Women raise more venture capital, but there’s a catch
Also: Carta's valuation, startups taking on incumbents, and more
Welcome back to Cautious Optimism. Today is June 7th, 2024. My little riff about buying a dusting of bitcoin as a hedge turned out to be more controversial than I expected, so more on that to come. To work! — Alex
Trending Up: JUUL … Apple + AI … crypto exchange fundraising … crypto exchange expansion … OpenAI pretending to be Anthropic … the US economy … AI agents, still … my favorite startup race today … Threads? … prime age labor participation … not learning to code …
Trending Down: Global interest rates (slowly) … Adobe’s ability to keep its feet from its mouth … cybersecurity … economic connections between China and the United States … the chance of a near-term domestic rate cut …
Carta’s valuation is in danger: The ever-scoopy Connie Loizos has a piece out reporting that Carta has a secondary transaction coming up. It’s not going so well. The company “initially hoped to find demand for the offering at a valuation of $4 billion, but according to our sources, even $2 billion may prove ambitious.” More at TechCrunch.
Women raise more venture capital, but there’s a catch: Sorry to double-cite my former editorial homes this morning, but Crunchbase News has a report up about female funding data that got me thinking. Here’s the excellent Gené Teare:
In 2023, the proportion of U.S. venture funding that went to startups with at least one female co-founder reached a new peak. In fact, a quarter of all funding — $34.7 billion — was invested in companies with at least one female founder, Crunchbase data shows.
Great, right? Actual progress? You love to see it. However, Teare has more:
The uptick in the portion of startup investment going to female-founded companies — up from 15% in 2022 — was in large part due to a number of billion-dollar-plus rounds raised by AI companies with a female co-founder.
OpenAI and Anthropic “count women among their founders,” Crunchbase News writes. I do not mean to rain on the parade of positive data, but I am also looking for more general progress on this front.
Cautious Optimism: Seeing AI companies with female co-founders raise a lot of capital means that women are at the epicenter of value creation in the startup world today. That’s great. So, should we celebrate or mourn given the NVCA also reports that the total fraction of venture rounds into female-founded companies as a portion of the whole is falling?
Or as Crunchbase News charted it:
Startups Daviding incumbent Goliaths
The correct way to challenge big tech companies is to beat them in the marketplace, not, as we see from Congress, working to erode the legal underpinnings of a vibrant Internet just because Facebook hurt your feelings.