How New Venture Funds Are Targeting Women Founders as Their VC Share Stalls

Key takeaways

• New funds including Capital F, the Arāya Sie Fund and Aurora Ventures are raising capital specifically for women founders, often with majority-female investor bases.
• U.S. female-founded companies raised a record $73.6 billion in 2025, but more than $30 billion of that came from just two AI companies, Anthropic and Scale AI.
• All-female founding teams captured only 1.1% of U.S. venture dollars in 2025, and women hold few partner-level roles at venture firms.

A cluster of venture funds built specifically to back women founders has closed or launched since late 2025, in the United States, the United Kingdom and emerging markets. The vehicles vary in size and structure, but most share a second feature: investor bases that are majority or near-majority female, a marked departure from venture capital generally.

The launches come as headline funding numbers for female founders hit records in 2025, even though the underlying data show that money remains concentrated in a small number of deals, mostly in artificial intelligence.

The Gap the Numbers Still Show

U.S. venture-backed companies with at least one female founder raised $73.6 billion in 2025, according to PitchBook data reported by public radio station WLRN. That was nearly double the $38.8 billion raised in 2024, according to a PitchBook report cited by Markets Media, and represented 27.7% of total U.S. deal value, up from 19.9% the year before.

More than $30 billion of that total came from just two companies, Anthropic and Scale AI, the same data show. Excluding those two rounds, female-founded companies raised roughly 13% more venture capital than in 2024, a smaller gain than the headline figure suggests.

The picture is narrower still for companies founded entirely by women. All-female teams raised $3.2 billion across 794 deals in 2025, or 1.1% of total U.S. venture dollars, according to the PitchBook data cited by WLRN. That was a 22% decline from 2024, while all-male teams raised 21% more, taking in $191.1 billion across 10,048 deals.

“That suggests there is underlying momentum behind the headline-grabbing AI rounds,” said Annemarie Donegan, a PitchBook senior custom research analyst and author of the report, according to WLRN.

The 1% Problem
All-female founding teams raised $3.2 billion across 794 U.S. venture deals in 2025 — just 1.1% of total venture capital — even as female-founded companies overall raised a record $73.6 billion, according to PitchBook data reported by WLRN.

A San Francisco Fund Built on Women’s LPs

Capital F, a San Francisco venture firm co-founded by Margaret Coblentz and Dawn Dobras, closed a $17 million debut fund on August 26, 2026, according to TechCrunch. The fund targets what its founders call the “female economy”: women’s health, digital commerce and AI tools addressing trust and safety issues that disproportionately affect women. Coblentz previously founded and exited a luxury knitwear brand; Dobras was chief executive of Credo Beauty.

The fund writes checks of $250,000 to $1 million and has backed 13 companies so far, including telemedicine startup Hey Jane and the period-tracking app Stardust. Almost 80% of its limited partners are women, among them Rothy’s chief executive Jenny Ming and former Pottery Barn chief executive Marta Benson. Dobras told TechCrunch the fund’s LP structure grew out of a recognition that “many times women aren’t invited into the rooms to invest in funds.”

Britain’s Fund-of-Funds Approach

In the U.K., the Invest in Women Taskforce has taken a different structure: a fund of funds rather than a single vehicle. Its “Women Backing Women” fund of funds, managed by Bootstrap4F and thought to be the largest dedicated fund of funds in the world, channels capital to female-founded businesses and mixed investment teams, according to a December 2025 announcement covered by Startups Magazine.

The Taskforce said its broader funding pool, which channels money to female-led and mixed fund managers and businesses, had reached £635 million in commitments, with more than £70 million deployed through partner programs in 2025.

The Taskforce cited data showing fully female-founded businesses receive just 2% of U.K. equity investment, while about 80% of U.K. venture capital goes to all-male teams. At current commitment rates, the Taskforce said, reaching funding parity between all-male teams and female or mixed teams would take at least a decade.

We realized that many times women aren’t invited into the rooms to invest in funds.

A Corporate-Backed Bet on Emerging Markets

Aurora Ventures launched in 2026 as a pilot vehicle backed by mobility and delivery platform inDrive, aiming to invest $180,000 to $250,000 checks into women-founded pre-seed and seed startups across the Middle East, North Africa, Africa and Latin America, according to Tech Economy and other coverage of the launch. The fund is led by Isabella Ghassemi-Smith and grew out of the Aurora Tech Award, whose applicant pool grew nearly 30-fold since 2021 to a record 3,400 applicants in the 2026 award cycle.

Aurora plans to operate as a pilot through 2026 before moving to a formal general-partner/limited-partner fund structure. Ghassemi-Smith said the fund targets women who are “reaching institutional capital later and on worse terms than their performance justifies,” pointing to a related Aurora study of more than 900 founders across 127 countries that found women face greater scrutiny of their competence and higher standards for demonstrating business traction.

Who Is Backing the New Funds

The funds share a pattern beyond their mission: several are built with predominantly female investor bases, a departure from the gender makeup of venture capital generally. At Capital F, roughly 80% of LPs are women. At the Arāya Sie Fund, a U.K. and Europe vehicle from Arāya Ventures and Sie Ventures that closed a £7.5 million first close in 2026, more than half the LP base is female — a share the fund’s founders call still far too rare in venture capital.

The Arāya Sie Fund focuses on early-stage startups in artificial intelligence, deeptech, fintech, healthcare and sustainability. Women founders receive less than 2% of total venture funding across the U.K. and Europe, the firms said in announcing the fund.

The imbalance extends to who sits on the investing side of the table. Among larger U.S. venture firms with at least $50 million under management, only 18% of partners, principals and managing directors are women, according to the PitchBook data cited by WLRN, and just 11.3% of those firms have majority-female partner teams. Smaller firms fare somewhat better, with women holding 20.5% of comparable roles.

Photo: Coolcaesar · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons