Women

Women-only startup founders got 5.94 percent of venture capital in 2025

Women-only startup founders received less than six cents in every venture capital dollar invested in New Zealand last year, despite a sharp rise in funding.

New data from the Aotearoa Centre for Enterprising Women at the University of Auckland Business School shows women-only founding teams attracted $14.75 million in disclosed investment from venture capital firms in 2025, more than triple the $4.59m raised the previous year.

Their share of total disclosed capital more than doubled, from 2.9 percent to 5.94 percent, but the gap remained significant.

Male-only founding teams received $172.35m, or 69.42 percent of disclosed capital, while mixed-gender teams received $61.17m, or 24.64 percent.

Gender Investment Gap co-founder Jenny Rudd said the improvement was encouraging, but the headline number was still too low to celebrate.

"When we look at women-only founded startups, it's doubled from about 3 percent last year to 6 percent," she said. "Which is great when it's doubled, but it's not really meaningful enough yet to get excited about."

Rudd said women-only founding teams accounted for about 12 percent of all deals but received about 6 percent of the money.

"That tells us that we're getting half the amount for our deals that everybody else is getting."

She said women-led startups often generated more revenue on less investment capital, but unconscious bias could still shape what investors saw as a safe bet.

"People who are deploying venture capital dollars, also largely men, see people that look like them as safe and what success looks like," Rudd said.

Contented co-founder Hannah Hardy-Jones said she and co-founder Lucy Pink raised $4.1m this year, but only after bootstrapping the company to $1m in annual recurring revenue.

She said that gave them a stronger position when they finally spoke to investors.

"We had proved ourselves before actually raising capital," Hardy-Jones said.

Hardy-Jones said earlier fundraising conversations had shown how differently women founders could be treated.

"The questions that I was asked as a founder were very different. It was all around competitors and risk, whereas my male counterparts were not fielding those sorts of questions. It was always around vision and ambition."

The research suggests the funding problem continues past the initial stages.

Women-only teams accounted for 17.6 percent of pre-seed investments and 15 percent of seed investments, but 7.5 percent of bridge investments.

None of the Series investments captured in the 2025 dataset went to women-only founding teams.

Hardy-Jones said more women needed to be visible in the startup ecosystem, and entrepreneurship should be taught earlier.

"The more women that are put into the space and given these opportunities, the more that evens out," she said.

Rudd said venture capital firms also needed to think about what they signalled publicly.

Rudd said if a fund's website or communications mostly showed male-led companies, women founders could decide it was not really for them.

"I didn't approach most of the VC firms when I was raising capital because I was like, they're not really designed for me," she said.

For Rudd, that meant some funds may never get the opportunity to invest in businesses like hers.