MALE SKEW IN FUNDING

Why it is more difficult for women entrepreneurs to raise capital.

- DEVIKA SINGH

HER PITCH at Shark Tank India did not work, but 28-year-old Purva Aggarwal recalls drawing a lot of attention after her appearance at the show, most of it unwelcome. “Several people reached out to me for funding. However, some requests made me uncomfortable,” recounts the New Delhi-based founder of Good Good Piggy, an app that teaches money management to children.

“I remember a person, who owned a hotel, calling up and saying he would be interested in funding my start-up and we could meet at his hotel to discuss the details,” she says. “He told me he was sending a car to pick me up. This made me wary. I thought would he offer that to a man?” she says. Aggarwal later tried institutional funding and found the system skewed towards men. “Most networking events start late and run till late in the night. Very few women attend,” she says.

In spite of efforts by the start-up ecosystem to counter biases, stories of fund-raising by most women entrepreneurs are replete with incidences of gender discrimination and uncomfortable questions, for example about family planning. While fund-raising is not smooth for anyone, such experiences make things harder for women.

According to data from start-up intelligence platform Tracxn, India has more than 8,000 start-ups founded by women. Only a little over 2,000 have been able to raise funds so far. Indian start-ups have till date received total funding of $161 billion. Of that, $23.9 billion has gone to start-ups that have at least one woman founder. The difference could be starker for companies where all founders are women.

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