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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Their share of total disclosed capital more than doubled, from 2.9 percent to 5.94 percent, but the gap remained significant.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Gender Investment Gap co-founder Jenny Rudd said the improvement was encouraging, but the headline number was still too low to celebrate.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Rudd said women-only founding teams accounted for about 12 percent of all deals but received about 6 percent of the money.<\/p>\n
“That tells us that we’re getting half the amount for our deals that everybody else is getting.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She said that gave them a stronger position when they finally spoke to investors.<\/p>\n
“We had proved ourselves before actually raising capital,” Hardy-Jones said.<\/p>\n
Hardy-Jones said earlier fundraising conversations had shown how differently women founders could be treated.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
The research suggests the funding problem continues past the initial stages.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
None of the Series investments captured in the 2025 dataset went to women-only founding teams.<\/p>\n
Hardy-Jones said more women needed to be visible in the startup ecosystem, and entrepreneurship should be taught earlier.<\/p>\n
“The more women that are put into the space and given these opportunities, the more that evens out,” she said.<\/p>\n
Rudd said venture capital firms also needed to think about what they signalled publicly.<\/p>\n
Rudd said if a fund’s website or communications mostly showed male-led companies, women founders could decide it was not really for them.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
For Rudd, that meant some funds may never get the opportunity to invest in businesses like hers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Women-only startup founders received less than six cents in every venture capital dollar invested in New Zealand last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":903813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[45,49,48,137],"class_list":["post-903812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entrepreneurship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/903813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}