Golden Seeds supports women entrepreneurs and investors to achieve business and financial success.
Golden Seeds is helping to fill the funding gap
- 10.6 million firms in the US are at least 50% owned by women. This is nearly half of all privately-held firms in the country.
- These firms employ 19.1 million people and generate nearly $2.5 trillion in sales.
- Historically, women-led companies have received only 2.4% of venture capital investments; some years, they received no funding at all. *
- Is this because women only own small businesses? We don't think so: only 4% of women owners of million-dollar-plus firms have raised private equity, compared to 11% million-dollar-plus businesses owned by men.
- In 2008 women angels represented 16.5% of the angel market. Women-owned ventures accounted for 15.7% of the entrepreneurs that are seeking angel capital and 9.5% of these women entrepreneurs received angel investment in 2008. Thus, while the number of women seeking angel capital is low, the percentage that receives angel investments is in line with the overall market yield rate. These data indicate that when women do seek angel capital they fair well, but the need is to increase the number of women entrepreneurs that seek angel capital. (Jeffrey Sohl, "The Angel Investor Market in 2008: A Down Year In Investment Dollars But Not In Deals", Center for Venture Research, March 26, 2008.)
* Statistics on this page were sourced from The Center of Women's Business Research, with the exception of this bullet, which is from Clearing the Hurdles: Women Building High Growth Businesses by Brush, Carter, Gatewood, Greene and Hart. 2004.