Companies founded solely by women received just 1% of all European capital raised in 2019: PitchBook

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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 thereโ€™s also an option to enable filtering results by female-only founded startups or startups with male and female co-founders. 

According to the dashboard, thereโ€™s 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 doesnโ€™t 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 โ‚ฌ349M 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 โ‚ฌ585 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 โ‚ฌ240 million across 136 deals. In comparison, in 2019, the amount was โ‚ฌ4.8 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 โ‚ฌ1.4B 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 (โ‚ฌ1.38B post-valuation), Starling Bank (โ‚ฌ136M post-valuation), Infarm (โ‚ฌ362.43M post-valuation), Vayyar (โ‚ฌ566.84M post-valuation), and Vinted (โ‚ฌ1B 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

Shubham Sharma

Grew up reading tech magazines and comic books. I binge on books, manga, movies, anime, and everything in between. Nothing makes my day like an innovative idea and a good tech story. You can reach him via [email protected]

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