Immigrant women founders face bias in Silicon Valley

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 inquireed: “Who else is on your team?” One funder declared: “If you had a white male CEO, you would obtain a check.”

Ramaswamy, co-founder and chief executive of Charlee.AI, 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 notified Rest of World. “The men are inquireed, ‘If we give you $5 million, where can you take the company?’ I was inquireed, ‘What if you fail?’ I launched to doubt myself, wonder if I should step down and bring in a white guy.”

Immigrant female founders face a compounding bias becaapply they’re often navigating sexism and racism at the same time.”

Artificial ininformigence 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 revealed. While building 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 obtainting about 4% of funding and those in Africa obtainting 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-focapplyd network 37 Angels, notified Rest of World.

“The issue isn’t capability; it’s unequal access to information, credibility, and social capital,” she declared. “Immigrant female founders face a compounding bias becaapply 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 declared. Women are also far more likely to be doubted on their technical skill, ambition, and leadership.

“For immigrant women, that bias reveals up earlier and more often: in pitch meetings, partner discussions, and even informal feedback loops that determine who obtains a second meeting,” Lee declared.

Female founders are often described as “cautious,” “inexperienced,” and “emotional,” and obtain more questions on risk and potential losses during fundraising than men, research by the Female Founder Collective revealed. Women are also interrupted nearly five times more often than men during pitch meetings, and obtain 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 AI startups such as Perplexity 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 extfinish to the women, Sushma Rajagopalan, a partner at VC firm Rittenhoapply Ventures and co-founder of 2nd Careers, an AI-enabled jobs platform, notified Rest of World.

“The bar is much higher for women, who also tfinish to start later, and so face ageism, as well,” she declared.

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 notified 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 required to first educate investors about where they come from before talking about what they are building,” declared Seitova. Recent successes have put the region on the radar of investors, she declared. 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 industest have long tapped the networks of Ivy League universities that also dominate the VC industest 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 build up a compacter cohort at these institutions.

Groups such as Sisters and TiE, a global nonprofit organization of entrepreneurs in the U.S. and India, support 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,” declared Rajagopalan, who is the global lead for women entrepreneurs’ pitches at TiE. At Rittenhoapply Ventures, about a third of the investment goes to women-led startups, she declared. “We required 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, notified Rest of World.

“Historically, investors have liked to invest in people that see like them — so men like to invest in men, and in men who went to their same schools,” she declared. “The challenge is that a lot of women don’t talk about money. … Women are also more risk-averse than men. To obtain more women funding women, we required 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 declared.

In the current AI boom, companies are being funded earlier, rapider, and with largeger checks, so women founders have a lot to lose, Lee declared.

“The risk in not funding women-led AI startups is that we hard-code today’s bias into tomorrow’s infrastructure,” she declared. “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 supports to grow a thick skin, declared Ramaswamy.

“It took me a long time to declare, ‘If you’re giving me a check, I’ll listen to you,’” she declared. “If you consider that I’m an Asian woman and that I can’t build it, too bad, you’re going to miss out on my success.”

Source link