Opinion: Two per cent of global funding goes to women-only teams. Brittany Fox is an outlier, having raised a $1.2m seed round for her startup Nevam last month. Here’s why she still believes the fundraising journey is broken.
Women in corporate know the barriers, the gender pay gaps, the promotion inequality. We see it in leadership, we can see it during meetings, and we see it annually at review time.
In startup world, the stats are also clear. Women-only teams receive roughly 2% of funding globally. The problem is that both male and female founders want to scale and build rockets, and to do it they need investment.
I recently announced closing my over subscribed funding round of 1.2 million which closed in only 3 weeks. This made me part of 1.5% of funding to go to solo female founders. My investors were all male and ranged from VC, family office to angels.
I mapped the founder experience, I tested it, watched it and then took my learnings and incorporated them. I didn’t raise because I was lucky. I raised because I had deep domain expertise, real traction, and investors who designed a better founder experience.
I have designed customer experiences for some of the largest enterprises in Australia. The industry may be different but customers expects a seamless experience regardless of industry.
Investment is no different.
If VCs want to find more women founders, they need to look at it like their founders do.
A broken funding journey
That 2% statistic is not growing, and as a customer experience expert, I see it as a broken journey. I see gaps in the analytics, and in the content. Those are the discrete reasons why women aren’t getting funded.
Every startup founder knows the drill: Obsess over the customer. Define your ideal customer profile (ICP), design your funnel, and make it frictionless. If your funnel is full with unqualified leads, content isn’t optimised to convert them, conversion rates collapse, and you don’t understand your customer. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a viable investment. And so you pivot.
Now let’s flip that lens onto investors.
VCs also run funnels — but they don’t obsess over converting. They create huge awareness funnels and then cull. HARD.
Here’s what typically happens:
- Investors attend events and invite anyone into their pipeline.
- Founders dutifully show up for coffee chats, panels, and “meet us early” sessions.
- Then, arbitrary criteria appear. Rejections come before founders are even raising. Promises about being “on the journey” fall flat.
- Founders are taken out of the funnel before they even realised they were in it.
The result? Founders, especially women, don’t come back. Because we weren’t asked the right questions. The content in our meetings were preventative instead of promotional. We felt friction at every stage. We weren’t encouraged to tweak and come back, we were told ‘soft no’s’ and when someone doesn’t believe in us while we figure it out. We don’t really feel the need to prove you wrong, we move on and go to where we shine.
In CX terms, the founder experience (FX) is broken.
The faulty funnel
Startups would never get away with designing a funnel this way. Imagine telling your board, “We let everyone in the top of funnel, convert 1–2%, and lose the rest forever.” You’d be told you don’t know your ICP.
Investors are making the process exclusive without making it clear. They post criteria on their websites, but don’t follow them. They offer early meetings, but penalise founders for not being “ready.” They say “pipeline problem” when what they really have is an conversion problem.
If investors want to see more women, more diverse founders, more game-changing ideas — they need to treat founders like customers.
That means:
- Define your ICP clearly.
- Make your funnel transparent.
- Allow for re-entry
- Remove friction from the journey.
- Deliver a consistent, credible experience.
- Measure and optimise- over and over again
Startups are expected to obsess over their user experience. It’s time investors did the same. Because the problem isn’t that they can’t find us.
The problem is that when we show up, too often the funnel isn’t optimised or clear how to convert.
Full disclaimer: I really contemplated writing this article at all, while my points are valid, I would be lying if I didn’t believe calling out an industry would put future raises at risk. I consider this my Voice of customer and hope it is received with the intent its meant for: to spark a change in perception.
Brittany Fox is a marketing strategist, digital transformation leader, and SaaS entrepreneur with a background in high-impact consulting and marketing. As the Founder and CEO of Nevam, Brittany oversees a platform built to visually map customer journeys and enable teams to resolve issues in real time.
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