Menu Icon
Refresh Miami Logo
Search Icon
Sign Up Sign In

How much did female founders raise in VC in 2023? Pitchbook report sheds some light

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
PinLinkedIn

By Nancy Dahlberg

Across the nation and locally, the venture capital funding gap between male- and female-ounded companies remained substantial in 2023, according to a just-released report, the US All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem, produced by PitchBook and its partners.

Nationwide in 2023, female-founded companies – defined by Pitchbook as companies with at least one female co-founder – generated a record high proportion of total US VC deal value, but still it is only 22.8% (this does not include OpenAI as the female founder left before the round). The proportion had been hovering at around 20%. While their proportion of deal count declined, the cumulative value of the deals that female founders did close represent a larger slice of the smaller total VC pie. And locally? We’ll get to that.

Let’s look at the gap between the amount of VC capital closed by teams with at least one female co-founder ($44.7 billion in 2023) compared to all-male founding teams ($114.8 billion). That gap widens substantially when we look at teams with all-female founders ($3.2 billion) compared to all-male teams ($114.8 billion).

The proportion of funding that all-female teams took in was just 2%, a share that hasn’t budged for more than a decade.

The areas with the largest share of female-founded startups getting funded were the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Boston, with a 38% and 26% share of the funding respectively. Two areas that did not do as well were Atlanta and Washington, DC, with 11.7% and 8.6% respectively.

The report didn’t break out the Miami metro area specifically, but Pitchbook’s US Female Founder Dashboard sheds light on that – and it is a very sad trend.

According to the PitchBook dashboard, businesses with female co-founders in Florida raised $309 million over 116 deals in 2023, with about one-third of that directed to businesses with all-women leadership. Startups in the Miami metro area raised $146 million across 75 deals, including $40 million across 20 deals for all-female founded teams. Across Florida, companies raised $309 million across 319 deals, according to the dashboard.

But what do those local numbers mean by percentages? Using Pitchbook’s 2023 deal data for South Florida, just under $2 billion, all-female founded teams drew 2% of funding, the same as the dismal national trend. However, all teams with at least one female founder drew just 7.3%, much worse than the national average. That means over 92% of the funding went to all-male teams.

Here are a few more national findings in the All In report:  

  • The exit environment remains a challenge and female founders have felt these effects with exit value and count declining for the second year in a row. The proportion of total US VC exit value closed by female founders is historically quite variable and declined to 12.7% in 2023 after two years of growth.
  • The median time to exit (in years) for female founders in the US remains slightly below the broader population, at 6.7 years compared to 7.5 years.
  • Women represented 17.4% of all US decision makers at the VC firm level at firms with AUM of $50 million or more in 2023, up slightly from 16.1% in 2022.

Download the Pitchbook US All In report here and stay tuned for the eMerge Americas Insights report for 2023, which will also include top fundings for female founders in South Florida among much more data about 2023.

READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:

Nancy Dahlberg
Latest posts by Nancy Dahlberg (see all)