An all-women founding team has as little as a 1-in-5000 chance of being funded in Australia according to the latest analysis of investment data from Blackbird.
The VC fund released details on its efforts to close the gender investment gap for the 2025 financial year (FY25), with head of impact, Kate Glazebrook, saying “the last 12 months saw one of our best years ever in terms of investments made into female (co)founded companies”.
Blackbird’s “headline goal” of 40% of its investment committee (IC) pitches featuring teams with at least one female (or non-binary) founder remains beyond reach for the third year in a row, sitting instead at around a third of those fronting up to ask for money.
“Despite big efforts, our top of pipeline volume didn’t match the highs of FY24,” Glazebrook said of the numbers.
“But, we saw improvement elsewhere in the pipeline, and in particular, capital investments.”
But the good news is Blackbird “made first bets on 9 new female (co)founded companies”, up 80% on the five in both FY23 and FY24 – a peak in 12 years of investing. That includes core funding backing, mostly in pre-Seed or Seed rounds; as well as follow-on cheques for portfolio companies.
That translated to 32% of the new investments out of our ‘core’ fund, or 35% of all new investments,” Glazebrook said, adding that it represents a 9% increase in the share of new investments into all-female and mixed teams over two years
“In financial terms, those teams took about a quarter (24%) of the total dollars we invested into new companies from our core fund, or a whopping 61% if you include all new investments,” she said.
The hardest part for the VC is finding the right type of women, Glazebrook said.
“Our biggest challenge is top-of-pipeline: meeting more women founders pursuing businesses that match our mandate,” she said.
“And so while we didn’t quite make our target at the investment committee pitch stage, we are continuing our efforts, particularly at the top of the funnel this coming year. ”
Blackbird has outperformed the market more broadly when it comes to investing in women founders, but the sheer maths of venture investment shows how impossible the task can be.
Glazebrook said Blackbird invests in 1-2% of the companies that come into the VC’s pipeline. All-women teams represent 2% of that investment. That’s on a par with the industry numbers more broadly.
That means that in the pipeline, the chance of an all-female team being funded sits between 0.04% and 0.02% – between a 1-in-2500, and 1-in-5000 chance.
The VC had nearly 1800 deals added to its pipeline in FY25. Around 39% came from all-female or mixed teams.
Of 146 all-female teams, 42% of those startups made it to the IC. That falls to 24% for mixed teams from 560 in the pipeline, but rises to 42% again for 1091 among the all-male teams.
The Blackbird investment pipeline and results. Source: Blackbird
An equal chance
But Blackbird’s head of impact argues that making it to IC as a woman puts you on a level playing field with the blokes.
“Our FY25 data has shown that female (co)founded companies are about as likely to succeed as their all-male counterparts. We’ve known for a while that female (co)founded teams that get to IC pitch tend to have a higher chance of getting a ‘yes’, but we’re now seeing that equalisation across the whole pipeline,” Glazebrook said.
“If we can maintain this, the challenge shifts even more clearly to sourcing: increasing the volume of women founders we meet in our investment mandate.
“We spent FY25 experimenting with ideas in that space. Interestingly, these efforts didn’t translate to a higher volume of leads, but the improved conversion tells us something about getting better matches.”
Glazebrook said they “looked for ways to evolve the narrative away from just being a conversation about how little cash goes to women founders”.
But amid what looks like impressive numbers, there’s one thing worth noting in 60% of the cash going to mixed teams, compared to 39% of Blackbird’s investments going to blokes (and no, we’re not sure how, with 2% going to all-women teams, the VC managed to invest 101%, but that’s all-in commitment for you) that 60% includes Airwallex, with Lucy Liu as cofounder.
A clearer metric is the percentage of deals done: 8% for all-women, 27% for mixed teams, and 65% for all-lads.
You can slice an onion a lot of different ways. But it’s still an onion.
You can read Kate Glazebrook’s full analysis on the gender funding gap here.
Blackbird’s investments in women-led startups compared to the broader VC market. Source: Blackbird
