The numbers from India's first quarter told a familiar story: venture capital evaporated, late-stage deals vanished, and startup funding cratered 26% year-over-year to just $2.3 billion across 271 deals. Not a single round topped $100 million. For the first time in recent memory, the nine-figure check disappeared entirely from the landscape.
Yet buried in Inc42's latest quarterly report sits a figure that cuts against the gloom. Women-led startups raised roughly $350 million during those same three months—a 75% surge from the prior year. While nearly every cohort of founders watched capital dry up, female entrepreneurs pulled funding at a pace that not only defied the downturn but accelerated through it.
The question has shifted. It's no longer whether women-led ventures can secure money during a slump. It's what's driving this pocket of resilience when the rest of the market is contracting.
Defensive Mode
India's startup ecosystem entered the year bracing for impact. Valuations that had inflated through years of exuberance were recalibrating, sometimes painfully. Late-stage investors mostly sat this round out. But the funding mix shifted in ways that mattered. Early-stage deals jumped 58% year-over-year, suggesting that while growth capital froze solid, seed and pre-Series A activity—smaller checks, faster decisions—heated up considerably.
Women-led companies captured a meaningful slice of that early-stage momentum. The $350 million from Inc42's first-quarter report marks a sharp reversal from the prior two years, when the sector languished. In 2023, women-led startups raised approximately $480 million. The rebound to $930 million in 2024 across 136 deals nearly doubled the total in twelve months. By last year, the figure held near $1.0 to $1.1 billion, according to Tracxn's annual report on women co-founded tech startups released in early March.
Still, context matters. The structural gap persists, stubborn as ever. Women founders receive just ₹4 of every ₹100 raised by men, according to a report by Kalaari Capital released in March. Only 15% of funded startups in the first half of last year had at least one female cofounder, Inc42 data shows. The recent surge is real, but it's happening from a baseline so low that the absolute numbers remain a fraction of what male-led teams command. Progress, perhaps—but incremental.
Converging Tailwinds
The uptick reflects several forces that happened to align at once. First, government-backed capital is finally moving. India's Fund of Funds for Startups has deployed ₹2,995 crore to women-led ventures since 2020 via alternative investment funds. The Startup India Seed Fund Scheme directed ₹294 crore to women-led startups between April 2021 and January, while the Credit Guarantee Scheme for Startups provided ₹39 crore in guarantees from April 2023 through January, according to Lok Sabha data released in March.
Second—and this matters more than the raw figures suggest—women founders are clustering in sectors that align with macro investment priorities. Healthcare access. Climate financing. Financial inclusion. This isn't opportunism so much as structural fit, and investors are noticing.
Pee Safe, a femtech and personal care brand co-founded by Srijana Bagaria, secured a $32 million Series C led by OrbiMed in January. The company operates across more than 50,000 offline touchpoints and exports to 23 markets—scale that matters when consumer brands are struggling to justify valuations. Even Healthcare, co-founded by Matilde Giglio, Mayank Banerjee, and Alessandro Ialongo, raised a $20 million Series A extension that same month, led by Lachy Groom and Alpha Wave, to build vertically integrated hospitals in Bengaluru. Ecofy, a green retail finance NBFC co-founded and led by Rajashree Nambiar, pulled in ₹3.8 billion (roughly $42 million) in March from British International Investment and Finnfund's Development Africa India Fund, with participation from FMO and Eversource. The company finances electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and green SME loans exclusively. No fossil fuel exposure, full stop—a positioning that resonates as India chases net-zero targets and development finance institutions hunt for vehicles to deploy climate capital.
Third, early-stage investors are placing smaller bets across more companies, and women-led teams are capturing a rising share. The 58% year-over-year jump in early-stage activity created oxygen for founders who might have struggled to raise in a market dominated by late-stage mega-rounds.
Consider Pronto, founded by Anjali Sardana just last year. The 10-minute household services platform raised $25 million in a Series B led by Epiq Capital in early March, reaching a valuation near $100 million. The company was clocking around 22,000 daily orders in March and had completed more than 500,000 bookings. Notably, approximately 99% of service providers on the platform are women. The funding jump—Pronto's valuation rose from approximately $12.5 million to $100 million in under a year—signals investor appetite for scalable, operationally dense models that formalize informal labor markets. Whether that appetite holds through the next funding cycle is another question entirely.
Threading the Needle
Pee Safe's journey illustrates how women-led consumer brands are navigating a narrow path to growth capital. The company began by tackling taboos around women's health, then expanded into personal care—categories that carry cultural baggage in India but also represent massive untapped markets. By January, it was generating annual recurring revenue of roughly ₹150 crore and had turned profitable, according to Economic Times coverage. OrbiMed's $32 million Series C—structured as a mix of primary and secondary capital—brought a global healthcare investor onto the cap table with board seats. For a femtech company operating where even basic hygiene products carry stigma, that kind of institutional validation isn't just capital. It's permission.
Even Healthcare is betting that vertically integrated care will crack India's fragmented healthcare puzzle. Co-founders Giglio, Banerjee, and Ialongo are building OPD, diagnostics, and hospital infrastructure under one roof, paired with insurance-like coverage. The $20 million top-up in January followed a $30 million Series A back in October 2024. The company's first hospital in Bengaluru hit early breakeven, per YourStory, and management is targeting 25 facilities within 18 months—a capital-intensive model in a risk-averse climate, which makes the follow-on raise all the more notable.
Ecofy occupies a different niche entirely. Rajashree Nambiar and co-founder Govind Sankaranarayanan launched the NBFC to lend exclusively for green projects: EVs, solar installations, energy-efficient equipment for small businesses. The March equity infusion from British International Investment and Finnfund came on top of earlier rounds from FMO (₹90 crore in January 2024) and $12.5 million in debt from Denmark's IFU in March last year. Ecofy's thesis is stark and uncompromising—no fossil fuel exposure whatsoever. That clarity resonates as development finance institutions hunt for deployment opportunities in emerging markets.
Pronto's rapid ascent speaks to latent demand in India's informal domestic help market—a sector that has operated through word-of-mouth and cash transactions for generations. Anjali Sardana built a platform that promises 10-minute bookings for household services, formalizing an ecosystem where trust and reliability were always the bottlenecks. The Series B from Epiq Capital valued the company near $100 million, jumping from approximately $12.5 million in under a year. Perhaps more striking: 99% of the workers on Pronto's platform are women. This isn't just a tech play. It's an economic participation story at scale, assuming the unit economics hold as the company grows.
The Real Test Ahead
The first-quarter numbers suggest women-led startups are capitalizing on a structural shift in how early-stage capital deploys. With late-stage rounds frozen and AI startups absorbing $253 million across 29 deals in the first quarter, investors are hunting for category-defining plays at lower check sizes. Women founders clustering in healthcare, climate, and consumer sectors are hitting that sweet spot: durable markets with regulatory tailwinds and, in some cases, clear unit economics.
But the data carries caveats—several of them. The 75% year-over-year jump is impressive, yet it follows years of stagnation and, frankly, neglect. Women-led startups still command a tiny fraction of overall capital. The ₹4-for-every-₹100 ratio that Kalaari Capital flagged in March hasn't budged meaningfully. And the historical pattern shows gains at seed and Series A often fail to translate into late-stage momentum. Inc42's report from the first half of last year noted that only 15% of funded startups had a female cofounder, despite the absolute dollar surge.
Geography will matter, too. Bengaluru has historically dominated women-led startup funding, capturing roughly $13.4 billion cumulatively from 2010 through 2025, per the Bengaluru Innovation Report. Delhi-NCR and Mumbai trail at $10 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively. If the recent momentum holds, expect Bengaluru's share to widen further—Tracxn's report already pegged the city at 38% of women co-founded tech funding.
The real test comes in the months ahead. Can women-led companies that raised seed or Series A early this year demonstrate enough traction to pull Series B or C rounds when growth capital is still scarce? Pee Safe's Series C and Even Healthcare's extension suggest that proven models with clear revenue or a credible path to profitability can still command institutional checks. Ecofy's climate finance thesis pulled development capital from institutions with long deployment horizons. Pronto's operational density—those 22,000 daily orders—gave Epiq Capital conviction to lead a sizable Series B.
Government programs may provide a bridge, though the amounts involved are modest when spread across hundreds of companies. The ₹2,995 crore deployed through the Fund of Funds since 2020 and ₹294 crore via the seed fund scheme represent meaningful early-stage liquidity, even if those figures dissolve quickly when divided among recipients. Enablement programs like Google for Startups Accelerator for Women Founders continue to run active cohorts, chipping away at the technical scaling barriers that often stall women-led teams before they reach institutional funding.
The first quarter defied a brutal market. Whether it marks an inflection point or a temporary pocket of strength will depend on the next twelve months—whether early-stage momentum persists and whether women-led companies convert it into revenue and follow-on rounds. If they do, the structural funding gap may finally begin to narrow. If not, the $350 million will read as an anomaly in a market that still allocates capital overwhelmingly to male founders, downturn or no downturn.
