VC Dollars for Female Founders Doubled
Venture funding for female founders doubled to a record $73 billion last year, but the numbers come with a major caveat. A significant portion of that total was concentrated in mega-deals for companies like Anthropic and Scale AI. The data highlights a positive top-line trend but also underscores the uneven distribution of capital within the startup ecosystem.
While the doubling of VC dollars for female founders to $73.6 billion in 2025 marks a significant milestone, a closer look reveals the outsized impact of the AI sector. Over $30 billion of this total was concentrated in massive funding rounds for AI companies Anthropic and Scale AI, both of which have female co-founders. This highlights a trend of capital concentration in a few high-profile, AI-driven ventures. The proportion of total US venture capital deal value going to companies with at least one female founder reached a record 27.7% in 2025, a substantial increase from 19.9% in 2024. However, for companies founded solely by women, the picture is less rosy. These firms raised only 1.1% of total venture capital dollars in the US, a decrease from 2.1% in the previous year, with funding for all-female teams declining by 22%. Anthropic, co-founded by President Daniela Amodei, emphasizes a mission-driven engineering culture focused on creating reliable and steerable AI. Their full-stack engineers work with Python and modern web frameworks like React and TypeScript, and experience with cloud infrastructure such as GCP or AWS is valued. The company's interview process for technical roles includes live coding exercises, and they look for engineers who can contribute to research. Scale AI, co-founded by Lucy Guo, is also deeply embedded in the AI ecosystem and seeks engineers with a strong background in machine learning and experience with cloud technologies. Job postings for software engineers often list experience with React, TypeScript, Node, and Python as requirements. The company's engineering culture is described as fast-paced with a high degree of ownership, focused on building products at scale. Daniela Amodei's background is not in computer science; she graduated with a degree in English Literature before entering the tech world at Stripe and later OpenAI. Her focus at Anthropic is on business operations, strategy, and policy. This contrasts with the technical background of many AI founders and highlights the diverse skill sets present in leadership at major AI firms. Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, a Thiel Fellowship recipient who dropped out of Carnegie Mellon's computer science program, has a strong technical background. Before co-founding Scale AI, she interned at Facebook and was the first female designer at Snapchat. Though she left Scale AI in 2018, she retains a significant stake in the company. For software engineers targeting high-growth startups like Anthropic and Scale AI, a key takeaway is the emphasis on both strong foundational skills and the ability to work in a rapidly evolving, product-focused environment. At Anthropic, there's a unique integration of engineering and research, with engineers frequently co-authoring research papers. The company's own AI, Claude, is now used to generate the vast majority of its internal code, shifting the role of human engineers towards system design, architecture, and product strategy. At Scale AI, "Forward Deployed Engineers" work directly with major clients, including leading AI research labs, to build data infrastructure for advanced AI models. This role requires a blend of strong coding abilities and effective communication skills to work with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. The company is expanding its team to accelerate the development of AI applications and emphasizes a collaborative, high-impact engineering environment.
