More Philly women founding startups win funding from venture capital, but still badly lag men
There's been progress, although not as much as hoped.
The share of venture capital going to women-founded startups tripled from 2005 to 2017, rising from 7 percent to 21 percent.
Philadelphia-based companies with at least one female founder brought in $256.72 million in venture capital in 2018, including angel or seed capital. Companies founded by at least one woman received only about 18.4 percent of $1.4 billion in venture capital deals that took place in the Philadelphia area last year, according to PitchBook data and a report from the Philadelphia Alliance of Capital and Technology.
Using data on VC investment from PitchBook, the Center’s Ian Hathaway tracked the share of startups around the country with at least one woman in the founding team over the period 2005 to 2017.
The startups cross different industries, with the main ones being technology, consumer products and services, and healthcare. Hathaway examined VC-backed “first financings” of startups—or when venture capitalists initially backed these companies.
American cities with persistently high rates of women-founded startups include Ann Arbor, Memphis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boulder, and Washington, D.C., according to a paper by the Center for American Entrepreneurship.
Women-founded startups are heavily concentrated by geography in America’s leading startup communities, including in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. And Philly isn’t far behind those major VC metro areas.
The flow of venture capital dollars is still biased toward men, with only a couple cents of each VC dollar going to companies with one or more female founders, the reports found.