Startups with at least one female founder raised a record $73.6 billion in 2025, according to a new PitchBook report, nearly doubling the $44.7 billion they raised just two years earlier. But the apparent victory masks a more complicated reality that has been building for years. 

Deal count for female-founded companies fell for the fourth straight year, a contraction that began after a 2021 peak and has yet to reverse. The dollars are climbing, but they are pooling at the top, not spreading through the pipeline.

The concentration trend predates the AI boom. In 2022, female-founded companies (with mixed gender teams) captured roughly 18.4% of U.S. VC capital—with all-female teams scraping together just 2% of total funding. By 2023, their share of deal value had edged up to about 22.8%, but deal count kept shrinking, an early tell that investors were consolidating bets rather than broadening them.

In 2025, that dynamic reached a new extreme. AI swallowed two-thirds of every venture dollar invested in female-founded companies. Anthropic and Scale AI alone pulled in more than $30 billion—over 40% of all AI funding in the category. Their towering valuations of $183 billion and $74.1 billion, respectively, are what lifted female-founded companies above one-quarter of total U.S. deal value for the first time. Remove those two names, and the record disappears.

The pain fell hardest on all-female founding teams, which posted steeper drops in both deal value and count than mixed-gender cohorts, continuing a now multi-year divergence. 

There is, however, no denying certain gains. Anthropic, co-founded by Daniela Amodei, and Scale AI, co-founded by Lucy Guo, now sit among the most valuable VC-backed companies in the country. 

But outside AI and a few resilient sectors like biotech, deal activity is stagnating or shrinking, especially at the earliest stages. Later-stage and growth rounds captured an outsized share of capital for female founders in 2025.

The context, of course, is that historically female-founded startups have been more capital efficient than the broader market (generating more than twice the revenue per dollar invested than male-founded companies on average), with lower median burn rates and, until recently, faster exits. In 2025, those advantages narrowed; Female-founded companies still show slightly stronger progression after their first round, but the gap is closing.

Meanwhile, the gatekeepers allocating this capital remain overwhelmingly male. Eighty-two percent of decision-makers at U.S. VC firms with at least $50 million in assets under management are men, and nearly 90% of large firms are majority-male at the check-writing level.

Ultimately, the data cuts both ways. On one hand, women are riding the defining technological wave of the decade. They are co-founding some of its most valuable companies. But progress is increasingly tethered to the fortunes of a few AI giants. If AI valuations wobble—or if investors pivot away from giant late-stage rounds—the gains for women founders could evaporate quickly.