Presented by NiceTo, Techstars Tech Central Sydney Accelerator, and Overnight Success
It has been a little over a month since we started publishing the weekly Funding the Balance breakdowns in the Overnight Success newsletter (read more about this initiative here) and we’re pleased to present the first monthly retro (which, in this case, is a retro on the first quarter of 2024).
Congratulations to all the founders who successfully raised and announced in Q1 of this year!
These are the cumulative stats for Q1 2024, based on stories published about startup fundraises. The two stats in focus are
Note on why we look at founder demographics: Often we look at the proportion of teams “with at least one non-man founder” together, however this can hide the extent of the funding disparity. For example, a team may have 3 men and 1 woman on their founder team and count as a “mixed gender team” despite being majority men. We aim to disaggregate this data by separating out the capital raised by mixed gender teams and allocating it proportionately according to the gender split within their founder team. For example - if the startup in the above example raises 1,000,000, this equates to $250K raised per founder, meaning this team contributes $750K towards the total funding raised by men and $250K towards gender minority founders.
Startup Teams
| Deals (#) | Capital ($) | |
|---|---|---|
| Men Only | 38 (63%) | $445.8M (81.9%) |
| Mixed | 13 (22%) | $32.4M (6.0%) |
| Gender Minority Only | 9 (15%) | $65.7M (12.1%) |
Startup Founders
| Individual founders (#) | Capital ($) | |
|---|---|---|
| Men | 100 (80%) | $464.7M (85.4%) |
| Gender Minority | 25 (20%) | $79.3M (14.6%) |
In digging into the data behind mixed gender teams we also uncovered another anomaly: of the mixed gender teams featured in published stories, majority of teams comprised one man and one woman cofounder, with just under 30% (5/18) comprising two men and one woman cofounder. There were no mixed gender teams featured this quarter in published capital raising stories that had more than one woman cofounder.
Breakdown by fundraising milestone
Results for accelerator stage are more favourable than the overall numbers this quarter due to Startmate (as the only accelerator reporting in the first quarter) beating its previous record for representation of gender minority founders.
The number of published stories by funding milestone does not show substantial variation from the overall number of deals for Pre-seed/Seed or Series A + companies.
| # Deals | Accelerator | Pre-seed / Seed | Series A+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Men only | 4 (40%) | 17 (68%) | 17 (68%) |
| Mixed | 4 (40%) | 5 (20%) | 4 (16%) |
| Gender minority only | 2 (20%) | 3(12%) | 4 (16%) |
Accelerator funding stories this quarter mirrors the breakdown in the number of deals due to accelerators typically offering the same amount of funding to each participating startup.
The disparity in amount of capital raised, compared to number of deals is most notable at the Series A+ stage.