Women Founders Are Benefiting From Crowdfunding, but Where are the Women Investors?

Investment crowdfunding is beginning to fulfill its promise of democratizing investment and access to capital.

While women entrepreneurs are still outnumbered by men on most crowdfunding sites, their ranks are steadily growing. At Republic, a Regulation Crowdfunding portal that emphasizes women-owned ventures, 8 out of 13 businesses currently raising capital are women-owned.

And on investibule, a platform that aggregates a broad range of community-based investment opportunities (and the sister site of Locavesting), 53 out of 212 current offerings have at least one female founder. Within that group, almost half are women of color.

Women founders are coming forward, and they are getting funded. An analysis of the first 500 offerings featured on investibule last year found that 76% of women-owned ventures and 73% of minority-owned ventures successfully raised funding, besting the overall success rate of 68% for the group as a whole.

Compare that to conventional finance. Last year, all-women teams got just about 2% of venture capital, and mixed gender teams received just 12%. The remainder of the $85 billion in VC funding in 2017 went to all-male teams. The problem stretches far beyond the rarified world of venture capital. Women are also denied more for bank loans and, when they are approved, receive smaller amounts than their male peers.

Wanted: Female Investors

Several recent studies have illuminated the real effects of bias when funding decisions are in the hands of a small and homogenous group. The venture world is ever so slowly changing. But a better idea may be to give a broader group of investors a say in who gets investment capital.

In other words, if we want to change who gets funded, we need to change who does the funding. […]

The post Women Founders Are Benefiting From Crowdfunding, but Where are the Women Investors? appeared first on Locavesting.

About Locavesting