You Got the Seed. Now What?
Getting funded is hard enough. Here is why the real challenge starts the moment you do.
Most conversations about women and venture capital start and end in the same place: women-led startups receive less than 2% of global VC funding, according to the Arise Ventures Diversity Report 2026. In the United States, all-female founding teams attract closer to 1%. That number is cited relentlessly, and rightfully so. It is a damning indictment of where institutional capital actually flows.
But it misses a more specific, more actionable problem. Because the women who do get funded face a second gap – one that is less visible, less discussed, and arguably harder to navigate than the first.
Getting to Seed is one battle. Getting from Seed to Series B is a different one entirely. The structural forces stacked against women at that second stage are not the same as the ones at the first. By the time you are raising a Series A or B, you are expected to already know what you are doing. The system is less forgiving, the checks are bigger, and the decision-making is even more concentrated in the hands of people who do not look like you.
“Female-only founding teams captured just 2.3% of all VC deployed globally in 2024. All-male teams received 83.6%. As round sizes grow, so does the gap.” — Founders Forum Group, 2025
Read on to understand why this happens and what you can do about it.
Why Seed Is Not the Hard Part
Early-stage capital for women founders is slowly improving. Angel networks are diversifying. New funds with explicit mandates to back women at pre-seed and seed are launching across the UK, Europe, and the US. In the UK, organisations like Lifted Ventures, backed by the British Business Bank, are actively building a new generation of women angel investors, because only around 14% of UK angels are currently women, and diverse investor groups are measurably more likely to back female founders.
At the earliest stages, the bet is primarily on the founder: the idea, the drive, the ability to figure things out. That is a bet a growing number of people are willing to make on women. And Seed rounds are small enough that the pool of potential backers is wide.
But Seed funding buys you 18 months, at best. And when that runway starts compressing, the environment you are raising into looks very different.
The Funding Gap Has a Funding Gap
The further you move through the funding stack, the starker the numbers become. This is the part that gets talked about less, and it is the part that matters most for founders who have already cleared Seed.
According to Founders Forum Group’s 2025 analysis, female-only founding teams captured just 2.3% of the $289 billion deployed globally in venture capital in 2024. All-male teams received 83.6%. Mixed-gender teams took 14.1%. That gap does not shrink as round sizes grow; it widens. The progression from seed (3.2% female) to Series C and beyond (1.8% female) is a steady compression, not a plateau.
The reason is structural. As check sizes increase, so does institutional pressure to pattern-match. Partners who have seen hundreds of pitches default to what they recognize. And what they recognise is typically a male founder with a technical background. VC firms with at least one female partner are 2.3 times more likely to back female founders; firms with more than 30% female partners invest 4.7 times more. But women hold only around 15% of VC decision-making roles. The math compounds at every stage.
Kelly M. Whitfield, founder of KLIK SaaS and one of 50 North East female founders recently invited to meet Chancellor Rachel Reeves at 11 Downing Street, put it bluntly: less than 2% of national funding goes to female founders, and that figure has not moved in 10 years. She raised successfully as a solo female founder in tech, a pre-revenue valuation of more than £6 million before the full product was built, but she is clear that it required being exceptional and being able to demonstrate it. That is a higher bar than most founders, male or female, are held to.
What VCs Are Actually Betting On
At a recent female entrepreneurship panel hosted by Calcalist and Bank Leumi in New York, Rachel ten Brink, General Partner at Red Bike Capital, put it plainly: at very early stages, investors are essentially betting on the founder as a person. The qualities that matter are resilience, commercial instincts, the ability to be capital-efficient, and the judgement to know when to push and when to adapt.
This framing matters, because it points to where the work is. Investors who fund on the basis of founder quality, rather than pattern-matching against a narrow template of what a fundable CEO looks like, are far more likely to back diverse founding teams. The problem is that institutional pattern-matching is deeply embedded at growth stages, where partners have seen hundreds of pitches and default to what they recognise.
Kira Vanderwert, Partner at Outsiders Fund, described going deep into the process with a portfolio company whose technical founder was struggling to articulate their business narrative. Her team rewrote documents, reworked the financial model, and rebuilt the story from the ground up. The round ended up oversubscribed. The lesson: the investor’s job is not just to write the cheque but to be a strategic partner through every phase of growth.
For women founders navigating Series A and beyond, this kind of hands-on investor relationship is not a nice-to-have. It is often the difference between a round that gets done and one that quietly dies. Which is exactly why who is in your corner matters as much as what is in your deck.
New Funds Are Trying to Fix the Infrastructure
There is movement at the structural level. New fund models are emerging that are explicitly designed to support women founders into and through the growth stages, not just at the earliest point of capital access.
The UK-based Arāya Sie Fund secured £7.5 million in its first close in May 2026, combining the networks of Arāya Ventures and Sie Ventures to back female founders at pre-seed and seed stage across the UK and Europe. More than 50% of their own LP base is women, making them one of the most female-represented funds in European venture capital. Their approach is explicitly sector-forward, with a particular focus on deeptech, defence, spacetech, and AI: the high-growth, male-dominated industries where the next generation of category-defining companies are being built.
Critically, their model extends beyond the initial investment. Post-investment support covers hiring strategy, go-to-market, product development, customer introductions, and follow-on fundraising. The fund positions itself as a strategic partner through every stage of growth, which is precisely the kind of scaffolding that helps founders make it through that dangerous middle passage.
Globally, capital formation leaders like Angelina Hu, Head of Investor Relations at Bridge Funding Global, are working from the supply side: helping emerging VC fund managers meet institutional underwriting standards and access LP networks they would not otherwise reach. The argument is consistent: when you expand access thoughtfully without compromising standards, you strengthen performance. Better-aligned capital leads to better outcomes.
What Women Founders Can Actually Do: A Step-by-Step Guide
The structural problems are real, and fixing them requires action at the system level. But if you have raised Seed and are building toward Series A or B, you need a strategy that works in the world as it is. Here is where to focus your energy.
1. Build your investor relationships before you need them
The founders who navigate the Seed-to-Series B window most successfully are not the ones who start fundraising when their runway hits 12 months. They are the ones who have been in consistent contact with their target lead investors for a year or more before the process begins. Investor updates, warm introductions, and strategic conversations are your fundraising pipeline. Aim to be on the radar of your top 20 target investors at least 12 months before you plan to raise, and send brief quarterly updates in the interim.
2. Know your numbers with surgical precision
At growth stages, pattern-matching pressure intensifies. The best counter to bias is not argument, but data that speaks for itself. Revenue trajectory, unit economics, net revenue retention, customer acquisition cost against lifetime value: these numbers need to be not just solid but immediately accessible. If you can walk into a room and tell the story of your business in six data points without looking at a slide, you remove a significant amount of surface area for scepticism. Benchmark your metrics against public comps in your sector so investors can immediately place you.
3. Build a cap table and advisory board that compounds
Who backs you shapes who backs you next. Seek out funds, advisors, and board members who have actively supported women-founded companies through growth stages. Arāya Sie Fund, Lifted Ventures, and similar networks in your geography are not just capital sources. They are networks that compound. Research shows VC firms with at least one female partner are 2.3 times more likely to invest in female founders, so investor composition is worth investigating before you start your funding journey.
4. Engineer your Series A readiness 12 months out
Series A investors are not making the same bet a seed investor made. They need to see evidence that your early traction is repeatable and scalable and that you deployed Seed money effectively. Start building your Series A story at least a year before you plan to raise: what does your cohort data show, what does your retention look like, what is your path to the metrics that matter at that stage. Use the last six months of your Seed runway to close the gaps you know exist, not to keep growing at all costs. Investors will scrutinise your Series A narrative far more intensely than your Seed pitch, so every number needs to be defensible and every assumption needs to be tested.
5. Tell a bigger economic story in your pitch
A growing segment of institutional LPs now ask about diversity metrics in due diligence. Forbes notes that women are becoming entrepreneurs in record numbers, but that scaling remains a persistent structural barrier with a genuine economic cost. That framing is accurate and useful. Positioning your company as part of a larger shift in who builds the economy, and where the untapped return potential actually lives, is a narrative that lands with the right LPs. You are not asking for a favour. You are offering access to a category of returns that most VC firms are systematically missing.
6. Join a community that has been through it
The founders who make it through the Seed-to-Series B window rarely do it alone. Peer communities of women at similar stages offer something that no advisor or investor can fully replicate: real-time intelligence from people navigating the same terrain at the same moment. Find your people early. Share investor intel, warm introductions, and hard-won lessons. The structural headwinds are real, but they are far more navigable when you are not carrying them alone.
The Window Is Narrower Than It Looks
The data is striking not because the gap between Seed and Series B is surprising, but because it is so precisely located. Female representation in VC-backed companies does not drift downward gradually. It compresses at a specific, identifiable point in the funding lifecycle, and it compresses hard.
That specificity is useful. It means the problem has an address. It means founders who understand the terrain can prepare differently. It means investors who understand the dynamics can build the support structures that actually matter.
The gap between Seed and Series B is where the work is. Not just in terms of fundraising, but in terms of building the kind of company, team, and investor relationships that make it through to the other side.
The women who make it are not luckier or more talented than those who do not. They are better resourced, better networked, and better prepared for a journey that has more structural headwinds than it should.
That is exactly why community matters at this stage. The founders who make it through this window rarely do it alone.
If you would like NCR to help you navigate the Seed-to-Series B journey and need help considering how to scale – reach out today!