Launched to address the gender venture funding gap where female founders were only receiving 2.2% of venture capital, the campaign was the first-of-its-kind global capital commitment campaign focused on gender-lens investing, a bold measure to inspire venture capitalists to pledge to invest more into female-founded companies. 

This report, published with support from Pacific Western Bank, Mastercard, Bank of America and Motley Fool Ventures, found that the consortium deployed 61% of their pledged amount in just two years into almost 800 companies—nine of which were recognized as unicorns, with the remainder expected to be deployed by 2023. An additional analysis from a sample size of 479 of the deals tracked by the consortium’s data partner, PitchBook, showed that these portfolio companies with female founders, have gone on to raise more than $4 billion within the timeframe of the 2018-2020 pledge campaign.  This report presents both qualitative and quantitative data to specifically answer three core questions:

• How impactful was ‘Our First Billion’ campaign? That is, how much of the $1 billion pledged by 86 venture funds was deployed by December 31, 2020, and what were the trends observed from such data?
• What can GPs do to better fuel women-led innovation?
• What can LPs do to better back GPs who over-index into female founders?

Source: Beyond The Billion