Here are the facts.

A Harvard Business Review study revealed that 68% of investors elected to invest in pitches read by men, a number that fell to 32% when the same pitches were read by women. A 2017 Forbes investigation found that the fastest-growing companies, with 200%+ growth, are 75% more likely to have a female founder.

Across industries, the $38.9 billion raised by mixed gender startup founding teams in 2018 represented 17% of investment overall, just slightly higher proportionally than in 2017. (And even less, 13%, when removing a notable $14 billion outlier, Art Financial.) For female-only founding teams, the situation is worse; they received just 10% of global venture capital dollars, according to Crunchbase.

Agri-FoodTech is growing rapidly. Since 2012, $56 billion has been invested in Agri-FoodTech startups. And 2018 was a record-breaking year, with $16.9 billion invested, a 43% year- over-year increase, the same rate of growth as between 2016 and 2017.

Yet in 2018, just 8% of total dollars, across 16% of Agri-FoodTech deals, was invested in firms with at least one female founder. Female-only founding teams again fared worse, taking just 7% of deal activity and 3% of dollar funding.

We were able to extract gender data for 43.7%—or 3,109 — of 6,517 deals across AgFunder’s complete data set, for the years 2013-2018. This closely parallels Crunchbase’s gender dataset across all industries.

Are you a founder or CEO in Agri-FoodTech? We’d love to hear from you!