How COVID-19 and the resulting recession are impacting female founders

Last week The Exchange dug into recent data concerning the amount of venture capital raised by female founders. As a refresher, the numbers were not good.

In Q3 2020, PitchBook data reported that US-based female founders raised $434 million across 136 rounds. That dollar amount was off from $841 million in Q2 2020, for context. The numbers were a dramatic turnaround from where 2019 left the industry.

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The sharp decline in available capital is slowing the pace at which women are founding new companies in the COVID-19 era. There are other factors at play, new data from the Female Founders Alliance (FFA) indicates, but the funding drought is not helping.

Overall, the pace at which women are indicating that they intend to found a company, according to a group of women that the FFA is tracking longitudinally, is slipping.

FFA, a community of women founders and a startup accelerator working to achieve greater gender diversity in technology, built a sample of 150 women from tech hubs “with high likelihood of having entrepreneurial aspirations,” according to its dataset. It asked them about their entrepreneurial goals both before COVID-19 arrived, and again this September.

The changes in responses from before the pandemic and today are striking. Let’s examine the data in light of what we learned last week concerning capital available for female founders and see what we can find out.

Depressing declines

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J How COVID-19 and the resulting recession are impacting female founders https://ift.tt/3k7r8uN