The Network Gate

The Network Gate: women founders and early-stage funding

The first check a founder raises usually doesn’t come from a cold email. It comes from someone who knows someone. Three

reports released in the past ten days show what that means for women founders, and what founders and fund managers can do about it.

Three Reports, Three Different Measures

These reports measure different things, in different places. Each figure below is labeled with its source, geography and scope, and they shouldn’t be combined or compared as if they were the same metric.

  • PitchBook-NVCA Q3 2026 Venture Monitor (United States, VC deals). Released October 8, data through September 30.
  • Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2025/2026 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report (global, survey of informal investment). Released October 8, built on 150,799 adults in 48 economies.
  • Cherry Ventures, Heartbeat 2026 (Europe, count of founders). A study of 10,000 inception-stage European founders, covered by Trending Topics on October 13.

In the US: The Share Is Falling, Starting at the First Round

From the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor:

  • All-female founding teams received 0.7% of US VC deal value in 2026 through September 30, down from 1.1% in 2025. That’s 596 deals worth $3.7B.
  • Companies with at least one female founder were 19.0% of US VC deals in 2026 to date, down from 21.8% in 2025. All-female teams were 5.1% of deals, down from 5.4%.
  • “77.7% of first-time financings YTD have gone to all-male teams.”

That last figure is the one to sit with. It describes the very first venture round, the point where a company either gets started on the venture path or doesn’t.

Globally: The Friends-and-Family Round Is Skewed Too

GEM’s survey looks at informal investment, the money from friends, family and angels that often comes before any VC. It found “approximately 70% of informal investments were directed to men entrepreneurs globally.” In 2025, 6.7% of women reported making a recent business investment, against 9.2% of men, and women invested “roughly one-third less capital on average.”

GEM explains why this matters beyond the dollars. Informal investment “is not just a financing mechanism; it is also a transmission channel for wealth, trust, information, and social proximity.”

In Europe: The Network Is the Gate

Cherry Ventures counted founders, not funding. Women are 10.1% of the 10,000 European founders in its sample, ranging from 7.5% in AI applications to 16.6% in health. Cherry’s reading of its data: “Where a credential is the gate, more women get through. Where a network is the gate, fewer do.”

A related finding: co-founders are 3.2x more likely to have met through a shared former employer than through a shared university. Who you’ve worked with shapes who you build with.

What Networks Can and Can’t Do

Here’s an honest framing. The patterns in these reports reflect systemic issues that no single founder can network their way out of. Investors, LPs and ecosystems all have work to do on how they source, evaluate and fund.

But the reports also show that the earliest money moves through personal connections. That makes the paths themselves something founders and GPs can work on now, alongside the bigger changes.

Two Raises Where Networks Opened Doors

GLORIAH (Edinburgh, October 2026). Founded in 2021 by Jessica-Rose Watson and Isla Wynne Thomas, the women’s intimate-health brand reports raising £600,000 against a £500k target in its first seed round, oversubscribed “across just 4 weeks of pitching.” Gabriel Investment Syndicate led, with Highland Venture Capital, Investing Women Angels, Apollo Informal Investments and Scottish Enterprise. Isla Wynne Thomas: “AccelerateHER and Investing Women Angels’ Women to Women and Ready to Raise programmes helped us connect with women across the ecosystem who have opened doors.” (Self-reported, in a release from AccelerateHER, which is affiliated with investor Investing Women Angels.)

Antler Australia Fund III and the Coaxial Foundation (October 9). Nicola Forrest’s Coaxial Foundation committed up to 30 million to a partnership with Antler: 20 million as an LP in Fund III, “on the same terms as other limited partners,” and up to 10 million for grants, co-investment and operating costs for women founders. Startup Daily, an Australian outlet, reports these figures without a currency label; they are likely Australian dollars. Eligible women-founded companies receive a 60,000 grant at Antler’s first check and another when an external investor leads the next round. Antler GP Michael Kron points to the earliest milestones, “where the through rates are most chronically underperforming.” (Self-reported.)

What Founders Can Do Now

  1. Map the people one step from the check. Who in your network knows an angel group, a syndicate lead or a seed fund partner?
  2. Join structured networks before you need money. Founder programmes, women’s angel networks and syndicates can turn a cold list into warm introductions.
  3. Plan around the first-round numbers. For a first raise, the US first-financing figures matter more than headline totals. Build a longer investor list and timeline.
  4. Model, test, adjust. Try your story with a few warm contacts first, learn what lands, then widen out.

What GPs Can Do Now

  1. Track where your pipeline comes from. Look at your deal flow by referral source and by founder gender. Your network’s makeup shows up in your pipeline.
  2. Add deliberate referral partners. Angel syndicates, founder programmes and women’s investor networks can reach founders your network doesn’t.
  3. Make the thesis specific. Antler built a program around where women founders drop out, and it brought in an anchor LP. A clear, data-backed view of where good founders get filtered out can strengthen an LP pitch.

Widening the Gate

Talent is evenly spread. Introductions aren’t. Fixing the introductions won’t solve everything, but it’s work that every founder, angel and GP can start this week.

Much of the investor map is public. Form D filings list related persons, Form ADV shows advisers and their funds, and fund portfolios and board seats show who backs whom. ConnectLab.live maps those paths alongside your own contacts, so you can see the shortest trusted path to the right investor, and the paths you haven’t been using.

Connection is the currency of the 21st Century.

If you traced your last five investor meetings back to their first introduction, how many different networks would you find?

If you’d like help with that, here’s an open invitation:

Sources

About Ken McArthur

Ken McArthur is the founder of ConnectLab.live, an AI relationship-intelligence and warm-intro platform that helps founders who are raising find the funds that fit and the people who can introduce them, and helps fund managers connect with the founders they back. He was recently accepted into Harvard Business School Foundry. He also writes Raise Smarter, a daily newsletter on what's really moving in early-stage fundraising. Ken challenges us to realize we ALL have an impact, whether we want to or not, on thousands of people we touch in our day-to-day lives, and he shows that simple things make a HUGE difference. ConnectLab.live grew out of that belief. Connection is the currency of the 21st Century, and the right introduction can change a company's future. Long before ConnectLab, Ken was the popular host of live events that brought together top-level marketers, entrepreneurs, business owners, corporations and non-profit organizations to build multi-million dollar joint venture relationships. He has managed product launches ranked in the top 400 sites on the Internet and is regularly asked to speak at leading marketing events. He created AffiliateShowcase.com, a pioneering affiliate program search engine and directory. He also founded the MBS Internet Research Center, which conducted the world's largest survey ever attempted on creating and launching successful information products. Ken was the official mentor for Sterling Valentine as he took his launch from zero to over $100,000 in less than 8 days, a proof of concept documented in Info Product Blueprint. Today he puts that same skill for connecting people and launching ideas to work for founders and the investors who back them.

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