Investment in startups increases year on year. However, funding for female founders or female-led startups is yet to see a similar rise in investment. As per the SaaS company PitchBook, last year, all-women founded companies received merely 1% of the total capital invested in venture-backed startups in Europe. To take note of such a huge disparity in funding and help female-led startups gain momentum, PitchBook has announced a new European VC Female Founders Dashboard, which highlights VC investments in female-founded European startups.
European VC Female Founders Dashboard
The new dashboard introduced by PitchBook enables one to search for female-led startups that have received investment. It also enables one to tweak their search query via the tool to customise the data. This lets users figure out how much investment was made in a particular segment of a startup. It can be helpful since thereโs also an option to enable filtering results by female-only founded startups or startups with male and female co-founders.
According to the dashboard, thereโs a notable disparity in the funding that female-only founded startups receive. This gap has been highlighted, thanks to the data narrowed down by the new dashboard.
The dashboard sheds light on funding gap
The new PitchBook dashboard doesnโt just enable one to filter through female-only startups, but it also sheds a light on the funding gap. In 2019, teams of female-only founders received just 1% of the total European funding raised, which amounts to โฌ349M across 274 deals. However, 2020 is said to be a strong capital year for female founders in the region as all-female teams secured 2.3% of European funding. This surpassed the annual US percentage for the first time in a decade, with โฌ585 million invested year-to-date.ย
Compared to a decade earlier, investments in European startups with at least one female founder are steadily increasing. Back in 2009, female-founded or co-founded startups secured just โฌ240 million across 136 deals. In comparison, in 2019, the amount was โฌ4.8 billion across 1,342 deals. London leads the European counter in terms of deal volume for female co-founded companies and is followed by Paris and Berlin.
Software sector leads in terms of raised capital
As per the PitchBook dashboard, the software sector leads for both female-only and female and male-founded companies, in terms of raised capital. The sector pulled in about โฌ1.4B in investment across 377 deals in 2019; followed by the B2B services and B2C goods.
Some of the notable female-founded or co-founded startups that raised considerable venture capital investment include Darktrace (โฌ1.38B post-valuation), Starling Bank (โฌ136M post-valuation), Infarm (โฌ362.43M post-valuation), Vayyar (โฌ566.84M post-valuation), and Vinted (โฌ1B post-valuation).
The European VC Female Founders Dashboard is a handy tool, which is updated on a monthly-basis and can be accessed here.
Image Credits: JulieK2/Shutterstock
01
How Leipzig became a hub for energy and medical tech startups with IRL and SpinLab support