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Educational only — not investment, legal or tax advice.

In March, PitchBook reported a record: US venture-backed companies with female founders raised $73.6 billion in 2025, or 27.7% of all US venture deal value. That’s the highest share PitchBook has recorded. It’s a real number, but the story behind it is more complicated than the headline.

How “female-founded” is defined

PitchBook counts a company as female-founded if at least one founder is a woman. That includes companies founded only by women, and mixed teams where one co-founder of several is a woman.

Its own female-founders dashboard lists Anthropic as a select female-founded startup. Anthropic has seven co-founders, one of them a woman, Daniela Amodei. That’s a correct use of the definition. It also shows how a few very large mixed-team rounds can move the whole number.

Two AI companies made the record

According to Fortune’s reading of the PitchBook report:

• Two-thirds of the venture money that went to female-founded startups in 2025 went to AI companies.
• Anthropic and Scale AI alone raised more than $30 billion, over 40% of all the AI money in the category.
• As Fortune put it: “Remove those two names, and the record disappears.”

What happened to everyone else

The same report shows a harder picture underneath the record:

• Deal count for female-founded companies fell for the fourth year in a row. More money went into fewer companies.
• All-female founding teams saw steeper drops in both money raised and number of deals than mixed-gender teams.
• For context, in 2022 all-female teams received about 2% of total funding, according to figures cited by Fortune. We could not confirm a 2025 figure for all-female teams on the source page, so we’re not quoting one.
• 82% of decision-makers at US VC firms with at least $50 million under management are men.

What this means if you’re raising

Plan for a smaller pool, not a closed door. Money is concentrating in fewer, bigger rounds, especially in AI. Outside AI and a few sectors, early-stage rounds are harder to raise for everyone, and the data suggests harder still for all-female teams.

Lead with capital efficiency. Fortune notes that female-founded startups have historically been more capital efficient than the broader market. If that’s true of your company, put the numbers up front: revenue per dollar raised, burn, and months of runway.

Find the investors already writing cheques. Look at who led recent rounds for female-founded companies in your sector and stage. That’s a better target list than a generic list of funds.

Don’t depend on one kind of money. Revenue-based financing, grants and angels judge you on your numbers and your plan. Read when VC is the wrong money for the full list.

From the investor’s side of the table

Headline numbers like this one get shared a lot, and I always want to see the definition behind them before drawing conclusions. A record can be true and still hide a shrinking number of deals. If you’re a founder, the number that matters is not the share of money. It’s how many companies like yours got funded last year, and by whom.

The short version

Female-founded companies did raise a record share of US venture money in 2025. But “female-founded” means at least one woman founder, two AI companies drove most of the record, deal counts kept falling, and all-female teams lost ground. Know the real numbers before you plan your raise.

Sources

• PitchBook: 2025 US All In, female founders in the VC ecosystem (5 March 2026)
• PitchBook: The VC female founders dashboard
• Fortune: VC dollars to female founders hit $73 billion in 2025, but Anthropic and Scale AI skewed the data (6 March 2026)

Written by Fabian Cisneros. Educational only — not investment, legal or tax advice. See the full disclaimer.