Women-led venture funds near Palo Alto

Venture capital has long been a mostly male business, both on the investing side and among funded founders. That is changing slowly. Several of the Peninsula's better known early-stage firms were founded or co-founded by women. New women-led funds keep appearing. The money flowing to women founders has risen too, though the headline numbers hide a lot.

This guide lists women-founded firms with confirmed offices near Palo Alto, describes programs for women founders and investors and summarizes the most cited data on the funding gap. It is not a ranking. Each firm's details come from its own website or the profile pages on this site. For how venture funds work in general, see our venture capital guide.

Women-founded, women-led and women-focused

Three labels get mixed up:

• Women-founded means one or more women started the firm.
• Women-led means women hold the general partner or decision-making seats today.
• Women-focused means the fund invests mainly or only in companies founded by women, whoever runs it.

The firms below are women-founded or co-founded. None of them limits its investing to women founders. If a firm's gender focus matters to you, read its own description and look at its recent investments.

Firms with Peninsula offices

Cowboy Ventures

Aileen Lee spent 13 years at Kleiner Perkins before starting Cowboy Ventures in 2012. The firm works from 525 Lytton Avenue in downtown Palo Alto and leads or co-leads seed rounds for US software companies, usually before they have a product. Lee is also known for a 2013 TechCrunch article that gave billion-dollar startups the nickname unicorns. Cowboy's FAQ says founders do not need a warm introduction and points them to its own pitch process on the firm's website.

Floodgate

Floodgate began as Maples Investments and took its current name in March 2010. Ann Miura-Ko is credited as a co-founder alongside Mike Maples Jr. The firm works from downtown Menlo Park and invests at pre-seed and seed. Its early bets it names include Twitter, Lyft, Okta and Twitch.

Pear VC

Mar Hershenson and Pejman Nozad started Pear VC in August 2013 as Pejman Mar Ventures. It is based on El Camino Real in Menlo Park and runs PearX, a 12 week program for pre-seed founders. Pear also lists a Female Founders Circle among its community programs.

Funds based elsewhere

Some well known women-focused funds are outside the Peninsula. Female Founders Fund, led by Anu Duggal, is based in New York and invests in companies founded by women. Axios reported in 2025 on newer Silicon Valley funds such as the How Women Invest Fund, launched in 2020 by investor Lata Setty to back women-founded companies. We could not confirm Peninsula office addresses for these, so check their sites before assuming they meet locally.

What the numbers say

PitchBook's annual All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem report, released in March 2026, is the most cited source. Its key findings for the United States in 2025:

• Companies with at least one female founder raised a record $73.6 billion.
• That was 27.7 percent of all US venture deal value, an all-time high.
• AI made up roughly two-thirds of the money invested in female-founded startups.
• Anthropic and Scale AI alone raised more than $30 billion.
• The number of deals fell. Fortune noted it was the fourth straight annual decline after a 2021 peak.

The record is real but narrow. Fortune pointed out that without Anthropic and Scale AI the record disappears. Companies founded only by women did worse than mixed teams; Fortune said all-female teams saw steeper drops in deal value and count. The latest figure it cited for that measure was roughly 2 percent of total funding, in 2022.

On the investing side

Fortune, citing PitchBook data, reported that 82 percent of decision-makers at US venture firms with at least $50 million under management are men. All Raise told Axios in 2025 that more than 280 women-led US funds had raised more than $12.6 billion since the start of 2022 and that women hold less than 20 percent of decision-making roles at venture firms. For comparison, Axios noted US venture firms raised $76.8 billion in 2024 alone.

Programs and networks

• All Raise. A nonprofit launched in 2018 by more than 30 venture investors, including Aileen Lee, to increase the number of women in venture and among funded founders.
• Pear's Female Founders Circle. A community program run by Pear VC in Menlo Park.
• Stanford programs. StartX and the university's entrepreneurship courses are open to Stanford-affiliated founders of any gender. Our Stanford entrepreneurship guide lists them.
• Angel groups. Several local angel groups welcome women investors. Our angel investors guide covers the main ones and the accredited investor rules.

A bit of local history

Women have shaped Palo Alto's business life for more than a century, from Lucie Stern's philanthropy to the engineers of the postwar electronics boom. Our page on women in Palo Alto history covers that longer story. In venture capital, the change has been more recent. Many of today's women general partners started at large firms on Sand Hill Road and later left to raise their own funds, which is the same path Aileen Lee took from Kleiner Perkins.

For women starting a fund

Many of the funds counted by All Raise are small first or second funds, often called emerging managers. Raising one is slow. A new manager usually needs a track record from angel investing or a prior firm, a clear thesis and a first group of limited partners willing to back an unproven fund. Those early backers are often wealthy individuals, founders who have sold companies and family offices, since large pensions and endowments tend to wait for later funds. Our family offices guide explains how those investors work. Some managers start with syndicates or rolling funds to build a record before raising a traditional fund. The legal and tax setup is specialized, so new managers typically hire fund counsel and a fund administrator early.

Tips for founders

1. Pick investors by fit, not label. Stage and sector focus matter more than the makeup of the partnership.
2. Use each firm's own channel. Some firms take pitches through their websites. Others prefer introductions from founders they have backed. Follow what the firm publishes rather than writing to individual partners unprompted.
3. Ask about the whole team. Find out who sits on boards, who votes on deals and who will actually help you after the check clears.
4. Talk to portfolio founders. They will tell you how the firm behaves in a hard quarter.
5. Prepare for the meeting. Our guide to pitching investors covers decks, meetings and follow-up.

Frequently asked questions