Why Are Female Founders in Southeast Asia Getting Less VC Funding?
Despite years of rhetoric around diversity in venture capital and louder championing of female founders across Southeast Asia, the share of early-stage funding reaching the doorsteps of women-led startups is shrinking.
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There’s a scene in Crazy Rich Asians where Rachel Chu, the female lead who’s an economics professor, is in conversation with Princess Intan, and the conversation steers towards microloans. One line stood out for me.
“Microloans help women, and women lift up economies.”
It’s a small idea built on big dreams. Give women access to capital, and watch what follows. The film presents it as self-evident.
Reality, however, spells a different tale, especially in the venture capital world.
Despite years of noise around diversity in venture capital and louder championing of female founders across Southeast Asia, the share of early-stage funding reaching the doorsteps of women-led startups is shrinking.
According to new data analysed by OSK Ventures, female-founded companies, defined generously as any startup with at least one female founder, captured a mere 18% of deal transactions in 2025, a dramatic dip from 46% in 2024.
While the overall private marketing funding activity rebounded after 2024, the total capital allocated to female-founded companies remained stubbornly flat across the last four years. Sure, the tide is rising, but it is not lifting all boats in equal measure.
This month, in the spirit of International Women’s Day, Fintech News Network’s Chief Editor, Vincent Fong, sat with Sarah Lim, Investment Partner at OSK Ventures International Berhad, and Rejina Rahim, founder of Wahine Capital, to go into the statistics and beyond.
The topic? The challenges women founders face when navigating capital raising in SEA.
Women Are Held to a Higher Bar Before the Cheque Is Written
The graph above tracked deal activity and capital deployment across SEA from 2022 to YTD 2025. It shows one telling line: female-founded companies (FFC) have seen a decline in their share of both total deals and total funding.
For YTD 2025, specifically, the female-founded companies’ deal share declined to 18%, the lowest recorded during the period of analysis. Despite the rebound in overall SEA funding in 2025, female-founded companies have not captured a proportional share of the recovery.
As of August 2025, female-founded companies accounted for approximately 12% of total SEA funding of US$2.4 billion, indicating a widening gap between female-founded companies and non-female-founded companies’ capital deployment compared to deal participation.
Sarah shared,
Sarah Lim
“In Southeast Asia, a lot of transactions tend to take place at the seed stage. However, a lot of our respondents for the report shared that theirs are more at a later stage, at A round. If all the funding action is taking place at SEA, but women are not raising at SEA, this could be one attributing factor.”
The behaviour dimension correlates with the data.
Rejina shared her experience, starting off with how she came into the startup world with a strong corporate background, and still found herself blindsided by how difficult the fundraising process would be.
In one of her initial entrepreneurship programmes, she found herself in a room of roughly 30 women. Few had secured funding from the outset. The reason runs deeper than most think, Rejina adds.
Rejina Rahim
“Culturally, we’re (women) not very open to risk. We don’t like the idea of asking for money.”
She adds on, saying that there’s an unspoken rule that many women internalise long before they walk into a pitch room. Prove yourself first, and then ask.
It’s a standard that shows up not only in a fundraising conversation, but across women’s careers. A reflexive instinct women have to demonstrate results before making any claim on resources or recognition.
Rejina shares that for female-founded companies, the consequences of such a mindset are stark. Even more so when she approached investors with an early-stage idea via a paper napkin concept, only to be met with a brusque reply.
Come back with traction, then we can talk.
Meanwhile, she watched male founders with nothing more than a big vision walk away with cheques. “I know a lot of men who, with just an idea, get 2 million ringgit,” Rejina says. The pattern she describes runs deep.
“When it comes to funding women, we tend to be a lot more conservative. We tend to ask more details in terms of how to get to that path of actually making that product work. Whereas if a man painted a bigger picture and said, ‘I have a vision of being the next Microsoft’. Sure, here’s a cheque.”
The imbalance in standards is a pattern the data reflects. There is also a courage tax that comes with being a female founder. “It takes a lot of courage for women to actually say, I need help and I need money,” Rejina says.
64% Break-Even to Profitable, Yet Still Passed Over
Here’s another number that should give any investor pause: 64% of female-founded companies surveyed were break-even to profitable; running sustainable, capital-efficient businesses. By conventional standards, that’s a green flag.
Yet in a venture landscape conditioned to chase explosive growth, profitability at an early stage can read as a red flag in disguise. The framework being applied was, as Sarah puts it, the wrong ruler applied to the wrong company. She says,
“I’d rather take a lower return, but one where I can ascertain that you’ll at least get back your capital, and then some. As opposed to ‘I need 5x, I need 10x’ and then hey, by the end of it? You might have 0x.”
The industry has largely built its frameworks around a single archetype: the high-risk, high-burn, winner-takes-all bet. And it has been applying that framework universally to companies that were never designed to play that game, and were never worse off for it.
Female founders, the data suggests, tend to build differently. With an emphasis on sustainable growth, genuine unit economics, and returns that are real rather than modelled.
That profile is deeply attractive to family offices seeking consistent returns and corporates looking for strategic exposure to emerging sectors without too much volatility.
Until the investment community develops a framework that recognises and rewards capital efficiency as a feature rather than a flaw, the 64% will keep getting passed over, and those returns will remain uncaptured.
The Pipeline Problem Starts Way Before the Pitch Room
67% of Southeast Asian investors do not have a single woman in an investment decision-making role. To put that into perspective, when the people writing the cheques are mostly men, the companies that get funded tend to look like the world those men already understand.
Think of it as the gravitational pull of familiarity doing what it always does.
When asked about OSK’s governance report, where 40% of its board is female, and 66.7% of its senior management is female, yet its investment into women-led companies is quite limited, Sarah doesn’t deflect the statistics. She turns the focus inward.
“Our deal pipelines, when we look for deals, we have to claim a bit of responsibility. It’s very natural to go back to the same networks. And if you repeat the same thing, you will get the same result.”
OSK Ventures is now actively reaching out to female founder networks across SEA. “Come talk to us,” Sarah says.
Rejina pulls the frame back further to the WEF Global Gender Gap Report, where she shares that Malaysia sits 108th globally and last among its ASEAN neighbours on economic and political participation.
If the people setting the policy aren’t women, the problems women face rarely make it onto the agenda with any urgency behind them. Rejina adds,
“The pipeline of all these issues we’re facing is not being heard by the people who are making the decisions.”
The loop is self-reinforcing. No women in VC means capital continues to bypass female-founded companies. Fewer founded companies mean fewer visible proof points. Fewer proof points mean the pipeline stays thin.
But both Sarah and Rejina point to a similar fix: more women in rooms where decisions are made, as well as mentors and a community where women support each other.
“A lot of times at a workplace, we feel alone,” Sarah says. “We need mentors. We need someone to say it’s okay to take a risk. It’s okay to be ambitious. It’s okay to fail, pick yourself up, and try again.”
The ecosystem is slowly building that infrastructure. Female founder networks, women-on-boards organisations, and more mentorship programmes.
Not enough, both women are quick to add. But more than anything, it’s a vital step. Because for a lot of women, hearing it’s okay from someone who has already walked the path is the thing that makes the first step possible.
If this piece on female founders left you with more questions than answers, watch the full conversation with Sarah and Rejina below. You can also dive into the SEA Female Founders Research by OSK Ventures.
