2025. All-female teams, representing 4% of funded startups, received just 1% of total investment, and in some regional data as low as 0.6%.
The economic case couldn’t be clearer. A 2026 report from Barclays puts the cost of the gender gap in entrepreneurship at £310 billion. The value the UK economy is leaving on the table by failing to back female founders at the same rate as their male counterparts. The same research, based on a study of over 2,000 UK female founders, found that nearly half cite difficulty obtaining funding as their primary obstacle, and nearly three quarters hold negative views of seeking VC or angel investment. Not because the opportunity isn’t there, but because the experience of trying to access capital has put them off entirely.
What the data actually shows us about female founders
What we should be seeing from the data, is not the noise of funding figures, but what the data reveals is that female-founded companies perform
In Europe, more than two thirds of female-founded startups raised a follow-on round, or exited after their first VC funding. Slightly outpacing the European market overall. Female founders consistently maintain lower burn rates.
The resilience is there. The capital is not keeping up.
It’s a picture that sits uncomfortably alongside a milestone announced by Halogen Ventures, one of the US’s largest funds dedicated to female founders. They surpassed 100 investments with a portfolio now worth more than $15 billion, including six unicorns. As founding partner Jesse Draper put it: “For years investing in women was dismissed as a charity play rather than recognised as a massive, untapped market.” (FemTech World, March 2026)
What this means for talent
At Salt, we work with founders, the teams building behind them, and the businesses hiring into this space every day. And the conversation we have isn’t about whether female-founded companies can scale, it’s about how to build the teams that let them.
The sectors where female founders lead: life sciences, fintech, consumer, femtech (up nearly 25% in deal value in Europe last year, per Pitchbook) are exactly the sectors where specialist talent is hardest to find and most consequential to get right.
If you’re building a team in this space, or looking for your next role within it, Salt can help.
Workforce strategies that are built around you
The Salt Women in the workplace report 2026
Data sourced from Pitchbook’s 2025 All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem (US and European editions), published March 2026. Additional sources: Barclays Female Founders report (February 2026); Bertelsmann Stiftung Female Founders Monitor 2025; EY Startup Barometer 2025; FemTech World (March 2026).
