The Women's Investment Opportunity. What happens when you fund the companies everyone else is walking past.
Last year, under 2% of UK venture capital went to a female founder. Most people hear that and assume there just aren't enough women building companies.
In the first episode of my new series, I sit down with Baroness June Sarpong OBE and Debbie Wosskow CBE to take that assumption apart, and to make the case that this gap is one of the most overlooked opportunities in venture right now. If you invest, or want to, watch this one.
The lazy explanation for that 2% is a pipeline problem. Not enough women start companies, so not enough get funded.
As Debbie put it, that's a myth, and the data kills it. One in five investable UK businesses is run by a woman. The companies exist. They're just not making it through the process and the investment committee, so one in five at the top drains to 2% at the cheque.
That gap between supply and funding is the whole point. When good companies are systematically underfunded, their equity is cheaper than it should be, and the investors paying attention get in at prices others walk past. Debbie calls it unmet alpha, and I think that's exactly right.
The data underneath it is strong. Women-led companies deliver better returns, the Harvard studies have said so for years, and the argument the Investing Women Task Force has won is an economic one, not a moral one. Women are good business.
This is why we back the way we do. Our Araya Sie Fund, with Triin Linamägi as managing partner, invests only in companies with at least one female co-founder. And in our Super Angel Fund, which has no gender lens at all, 45% of what we backed has at least one female founder. We didn't engineer that. We just followed the quality, and the quality was there.
June made a point that's stayed with me: this isn't only about who gets funded, it's about who allocates. The $124 trillion wealth transfer over the next 20 years will put more capital in women's hands than ever before. Who deploys the money shapes which companies get built.
There's a deeper thread in the conversation, about why the funding gap starts long before the cap table, that I won't do justice to here. June and Debbie go into it in the episode.
What this means for you
If you back companies, treat the women-led businesses crossing your desk as a pricing opportunity, not a diversity exercise. The pipeline is strong, one in five investable UK companies, and the funding hasn't caught up, which means the entry prices often haven't either. Look at the returns data, then look at who everyone else is ignoring. The full conversation with June and Debbie is in part 1 of the series.
Warmly,
Rupa
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