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

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The full Supernovas study will be published 16 May