Asked to Win: The Case for Backing Women Founders.

A MAD Ventures white paper for wholesale investors, sponsors, and founder programs.

At a glance

Women are starting companies faster than at any point on record, run them with proven capital efficiency, and still receive a fraction of the investment that flows to men. All-women founding teams receive around 2 per cent of venture capital globally, and about the same in Australia in 2024, with the Australian run-rate falling below half a per cent in 2025. Yet women-founded ventures return 78 cents of revenue for every dollar invested, against 31 cents for men, and generate more cumulative revenue on less than half the capital.

The gap in funding is not a gap in performance. It is a mispricing, and the levers that correct it, capital-readiness, a room that rewards the ask, and a pathway designed so that women put their hand up, are practical and available.

The funding gap

Definitions change the numbers, so it helps to be exact. All-women teams means every founder is a woman. Teams with at least one woman founder describes a far broader group and always produces a larger figure. The two are routinely confused, and the space between them is where a lot of optimistic headlines live.

In Australia, all-women founding teams received about 2 per cent of venture capital in 2024, down from 4 per cent in 2023, and the 2025 run-rate has them tracking below half a per cent, a new low. Teams with at least one woman founder took 24 per cent of capital in 2025, up from 15 per cent, but that gain is misleading. Deal participation for female-founded teams actually fell from 28 per cent to 24 per cent, and the top five female-founded companies took 79 per cent of all the capital that reached women-led teams. The pattern beneath is a leaky pipeline: women raise at the earliest stages and fall away at Series A and beyond. In the same reporting, only 18 per cent of female founders said they felt supported by investors.

The wider picture rhymes. Of the 289 billion US dollars invested globally in 2024, all-women teams received 2.3 per cent, all-male teams 83.6 per cent, and mixed teams the remainder. At the current rate of change, parity arrives around 2065.

The counterweight is the growth in women starting businesses. Women launched 49 per cent of all new US businesses in 2024, up from 29 per cent in 2019. There are now around 14.5 million women-owned businesses in the US, 39.2 per cent of all firms, generating 3.3 trillion dollars in revenue. Scale is the qualifier: average revenue across all women-owned businesses is around 226,000 dollars, well below men-owned firms, and much of women's entrepreneurship is deliberate and lifestyle-shaped, financed through debt and personal networks rather than equity. One US headline flatters the picture: companies with at least one female founder reached a record 27.7 per cent of deal value in 2025, but strip out two AI mega-rounds, Anthropic and Scale AI, and the share falls to around 16 per cent, while all-female teams went backwards.

In Europe, female-founded startups, counted as teams with at least one woman, raised 5.76 billion euros in 2024, which is 12 per cent of all European venture capital. A 2025 study commissioned by the European Commission named the cause plainly: only 16 per cent of general partners in venture and growth funds are women, and they manage 9 per cent of assets. Its authors called it a power problem rather than a pipeline problem.

The performance paradox

The reason the funding gap is a mispricing, and not a reflection of quality, is that women-led ventures perform. Boston Consulting Group's analysis with MassChallenge of 350 startups found that companies founded or co-founded by women raised an average of 935,000 dollars, against 2.1 million for male-founded companies, yet generated 10 per cent more cumulative revenue over five years. For every dollar of funding, women-founded startups returned 78 cents of revenue against 31 cents for men, more than twice the value per dollar invested. First Round Capital's decade of portfolio data points the same way.

The advantage extends to exits. PitchBook's 2024 analysis found female founders reaching exit around six months faster on average and accounting for a record share of US venture exits. BCG's own reading of why the gap persists is worth holding onto: investors are, in their words, predisposed to look for big, bold numbers, and they reward the founder who swings for the fences, a style the market codes as male.

On failure, the evidence is genuinely mixed, and it is worth being precise rather than convenient. Some UK studies of company insolvency by board gender have found male-dominated companies failing at a higher rate than female-dominated ones, though the same researchers caution this likely reflects the sectors men tend to run rather than any difference in competence. The JPMorgan Chase Institute found women-owned businesses surviving at the same rate as men-owned, despite lower revenues and slower growth. The honest summary is that women-led ventures are more capital-efficient and at least as durable, and that the stronger, cleaner claim is efficiency, not a lower failure rate.

The mechanism in the room

If women perform and still raise less, something is happening between the founder and the cheque. The clearest account comes from Dana Kanze and colleagues, who recorded seven years of pitch question-and-answer sessions. Investors asked male founders promotion questions, about the potential for gains, and asked female founders prevention questions, about the potential for losses, by a ratio of about two to one.

The consequence was measurable. Every additional prevention question tracked with roughly 3.8 million dollars less raised, and founders who fielded mostly promotion questions went on to raise about seven times more than those who fielded mostly prevention questions. Two features matter for anyone trying to fix it. Male and female investors both did it, so simply adding women to the investment committee does not resolve it. And the effect is partly within a founder's control: entrepreneurs who answered a prevention question with a promotion focus, redirecting from risk to opportunity, raised significantly more. The room shapes the raise, and the shaping can be coached against.

The psychology, and its legacy

The internal side of the gap is real, widely misread, and the part most likely to be handled badly. The often-quoted figure that men apply for a role at 60 per cent of the listed qualifications and women only at 100 per cent comes from an old, never-published internal report. The behaviour is real: LinkedIn's data shows women applying to around 20 per cent fewer jobs while being hired more often when they do. But the usual reading, that women lack confidence, does not survive scrutiny. When Tara Mohr surveyed more than a thousand professionals, the most common reason both men and women gave for not applying was not doubt in their ability but a belief that they would not be hired without the stated qualifications. What held them back was a mistaken reading of the process, not of themselves.

The impostor phenomenon was named in 1978 in a study of high-achieving women, and the measured gap appears in entrepreneurship: across every economy the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor studies, women rate their own entrepreneurial ability below men and report a greater fear of failure. But the dominant framing has been challenged, and the challenge is well made. Tulshyan and Burey argue that labelling this an individual syndrome misplaces the cause, and that for many women the sense of not belonging is not a distortion but an accurate reading of a room that was not built for them.

There is also a penalty for the ask, and it turns caution from a flaw into a calculation. When women do the things raising capital requires, self-promote, negotiate hard, hold a room, they are penalised in ways men are not. Decades of experimental research show assertive, self-promoting women judged competent but less likeable and less promotable. In negotiation it costs money: women who negotiate for more are resisted, and the same women negotiate as hard and as well as men when they do it on someone else's behalf, at no penalty. A founder raising capital is performing the most self-promotional act there is, at the highest stakes, in the room where the penalty is sharpest.

The pattern is trained early. Girls are rewarded for being neat, correct, and pleasing while boys are rewarded for boldness and for taking the hit. Reshma Saujani's shorthand, that girls are raised to be perfect and boys to be brave, describes a perfectionism that keeps work in draft and asks unspoken while a founder waits to feel ready. Read together, these threads do not describe a deficit to be corrected with encouragement. They describe a set of responses, learned through socialisation and sustained by real penalties, that are for the most part rational. The strategic consequence is that the work is to change the conditions, not the woman.

What moves the number

The levers that shift women's funding outcomes are known, and they are structural rather than motivational. Dedicated preparation works: Tech Nation's research found participants in structured, women-focused programs about 2.1 times more likely to secure funding within twelve months than non-participants. This is the practical form of the Kanze finding, since capital-readiness includes the skill of meeting a prevention question with a promotion answer.

Who allocates matters. France's public co-investment quota, which requires funds seeking government co-investment to meet a female-founder threshold, produced a 35 per cent increase in female-founder funding. And committed capital follows evidence: the Minderoo Foundation has committed up to 8 million dollars over four years to female founders through Startmate, arguing the case on the same performance evidence set out here. The direction of travel is toward treating women founders as an underpriced opportunity rather than a diversity obligation.

Implications, and where MAD sits

For investors, the case is a portfolio case before it is a fairness case. A cohort that returns more revenue per dollar, exits at least as quickly, and is systematically underpriced is an opportunity a disciplined investor should want, not overlook. For sponsors and foundations, the money goes further here than almost anywhere, because the constraint on most capable women founders is not talent but capital-readiness and access to the right room, both of which are inexpensive to provide relative to the ventures they release.

For founder programs, the design lesson is specific. If women will not put their hand up until they meet every criterion, a high, intimidating bar filters out the founders most worth backing. The entry has to be low-stakes and openly invitational, with the real judgement happening quietly, through an assessment, rather than as a wall a founder must feel worthy of climbing. The room itself has to reward the ask rather than punish it.

MAD Ventures' own position rests on this reading. Across the ventures MAD has shortlisted for investment, close to 60 per cent were led by women, a revealed preference rather than a stated one. The Venture Compass, MAD's capital-readiness assessment, and the VC Mastermind, its twelve-month founder program, are built to do the three things the evidence calls for: ground a founder's self-assessment in an objective reading of her venture, teach the reframe that the funding room rewards, and open a door designed so that women walk through it.

A note on method and confidence

This paper distinguishes what is well established from what is contested. The capital-efficiency finding, the funding shares, the questioning mechanism, and the backlash research are strong and replicated. The confidence gap and the impostor phenomenon are real as measured behaviour but disputed as explanations, and are treated here as symptoms of conditions rather than causes in the individual. The claim that women-led businesses fail less often is genuinely mixed, and is not relied upon. Where a figure counts all-women teams, it is distinguished from the broader count of teams with at least one woman founder. MAD's own shortlist figure is internal data, offered as disclosure rather than as independent evidence.

References

1. Cut Through Venture, State of Australian Startup Funding 2025, and Cut Through Quarterly reporting, 2025.
2. Founders Forum Group, Women in VC and Startup Funding: Statistics and Trends, 2025.
3. Gusto, New Business Formation Report, 2025.
4. Wells Fargo, Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report, 2025.
5. US Census Bureau, Annual Business Survey and Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics, 2025.
6. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and Babson College, United States Report, 2024 to 2025 (Donna Kelley et al.).
7. Azoulay, Jones, Kim and Miranda, Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship, MIT, Northwestern and US Census Bureau, 2020.
8. Female Foundry, Female Innovation Index 2025.
9. European Commission and European Innovation Council, study on the gender investment gap in European venture capital, 2025.
10. Boston Consulting Group and MassChallenge, Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet, 2018.
11. First Round Capital, The 10 Year Project.
12. PitchBook, All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem, 2024 and 2025 reports; US 2025 figures reported by Fortune, 2026.
13. Company Rescue and Creditsafe, analysis of UK SME insolvency by board gender, 2024.
14. KSA Group, analysis of company insolvency by director gender, 2018 and 2023.
15. JPMorgan Chase Institute, research on the survival of women-owned businesses.
16. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, Women's Entrepreneurship Report, 2012 and 2024 to 2025 editions.
17. Kanze, Huang, Conley and Higgins, We Ask Men to Win and Women Not to Lose, Academy of Management Journal, 2018, and Harvard Business Review, 2017.
18. Hewlett-Packard internal report, as cited in Lean In and subsequent coverage.
19. Tara Sophia Mohr, Why Women Don't Apply for Jobs Unless They're 100% Qualified, Harvard Business Review, 2014.
20. LinkedIn, Gender Insights Report, Tockey and Ignatova, 2019.
21. Clance and Imes, The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 1978.
22. Bravata et al., Prevalence, Predictors and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2020.
23. Tulshyan and Burey, Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome, Harvard Business Review, 2021.
24. Rudman, Heilman, Moss-Racusin and colleagues, research on the backlash effect; and Catalyst, The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership, 2007.
25. Bowles, Babcock and Lai, Social Incentives for Gender Differences in the Propensity to Initiate Negotiations, 2007, and Babcock and Laschever, Women Don't Ask, 2003.
26. Reshma Saujani, Brave, Not Perfect, 2019, and associated TED talk, 2016.
27. Tech Nation, research on outcomes for participants in dedicated female-founder programmes.
28. Minderoo Foundation and Startmate, female founders funding alliance, 2025.

Founders building real-economy companies are welcome to begin with the Venture Compass, MAD's capital-readiness assessment, or to enquire about the VC Mastermind. Wholesale-qualified investors and family offices interested in the Information Memorandum and Partnership Deed for MAD Fund 1 are welcome to enter the Investor Room, or use the contact form for a private conversation.

Information for wholesale clients only. This paper is general commentary and does not constitute financial, tax, legal, investment, or other professional advice. It does not take into account the objectives, financial situation, or needs of any person. It does not constitute an offer of securities or an invitation to subscribe. Any investment opportunity referenced is offered privately and only to wholesale clients as defined under sections 761G and 708(8) of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), under separate offer documentation. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance and capital is at risk. Tax positions referenced are based on the manager's understanding of the ESVCLP regime at the date of publication; legislation may change. Prospective investors should obtain their own independent financial, legal and tax advice before making any investment decision. Nothing on this page should be relied on as a substitute for the Information Memorandum and Partnership Deed, available on request to wholesale clients via the Investor Room.