It’s not easy to raise capital as a founder. Sixty-four percent of female founders still describe their gender as having held them back or as an obstacle, according to a new report from the pre-seed fund January Ventures. And yet, for the first time since this report began in 2019, men and women founders are equally as optimistic about fundraising. A longtime “gender pessimism” gap has closed.
In such a difficult environment, you might think this gap closed because men are more pessimistic. But actually, women have become more optimistic about fundraising. That’s among a cohort of 482 founders that is on the earlier side of their fundraising journey; 32% hadn’t started raising capital yet, 52% had raised a pre-seed round, 14% were seed-stage, and only 1% had reached series A. Overall, 72% of founders are feeling optimistic—a huge rebound from a low of 22% in 2022.
So what’s behind this rosy outlook? It’s not women getting a greater share of capital—those stats are still stagnant. Deal count for female-founded companies fell for the fourth straight year in 2025. All-female founding teams posted steeper drops in both deal value and count than mixed-gender cohorts. And AI mega-rounds for elite founders like Thinking Machines Lab’s Mira Murati and Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei skewed the data, making it look like a better environment for female founders than it actually is.
