Why our female founders bootstrapped to $1.4m ARR before raising.

New data on New Zealand’s Gender Investment Gap shows investment in women-only founding teams has more than tripled in a year, but a substantial gender investment gap remains.

Gender Investment Gap co-founder Jenny Rudd pointed to Contented, alongside Dispute Buddy and Bonnet, as women-led startups posting explosive revenue growth, even as investment dollars remain stubbornly uneven.

The data, from the Aotearoa Centre for Enterprising Women at the University of Auckland Business School, shows women-only founding teams attracted $14.75 million in disclosed investments from Venture Capital (VC) firms during 2025, up from $4.59 million in 2024.

Their share of total disclosed investment capital has more than doubled, from 2.9% in 2024 to 5.94% in 2025.

But male-only founding teams still attracted $172.35 million, or 69.42% of all disclosed capital, while mixed-gender teams received $61.17 million, or 24.64%.

Dame Theresa Gattung, co-founder of the Gender Investment Gap initiative and a longstanding investor in women-led businesses, says the results provide grounds for cautious optimism, but not celebration.

"There has been real movement. In a year, the amount of capital invested in women-only founding teams has more than tripled and their share of investment capital has more than doubled. But let's keep that in perspective. Women-only teams are still receiving less than six cents in every investment dollar, compared with close to 70 cents going to male-only team."

Jenny Rudd, co-founder of the Gender Investment Gap initiative, says the results suggest access to investors is broadening, but that has not yet translated into anything approaching an even distribution of capital.

"My startup Dispute Buddy is in this year's data as a woman-only founder team. While we made up 12.3% of the total deals in New Zealand, we only received 5.9% of the investment capital."

"The explosive revenue growth of women-led startups like Dispute Buddy, Contented and Bonnet shows us that women founders are generating huge amounts of revenue, whilst still receiving disproportionately low funding."

Our co-founders Hannah Hardy-Jones and Lucy Pink helped skew the women-only investment figures in NZ with Contented's $4.1m seed raise earlier this in year. Knowing the questions they'd face as female founders, drove their approach. Hannah says:

“Women are often asked to prove how they’ll mitigate risk, while men are more often asked to talk about the size of the opportunity. One of the advantages of raising capital later for us was that we had already answered many of those risk questions with evidence, which gave us more space to talk about our ambition.”

"We made a deliberate decision to bootstrap until we had real traction."

"By the time we raised, we weren’t asking investors to believe that we could build a successful company. We had already demonstrated that we could. That fundamentally changed the power dynamic in the room and we successfully raised $4.1m."

That hard work may have been what drove their incredible seed raise, Lucy says.

"We always set ourselves a pretty insane goal of getting to $1 million ARR before we raised... I wonder if the reason why we got into all the meeting rooms with our investors, or we started to earn these amazing relationships, was because of the ARR. And I wonder if we raised with just the notion or the idea or the belief that we always had...whether we could have raised as much as we did or had the same conviction from investors."

Representation falls away at later funding stages.

The 2025 data also raises questions about what happens to women-founded businesses as they move through the investment cycle. Women-only teams accounted for 17.6% of pre-seed investments and 15% of seed investments. That representation dropped to 7.5% at bridge stage, while none of the Series investments captured in the 2025 dataset went to a women-only founding team. Gattung says:

"Women are clearly founding businesses, raising early capital, and demonstrating that investors will back them. But what happens when those businesses need larger amounts of capital to scale?"

"The challenge is making sure strong female-founded businesses can continue to attract capital as they grow and need larger investment rounds."

2025 Gender Investment Gap, at a glance.

• $248.27 million in disclosed investment value.
• $172.35 million (69.42%) went to male-only founding teams.
• $61.17 million (24.64%) went to mixed-gender founding teams.
• $14.75 million (5.94%) went to women-only founding teams, up from $4.59 million (2.9%) in 2024.
• Women-only teams accounted for 10.8% of individual investments, mixed-gender teams 22% and male-only teams 67.2%.
• Of the 155 companies receiving investment, 12.3% were women-only founded, 18.7% mixed-gender founded and 69% male-only founded.
• 100% of funds captured in the analysis invested in women-only and/or mixed-gender teams, up from 87% in 2024.
• Women-only teams accounted for 17.6% of pre-seed, 15% of seed and 7.5% of bridge investments, and none of the Series investments recorded.

About the research.

The 2025 Gender Investment Gap data was collected and compiled by researchers from the Aotearoa Centre for Enterprising Women at the University of Auckland Business School. Twenty-three funds voluntarily supplied information about investments made during the 2025 calendar year, including the gender composition of founding teams. Two funds did not disclose investment values.

The gender categories reflect the composition of the founding team at the time of investment, and the research distinguishes between individual companies and individual investments, as a company may receive multiple investments during a year or investment from more than one fund. Because the number and composition of participating funds can vary between years, year-on-year comparisons should be read as indicators of the direction of the investment market, rather than comparisons of an identical cohort of funds.