Driving Equity: The Latest on Women in Innovation
Supernovas’ latest study found that the 2021-2022 period had seen the most venture capital investment in women-founded scale-ups with over USD 9 billion invested over those two years. European investors have been providing the largest share of VC capital for European scale-ups founded by women since 2020.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done to reach a more equitable gender balance. Out of over 7 000 European scaleups, only 604 (8%) had at least one woman on their founding team. That’s why we continue to make women a central focus of our efforts.
Findings reveal benefits of women in leadership and the barriers to their success
- Women-founded businesses are significantly more likely to focus on sustainability, with nearly 1 in 4 women-led scale-ups working to fight climate change
- Women-founded businesses converted a higher percentage of rounds from Seed to Series A (funding during the early stages of their business growth) in a shorter period of time than the European benchmark, but are still disadvantaged in late-stage investment rounds
- There is an especially high growth of women founded scale-ups in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland — they grew 16.6x since 2017
The full Supernovas study will be published 16 May
In this EBAN Data Monthly Report, we present an overview of the agrifood entrepreneurial and investment ecosystem in Europe (including Türkiye), with a focus on the investments in Agrifood companies in between 2020 and 2022, and the suggestions by EBAN to enhance private investment in Agrifood sector in Europe. In this report, we adopt FAO’s definition of “Agrifood” which covers “from agriculture production through to food consumption”. The analysis is supported by the data gathered through our partner Dealroom.co, a platform that gathers all publicly disclosed information on funding rounds made in Europe and beyond as well as through research on the literature, and the support of EBAN members who have contributed individually through interviews and as a group during the co-creation workshops.
In Europe, private investment has been growing in the agrifood sector. Looking at the European VC rounds, investments in food startups increased 12 times between 2013 and 2020 and foodtech startup valuations increased 1.5 times between 2019 and 2020. Then, in only 1 year, between 2020 and 2021, investments in food startups have more than doubled . The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is highly related to this increase. Focusing on the Business Angels investment in Europe, a significant growth can be seen in investment in food between 2019 and 2021, but the sector remains limited compared to the others, such as fintech and health. It is important to note that the agrifood investment and entrepreneurial ecosystem is developing at a different pace in different regions, even though it is central to the European economy.
