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

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

Kristi Noem is out as Homeland Secretary. President Trump's decision makes Noem the first cabinet member to be fired in this administration. CNN reports that Trump was unhappy with how Noem's testimony during congressional hearings went last week. On her watch, federal officers killed two civilians in Minneapolis. And she's been plagued by other scandals too—including an alleged romantic relationship with an adviser and an uproar over briefly suspending TSA Precheck during a funding lapse. 

Black women's employment is still in crisis. Today's jobs report shows that the U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February. Men bore the brunt of those losses. And yet Black women’s unemployment still increased from 6.4% in January to 7.1% in February, per the National Women's Law Center. 

StubHub has a new ticketing platform just for women's sports. HerSportsHub will be a resale platform for tickets to WNBA, NWSL, PWHL, and NCAA women’s basketball games. 

For your weekend watchlist. I highly recommend a new documentary called The Pink Pill that starts streaming on Paramount+ today. It follows the years it took to bring the first female libido drug, Addyi, to market. From entrepreneur Cindy Eckert's efforts to champion the drug to fighting bias in Washington to the life-changing effects the drug had for women and couples—it's a compelling story! 

ON MY RADAR

The TikTokers reading the Epstein files so you don't have to VF

Sheryl Sandberg-backed study says aid cuts erode the decline of child marriage Bloomberg

Billionaire chipmaker CEO Lisa Su holds meetings on weekends and sends feedback after midnight because leaders aren't born: 'They're trained' Fortune

PARTING WORDS

"I would go to the ends of hell to protect my family, and we don’t get to see that with women characters very much."

— Priyanka Chopra Jonas on her new film, a revenge thriller called The Bluff