Female founders in Europe raised just €5.76bn in 2024, according to the 2025 Female Innovation Index by Female Foundry, a venture platform of more than 7,000 investors and female founders across the continent. That represents 12% of all VC capital raised and a 12% decrease on the amount raised by female founding teams in 2023. While this is a drop, the proportion of VC funding raised by female teams compared to the total VC funding raised by all gender teams has remained the same as last year, at 12%, and is up from 2020, 2021 and 2022, when it was 10%.
There are also a couple of other bright spots in the report. Funding rounds for women founders are getting bigger and more women founders are exiting.
VC funding: It’s man’s world
1,196 European women-founded startups raised €5.76bn across 1,305 deals in 2024 — a 12% drop from the €6.56bn raised in 2023. European companies with founders of all genders saw an 11% decrease.
Some of the largest funding rounds for women-led startups include UK-based money transfer app WorldRemit, which raised €242m in October, and Germany-based SpaceX competitor The Exploration Company, which raised €150m in November.
The size of funding rounds on average for female founders also increased 7% across stages compared to 2023.
Deeper pockets
While a lot of money found its way to healthtechs, fintechs and foodtechs led by women founders, 33% of VC funding raised by women entrepreneurs in Europe went to deeptechs — 2% more than deeptechs including all genders.
Synthetic biology, GenAI and drug development were the top-funded areas within deeptech for women-founded companies in 2024; 25% of the largest financing rounds in 2024 raised by female founders went to AI-driven startups.
M&A by women-founded companies increased by 15%, with 111 deals in 2024, up from 100 in 2023. Three women-founded companies went public last year, up from one in 2023.
The UK and Finland lead the way
27% of the funding raised by women-founded startups in 2024 went to companies headquartered in the UK, the highest percentage in Europe.
However, when it came to the highest proportions of VC invested in women-founded companies, Finland led the way with 30%, followed by Denmark (20%), Norway (17%) and Austria (17%).
