Friday, March 6, 2026

A record year for female founders wasn’t quite what it seemed

Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei is among the female founders whose AI mega-rounds are skewing overall female founder data.

Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Let’s check in on venture funding and female founders. PitchBook’s latest report on funding to the cohort is out, and my colleague Lily Mae Lazarus has a new analysis for Fortune.

The good: Startups with at least one female founder raised a record $73.6 billion in 2025, doubled from $44.7 billion two years ago.

The bad: Deal count fell for the fourth year in a row. Fewer female-founded companies are closing deals.

And worse: All-female founding teams—those without any male cofounders—saw a steeper drop in deal value and deal count.

So what’s going on? Mega-rounds of AI firms with female co-founders are skewing the data. Anthropic, cofounded by Daniela Amodei, and Scale AI, cofounded by Lucy Guo, together brought in more than $30 billion in funding in 2025.

For the first time ever, companies with at least one female cofounder accounted for more than one-quarter of total U.S. deal value in 2025—an “unprecedented” 27.7%. But that record depends entirely on Anthropic and Scale AI’s $183 billion and $74.1 billion valuations, respectively. Without these outlier companies, female-founded firms aren’t getting anywhere close to breaking that record.

As influential AI companies build the future of the tech industry, it’s a positive that women are involved in these teams. Understanding what “skewing” the data means requires some nuance. At Anthropic, Daniela Amodei is a critical part of the team, leading alongside her brother Dario. At Scale AI, Guo no longer holds an active role, but because she was initially a cofounder its raises are counted in this dataset. And let’s not forget Mira Murati’s $2 billion fundraise for Thinking Machines Lab, a record size for a seed round; at that company, Murati also has male cofounders but is in the driver’s seat as CEO.

Yet overall, it’s clear venture needs some sort of reset to get fully female-founded companies, outside of the flashiest AI startups, back in the game.

P.S. Have a happy International Women’s Day this weekend! How are you celebrating?

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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