Women-led firms are a bright spot in 2023’s fundraising slump

Venture fundraising has been slowing down since the middle of last year. Larger firms are cutting their targets, and emerging managers are struggling to secure funds. But it isn’t all negative by any means. While some firms are struggling, others are seeing success — and a lot of the latter are funds run by women.

Well, it seems that way at least. We can’t know for sure if women-led firms are actually doing better in 2023 than in past years — there isn’t fundraising data on exclusively women-led funds — but there have been multiple fundraising rounds worth paying attention to.

Back in January, Monique Woodard closed a $17 million debut fund at Cake Ventures. Adverb Ventures, run by Slack product veteran April Underwood and Twitter alum Jessica Verrilli, closed on $75 million in July. Supply Change Capital, run by Noramay Cadena and Shayna Harris, raised $40 million last month, too. And that doesn’t cover all of it.