Backing women is not about the pipeline

I spent 20 years inside financial services, first in Hong Kong and then in Australia – most of them as the only woman at the leadership table. I watched an entire industry build products for women, sell products to women, and design almost all of it without women in the room.

When I left my executive role at AIA during Covid to start LIFTWOMEN, one of the first questions I set out to answer was this:

Is the pipeline of women founders really that thin, or does the ecosystem just not know how to see it?

Four years, 400 crowdfunding campaigns, and more than 10,000 hours of mentoring later, I can say this with confidence: the problem isn’t the pipeline. It’s the pipes.

By “pipes”, I mean the systems, networks, and structures that carry a founder from idea to investable business.

When the pipes work, money flows and capital finds talent. When they are missing or clogged, talent leaks away, it never gets the opportunity to reach the other end.

Women don’t lack capability. They lack equitable access to the systems, networks, and opportunities that allow great businesses to grow.

There are three main barriers I see every week to this access:

When we started LIFTWOMEN in 2021, we weren’t trying to invent a new form of capital. We were trying to build the pipes that enable existing forms of capital to reach women, and to ensure they are seen through the same lens as men.

Rewards-based crowdfunding was the obvious first pipe as it enables equity-free, debt-free capital which is structurally suited to founders building their first product.

When Dr Ariella Heffernan-Marks joined our LiftHER accelerator with an idea for an AI health assistant for women, she launched a successful crowdfunding campaign on our platform, won a $20,000 grant, and used that early demand as proof of traction to walk into VC conversations.

She closed a $1.7 million Seed round with Giant Leap and Antler a few months later, and another A$4M this year, earned a high commendation at SXSW Pitch, and now runs clinical partnerships with UNSW and The George Institute. That is a pipe working.

Since then, we have launched close to 400 crowdfunding campaigns, supported more than 60 women founders through our global accelerator on their journey to follow-on funding, and partnered with Standard Chartered to deliver the SC WIN programme for women entrepreneurs across Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, and India.

Earlier this year, we also closed a US$1.3 million funding round, led by Singapore-based VC Braxton Capital and backed by respected business leaders including Maggie Zhou, former managing director of Alibaba ANZ, and Gordon Watson, former chair of AXA Asia.

Today, we operate across APAC, where some of the world’s largest gender finance gaps still exist. Every day, we’re repairing broken pipes and building better ones.

Investing in women isn’t a moral position. It’s a market position. McKinsey estimates that advancing women’s equality could add US$4.5 trillion to APAC GDP by 2030.

Standard Chartered has committed US$1 billion to financing women entrepreneurs by 2028.

Westpac has expanded its female-entrepreneurs fund to A$1 billion.

Two major banks. Two billion dollars. That is not philanthropy. That is the market saying returns are here.

The underlying case is straightforward. Women-led companies that do get funded return capital at higher rates than the average. Diverse leadership consistently drives stronger financial performance across McKinsey, BCG and MSCI datasets.

Every women-founded business that scales creates jobs, tax revenue, exports, and – this is the part most policy conversations miss – a new generation of products designed for the half of the population historically underserved by the incumbents.

The next decade of Australian and APAC innovation will be defined by what we do with this insight. If we spend that decade asking whether the “pipeline” is real, we will fund another cycle of overlooked opportunity.

If we spend it building the pipes, the crowdfunding platforms, the accelerator pathways, the corporate procurement channels, the bank partnerships, the policy frameworks that recognise alternative funding models, the pipeline will look considerably thicker than most investors currently believe possible.

The talent isn’t scarce. It never was. It has been sitting in rooms that didn’t have the pipes to reach it. Some of us are already changing that. The invitation to investors, corporate leaders, and policy makers reading this is simple:

Don’t just ask where the women founders are. Ask what infrastructure your organisation could build to find them.