Female founders took a larger chunk of the VC pie in Q2. Here's why

It's shaping up to be the second-best funding year ever for female founders, partly fueled by the AI race, but all-women teams are still struggling to raise capital.

Startups in the U.S. with at least one female founder raised just over $24 billion in the first half of the year, according to Pitchbook and the National Venture Capital Association's latest report. That puts 2023 on pace to be the second-highest year after 2021, which set a record at $59.6 billion.

The outlook is less rosy for all-women teams.

Startups with female-only founding teams raised just $1.4 billion in the first half of the year, according to the report. That's only 1.6% of all venture capital deployed in the first half of the year, the report shows, which is down from 2% for the full year in 2022 and also puts all-female teams on pace to raise less than $3 billion for the first time since 2017.

Mixed gender teams have done much better.

Women with male co-founders raised 28.1% of the venture capital deployed in the first half of the year, a significant spike from the 17.6% that they raised in all of 2022.

"Culturally, I think we have good news here, but we really need to push on all-women teams," Julie Castro Abrams told me.

Abrams is the CEO and founder of the Bay Area non-profit How Women Lead which launched a campaign last month called "The New Table" that aims to bring 10,000 women into investing through venture capital.

More women get funded when other women are cutting the checks, Abrams said.

And while there's been an "explosion" of female investors since 2021, the prolonged freeze on exits has reduced liquidity for all investors, she said.

The reported surge in capital going to female founders this year might be at least partly fueled by a handful of mega AI deals.

Pitchbook's data shows that in Q2 several of the top deals to startups co-founded by women were AI companies, such as Anthropic and OpenAI.

Anthropic was co-founded by several former OpenAI employees including Daniela Amodei and her brother, Dario.

OpenAI has a long list of co-founders, including Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston, though it's unclear how involved Livingston currently is. CEO Sam Altman is largely the face of the company.

A quick search through LinkedIn also shows that some of the women associated with the top Q2 deals for female founders have already left the companies they co-founded or stepped into non-executive roles.

Here were the top 10 venture capital deals that closed between April and June for startups in the U.S. with at least one female founder, according to PitchBook: