Chicago is the #1 metro for VC-backed companies founded by women.

Women-founded VC-backed companies are well represented in Chicago relative to other cities, but they are raising a smaller share of VC funding Chicago is outperforming most cities when it comes to the local share of new companies launched by women and people of color. We have the highest local percentage (36.5%) of new venture-backed companies founded or co-founded by women compared to other cities and the second highest local percentage (24.4%) of new companies founded or co-founded by founders identifying as Black or African American, Latine, and Asian American or Pacific Islander (AAPI). It is a different story when it comes to funding.

For instance, although a higher proportion (36.5%) of Chicago’s new VC-backed companies are founded or co-founded by women, these startups are raising a significantly smaller percentage of VC (14.9%) compared to Chicago companies founded by men in the last five years. This tells us that new women-founded companies in Chicago are raising smaller funding rounds (as a share of total local VC funding in Chicago) when compared to women-founded startups in other metro regions. Alternatively, 26.2% of all local VC funding in Austin went to new women-founded startups, placing them behind only Boston, despite the fact that only 25.2% of their new startups have at least one co-founded by women, suggesting that fewer women are raising more capital in that region.

In Chicago, 112 (36.5%) of the 307 new venture-backed companies founded between 2018-23 had at least one woman founder, the highest rate of gender representation of any city included in this report. For comparison, 239 (32.5%) of Boston’s 735 new venture-backed startups had at least one woman founder, the second highest rate of gender representation. New York came in a close third, with 654 (32.1%) of their 2,036 new companies having at least one woman founder. Chicago is the #1 metro for VC-backed companies founded by women.

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