The number of Series A rounds for women-led firms in the Bay Area dropped 30 percent in 2015, according to a recent report that looked at funding trends nationally.
In 2015, 16 Bay Area companies led by women received Series A funding, or 8 percent of the total.
That compares to 2014, when 23 firms in the Bay Area run by women received funding, according to F Cubed, a New York-based firm that focuses on investing in women-led startups.
But the amount invested in Bay Area women-run startups notched up a bit in 2015 to $8.6 million in the Series A round. In 2014, women received $6.37 million.
Series A funding is a critical step in a startup s growth. It is the juncture between receiving seed money and becoming a bigger and better financed company. Even in the best conditions, a company at the seed round has a 30 percent chance of making it to the Series A round, says Pando Daily.
That Bay Area female entrepreneurs might have struggled to raise money in 2015 isn t a surprise. The funding climate became tighter in the later half of the year, and the study s author notes that the Bay Area saw an 11 percent decline in the number of Series A rounds in 2015.
Bay Area female entrepreneurs tend to have more of technical background and be serial entrepreneurs compared to their counterparts in other regions.
In fact, female entrepreneurs in New York and Los Angeles saw increases of Series A backing. In New York, the number of deals increased from 12 to 13, and the amount inched up from $6.2 million to $6.6 million from the prior year.
The study s findings may be part of a bigger problem that I wrote about recently — businesses run by women tend to be under-capitalized. Even though women own 36 percent of all businesses, they make just 4.23 percent of the revenue of all businesses.
Above: Illustration of a woman at computer. (Doug Griswold/Bay Area News Group)
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