Pitching her AI-powered insurance-claims product to venture capitalists in the Bay Area, Sri Ramaswamy expected questions about the technology, and her growth plan. Instead, she was asked: “Who else is on your team?” One funder said: “If you had a white male CEO, you would get a check.”
Ramaswamy is among hundreds of immigrant female founders in the U.S. whose journey is very different from that of their male peers. Even as their numbers rise, female founders received only about 2% of all venture capital funding last year, according to data firm Crunchbase — a figure that has remained constant for years. There is no data for immigrant women founders.
“We face both racism and sexism,” Ramaswamy told Rest of World . “The men are asked, ‘If we give you $5 million, where can you take the company?’ I was asked, ‘What if you fail?’ I began to doubt myself.”
Immigrant female founders face a compounding bias because they’re often navigating sexism and racism at the same time.”
Artificial intelligence companies secured about $211 billion in 2025, or half of all global venture capital. Companies with at least one female founder received about 20% of the total, Crunchbase data showed. While making up more than a quarter of startups, female-only companies in the U.S. fare badly compared to other regions, with those in Latin America getting about 4% of funding and those in Africa getting 5%.
The reason the U.S. does poorly is the lack of access for women, Angela Lee, a professor at Columbia Business School and founder of female investor-focused network 37 Angels, told Rest of World .
“The issue isn’t capability; it’s unequal access to information, credibility, and social capital,” she said. “Immigrant female founders face a compounding bias because they’re often navigating sexism and racism at the same time, layered on top of cultural gaps around self-promotion, accent bias, and limited access to elite U.S. networks.”
While immigrant men face some of the same hurdles, immigrant women are less likely to have informal mentors who can explain how the system works, and introduce them to potential funders, Lee said. Women are also far more likely to be doubted on their technical skill, ambition, and leadership.
“For immigrant women, that bias shows up earlier and more often: in pitch meetings, partner discussions, and even informal feedback loops that determine who gets a second meeting,” Lee said.
Female founders are often described as “cautious,” “inexperienced,” and “emotional,” and get more questions on risk and potential losses during fundraising than men, research by the Female Founder Collective showed. Women are also interrupted nearly five times more often than men during pitch meetings, and get twice as many questions about their personal commitments and family. The challenges that female founders face intensify rather than diminish as they scale, even as their companies deliver comparable or better returns than companies by male founders.
The recent success of immigrant-led startups such as Perplexity and Neeva have captivated funders. But while immigrant Indian and Chinese men in the U.S. are stereotyped as being skilled in technology and finance, this does not extend to the women, Sushma Rajagopalan, a partner at VC firm Rittenhouse Ventures and co-founder of 2nd Careers, an AI-enabled jobs platform, told Rest of World .
“The bar is much higher for women, who also tend to start later, and so face ageism, as well,” she said.
For women entrepreneurs from nations that are not associated with tech, the bar is even higher. Sisters, a Silicon Valley-based network for female founders from Central Asia, has to work hard on raising awareness of countries such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, which are underrepresented on the global startup stage, founder Assel Seitova told Rest of World .
The risk in not funding women-led AI startups is that we hard-code today’s bias into tomorrow’s infrastructure.”
“Many founders need to first educate investors about where they come from before talking about what they are building,” said Seitova. Recent successes have put the region on the radar of investors, she said. Biotech company Valinor, co-founded by Zhanel Nugmanova from Kazakhstan, raised a $13 million seed round; legal AI tool Alma, founded by Assel Tuleubayeva from Kazakhstan and Aizada Marat from Kyrgyzstan, raised $8 million last year.
Men in the tech industry have long tapped the networks of Ivy League universities that also dominate the VC industry in the U.S. Indian men in the U.S. similarly have access to the alumni networks of elite tech colleges such as the Indian Institute of Technology: Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, is an alumnus of an IIT. Women make up a smaller cohort at these institutions.
Groups such as Sisters and TiE , a global nonprofit organization of entrepreneurs in the U.S. and India, help create some of the networks that immigrant women founders otherwise cannot access. Both plan to launch accelerators for women-founded companies in the U.S.
“The AI boom is enabling women to break some of the barriers, and there are more women-led AI startups,” said Rajagopalan, who is the global lead for women entrepreneurs’ pitches at TiE . At Rittenhouse Ventures, about a third of the investment goes to women-led startups, she said. “We need more such stories.”
Yet a majority of VC firms in the U.S. lack female partners , and this affects funding and visibility for women founders, Erika Bahr, founder of Daxe, an AI data aggregation platform, told Rest of World .
“Historically, investors have liked to invest in people that look like them — so men like to invest in men, and in men who went to their same schools,” she said. “The challenge is that a lot of women don’t talk about money. … Women are also more risk-averse than men. To get more women funding women, we need to shift that mindset.” A new law in California — where more than a third of the VC firms in the U.S. are located — requires VC firms in the state to report the demographic information of their portfolio companies from April. This may push the companies to invest in more women-led and minority-led startups, Bahr said.
In the current AI boom, companies are being funded earlier, faster, and with bigger checks, so women founders have a lot to lose, Lee said.
“The risk in not funding women-led AI startups is that we hard-code today’s bias into tomorrow’s infrastructure,” she said. “If women, particularly immigrant women, are excluded from this moment, they’re not just missing capital, they’re missing ownership, influence, and the opportunity to shape technologies that will define how work, health care, finance, and education function globally.”
In the meantime, it helps to grow a thick skin, said Ramaswamy.
“It took me a long time to say, ‘If you’re giving me a check, I’ll listen to you,’” she said. “If you think that I’m an Asian woman and that I can’t make it, too bad, you’re going to miss out on my success.”
