Venture investment in startups run by women has always lagged the overall market, and with companies across sectors cutting back on their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, things seem grimmer than ever for female founders.
But the data tells a different tale for 2024 — at least according to this one report by European venture platform Female Foundry: Venture investment to startups founded by women in Europe declined 12% in 2024 from a year earlier, but it was nearly in line with the 11% decrease in overall venture investment.
Notably, women who founded deep tech startups are raising more than men are in that area. The report, dubbed Female Innovation Index 2025, found that the number of female founders in deep tech is increasing thanks to that sector’s links to academia, where women tend to be more equally represented. About 33% of all venture capital raised by female entrepreneurs in Europe is going into deep tech startups — 2% more than gender-agnostic startups. Key areas of innovation include synthetic biology, generative AI, and drug development.
For the report, Female Foundry surveyed more than 1,200 female founders, female investors, and executives, and over 35 private equity firms, venture associations, and ecosystem players across 20 European countries. It’s worth noting here that Female Founders counted startups that had at least one female co-founder, which greatly increases the sample size of startups considered in this report, compared to other reports that only refer to all-women founding teams when they say “female-founded startups.”
Several surveys last year generally agreed that women founders continued to be vastly outnumbered by men, with all-women founding teams raising only 2.2% of the venture capital allocated for 2024.
“I started the index because I realized that the oft-quoted 2% figure about the number of female-founded startups is not detailed enough,” Agata Nowicka, founder of Female Foundry and the author of the report, told TechCrunch. “I would not have been included in that stat, because as an entrepreneur, I had a male co-founder. We should be taking into account far more diverse metrics.
That deep tech metric is heartening, but Nowicka thinks women in academic environments need to be encouraged more to take up entrepreneurship. “There is still a little bit of stigma attached to entering a startup from academia,” she said.
She noted that the COVID-19 pandemic had helped create a more level playing field for women in tech because the wider industry had been forced to open up.
“As a founder in 2016, most VCs didn’t even have a website or had just a landing page. Many events were held privately,” she said. “The venture capital industry transformed during COVID because of the boom in investment during 2021-2022. VC became overall more accessible to women […] because they needed deal-flow, and it became more competitive.”
Here are a few interesting nuggets from the report:
- Female-founded businesses in Europe raised €5.76 billion in 2024, marking a 12% drop from the €6.56 billion these companies raised in 2023.
- The health, fintech, and food sectors see the most venture investment going to startups with female founders.
- The seed stage is where female founders see the most success, and on average, round sizes raised by women-founded startups increased 7% across stages compared to 2023.
- More than 80% of the 50 largest funding rounds raised by female-founded startups in 2024 went to those with scientific backgrounds in areas such as synthetic biology (€282.4 million), generative AI (€221.8 million), and drug development (€169.9 million).
- The U.K., France, and Germany top the charts for investment in female-founded companies, while Finland and Denmark have the highest proportion of venture capital allocated to such startups.
