Let’s check in on venture funding and female founders. PitchBook’s latest report on funding to the cohort is out, and my colleague Lily Mae Lazarus has a new analysis for Fortune.
The good: Startups with at least one female founder raised a record $73.6 billion in 2025, doubled from $44.7 billion two years ago.
The bad: Deal count fell for the fourth year in a row. Fewer female-founded companies are closing deals.
And worse: All-female founding teams—those without any male cofounders—saw a steeper drop in deal value and deal count.
So what’s going on? Mega-rounds of AI firms with female co-founders are skewing the data. Anthropic, cofounded by Daniela Amodei, and Scale AI, cofounded by Lucy Guo, together brought in more than $30 billion in funding in 2025.
