Investors, take another look at women founders.
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Fifty years ago, a woman couldn’t get a credit card without a male co-signer. Today, some women founders are adding male co-founders who know nothing about their businesses — just to get a meeting with venture capitalists.
That second fact is very disappointing and shines a light on an inequity and an investment opportunity. Molly Huyck, founder and CEO of Aequitas Invest (AQi), a crowdfunding platform built by women, for women founders, is seizing this opportunity. “Despite the times, and despite how progressive things have improved,” she told me, “we still have a long, long road ahead.”
The numbers back her up. In 2025, companies founded solely by women raised just 1.1% of U.S. venture capital dollars, down from 2.1% the year before, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. You may have seen the celebratory headlines about female-founded companies raising a record $73.6 billion last year — but Fortune’s analysis found that two-thirds of those dollars flowed to AI companies, skewed by a handful of megadeals, and nearly all of it went to mixed-gender teams. For women building alone, the door is closing, not opening. Harvard Kennedy School research puts the 30-year average for all-female teams at 2.4% of VC funding. Three decades of stagnation
The Business Case Investors Keep Ignoring
Here’s what makes this gap so irrational: women founders outperform.
A Boston Consulting Group and MassChallenge study of more than 350 startups found that for every dollar of funding, startups founded or co-founded by women generated 78 cents in revenue. Male-founded startups generated 31 cents — less than half. Women-led ventures did this while raising less than half the capital: an average of $935,000 versus $2.1 million for their male counterparts. And they still produced 10% more cumulative revenue over five years.
“Investors are leaving millions of dollars on the table just by not investing equally, let alone more so, in women,” Huyck told me. “We work differently. We make a dollar go a lot further.”
The macro picture tells the same story. According to the Wells Fargo 2025 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report, women now own 40.6% of all U.S. businesses — 15.7 million firms employing 12.6 million people and generating $2.8 trillion in revenue. Yet those firms capture only 4.6% of total U.S. business revenue. That’s not a talent gap. That’s a capital gap.
From Omaha To PayPal To Founder
Huyck has spent her career being one of the few women at the table. She grew up in Omaha playing sports with four siblings, planned to study accounting at Creighton University, then pivoted to computer science, where she was one of only two women in the program. At Union Pacific Railroad, she was the only female systems engineer. She built and sold a company during the internet era, then spent years at PayPal leading operations strategy — defining how the company served 400 million customers in 29 languages.
It was there she saw what changes when women get a real seat. “I had a male leader who was very intentional about bringing women to his leadership table,” she recalled. “We exceeded all of our goals. We created operational efficiency while creating world-class customer service metrics.”
When she retired from corporate life and researched how to invest beyond public markets, she discovered the funding data — and decided to build the solution herself. On International Women’s Day 2024, she founded two companies: AQi and Set the Bar, Omaha’s first women’s sports bar and only the eighth in the country.
Democratizing Who Gets Funded — And Who Funds
AQi works like an online Shark Tank. Founders — businesses must be at least 50% women-owned — share their pitch decks and stories; investors can participate for as little as $150, thanks to the crowdfunding provisions of the 2012 JOBS Act. The platform is regulated by the SEC and FINRA, with background checks on founders, anti-money-laundering screening for investors, and third-party accounting reviews. Of the roughly 50 active crowdfunding platforms in the U.S., Huyck’s is the only one founded and run entirely by women, exclusively for women.
The demand is overwhelming. At a recent conference for women entrepreneurs, her team spoke with 150 founders. Several became emotional describing their funding struggles. One, a nurse practitioner from Omaha, holds contracts with NATO and multiple countries for a med-tech triage device — but can’t access the capital to move from prototype to production.
She also shared that AI can help small businesses with small teams be more efficient. Huyck has configured an AI “advisory board” with legal, marketing, and even antagonistic personas to pressure-test her decisions, and she now runs workshops to teach her founders to do the same. “If you configure it appropriately,” she said, “you can use it in a way that fills some of those gaps that founders have.”
Huyck is equally focused on the other side of the marketplace: women as investors. “There’s a correlation,” she explained. “The more women investors there are, the more women founders get funded.” Her advice for first-time investors is simple: invest in businesses that align with your values. Those investors become customers, brand ambassadors, and advocates — a flywheel that money alone can’t buy.
Make Space At The Table
When I asked Huyck for her leadership lesson, she didn’t hesitate: “Make sure you make space for everyone to have a seat at the table.”
As someone who has spent decades studying compassionate leadership, I’d argue that the funding gap is exactly what it is — a seating problem. The evidence is unambiguous: when women get capital, they return more per dollar, and research shows they reinvest in their communities and economies when they succeed. Yet women founders receive roughly a quarter of the funding they seek, while men receive half, per the Harvard Kennedy School.
The fix doesn’t require waiting for venture capital to reform itself. It can start with a $150 investment in a founder whose values match your own. As Huyck put it: “When women founders get funded, they do good things. And that’s just making the world a little bit better place.” That’s a return worth investing in.
If you are a founder in the making with a business idea and need support in making it a reality, join us this fall for Plan for Purpose.
