- Startups with female founders make up a tiny proportion of venture-capital funding.
- The presentation firm Pitch collected 80 successful pitch decks used by startups founded by women.
- Insider asked Vanessa Stock, a cofounder of Pitch, to pick out five of the best.
Venture capital has long been a male-dominated sector, but when the coronavirus pandemic hit the industry’s diversity problem became even worse.
Startups founded by women recorded a 3% slip in funding in 2020 despite the wider industry recording a 16% increase in investment, according to data from PitchBook.
While that drop-off seemed short-lived, the record $40.4 billion that venture capitalists pumped into US companies led by women in 2021 — almost double the $23 billion invested in the previous year — still accounted for only 2.3% of the total VC funding in the US, according to Bloomberg, which cited PitchBook data. That share was higher than in Europe, where just 1% of VC funding went into startups founded solely by women in 2021.
Vanessa Stock, the cofounder and vice president of people of Pitch, a presentation-software startup, says change has been slow in the industry amid “subconscious biases.”
“Female and nonbinary founders bring a unique perspective to entrepreneurship,” she told Insider. “If the gatekeepers of capital open the doors not just for women but for people of all classes, races, and genders, imagine the vibrant diversity of companies that we would see in the world.”
While some of the funding disparity has to do with the number of female founders in the ecosystem, Stock said investment firms could start by “implementing diversity benchmarks in the same way as many startups have.”
In a bid to amplify the efforts of female and nonbinary founders, Pitch has collected more than 80 successful pitch decks from companies founded by women.
Of the founders who submitted their pitch decks to Pitch, 66% of those surveyed said their gender had “negatively impacted the amount of funding raised,” according to Stock. “Only 8% said it positively impacted them,” Stock added. “And that’s a sample of founders who’ve already found some traction with investors.”
While getting a foot into the system appears daunting, Stock highlighted the importance of networking for female founders.
“Be open-minded to meeting industry leaders, getting good intros, and meeting other like-minded female founders,” she said. “Coming from another industry can be hard, but others can share their knowledge — especially if you’re a single founder.”
Insider asked Stock to select five successful pitch decks across a range of sectors, as varied as fertility benefits and alternative investment, and she also outlined why they were effective in gaining investor traction.
Check out the five pitch decks below:
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