I’m flipping the figures on the tiny proportion of female founders raising capital in Australia, because I’ve written this story over and over again and barely anything is changing when it comes to investors seeing beyond the men in the room.
So rather than consider the proportion of funding that went to startups with at least one female founder over the past year, let’s instead look at the proportion that went to those with at least one male founder: 98 per cent.
This 98 per cent figure is a slight twist on the stats shared in today’s release of the State of Startup Funding in 2024 report which presents a detailed view of the country’s startup ecosystem in 2024 including a gender breakdown of various metrics.
It calculates that 15 per cent of funding went to startups with at least one female co founder, a result that is actually down on the 2023 figure, which was already just 18 per cent.
And for all female founding teams?
Just two per cent of total capital raised in Australia went to all female founded teams.
This is half the proportion achieved by all female teams in 2023, when the figure was already a mere four per cent.
Almost the majority – that 98 per cent – of the total funding raised went to teams with at least one male co founder.
The real sweet spot for founders is among all male founding teams, achieving 85 per cent of total investments raised.
Sadly, one couldn’t even suggest startups can increase their chance of raising capital by NOT having a woman involved, based on what mixed teams and all female founding teams raised in 2024.
As for the proportion of deals completed in 2024, women did fare a little better. Twenty seven per cent of the deals done had at least one female founder, and nine per cent were competed by all female teams. Most of the deals involving women were in the pre-seed and seed stages (“a new high!” as the report stated) or in accelerator programs.
But the chances of finding a female founder or co founder involved gets less likely as you move into larger and larger deals.
Since 2019, all-women teams have secured just three deals above the $50 million mark, representing a mere 2.2 per cent of such transactions.
In 2024, all male teams achieved a median deal size of $3.2 million, compared with $1.4 million for mixed gender teams and $1 million for all female teams.
Meanwhile, much of the funding for female founders was concentrated into just five deals (all of which have one female co founder and at least one male co founder). The deals involving a female founder went to FLEET, Aravax, Constantinoplple, Kismet and RDC Rich Data Co. These five raised a combined $336 million, compared with $91 million for all other female founded startups.
Ada Guan (pictured above) is the CEO and Co founder of RDC, which provides an AI decision making platform for lenders, which recently raised $37 million for their US expansion. She’s a former Oracle director and program manager with Westpac pursuing the goal of increasing global access to inclusive and fair credit.
So what’s going on given we keep hearing the same story over and over again on moving past the rhetoric on the supporting more women to ensure we get the best possible ideas and innovations, and actually build solutions that meed the diverse needs of the community?
It’s clear that the talk from investors doesn’t match the reality of where the money is actually invested. A bias remains in favour of male founders. No amount of “we just need to build women’s confidence” speak is going to drastically shift the dial.
Rather, we need to move beyond blaming and attempting to fix the female founders, to instead focus on blaming and fixing the investors.
Investors need to address their own biases and communications skills, developing more robust processes for interrogating the data and the projections of the founders they meet with. As we know, there have been some monumental disasters in terms of money wasted on crappy ventures, likely due to the confidence and charisma of certain founders.
“It’s evident that without securing larger funding round, all-female teams are unlikely to significantly increase their share of total capital from investors,” the report stats.
It’s also evident that there’s only so much more that women founders can do to make that happen.