[StartupRecipe] Korea’s Female Startups Raised 2.7x More, But Hold Just 2% Share

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Korea’s Female Startups Raised 2.7x More, But Hold Just 2% Share

Korea’s women-founded startups raised significantly more money in the first half of this year. But the headline number tells only part of the story.

Startup Recipe tracked companies that raised 10 billion won or more through May 2026 and found four women-founded firms in the mix, together pulling in 126.7 billion won. That is 2.7 times the 47.1 billion won raised over the same period last year — a figure that, on its face, looks like progress.

The broader market, however, grew faster. A surge in large deals around AI semiconductors and robotics expanded the overall investment pool considerably, leaving women-founded companies with roughly 2% of total capital raised — a share that has been declining for years.

The longer trend is harder to dismiss. Women-founded startups accounted for 8% of total investment by amount in 2020. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 2.3%. Deal count tells a slightly different story — rising from 6.6% in 2020 to a peak of 9.1% in 2023, then slipping back to 7.9% in 2024 — but the direction of capital has been consistently unfavorable.

Part of this reflects a structural reality. The number of women entrepreneurs in Korea remains relatively small in absolute terms. And historically, women-founded companies have been heavily concentrated in consumer-facing categories: beauty, fashion, pet care, wellness, and femtech. Consumer tech accounted for more than half of all investment in women-founded companies in 2020.

The market has since moved on. Since 2022, investor appetite has shifted rapidly toward B2B models, deep tech, and AI infrastructure. Women-founded startups are only beginning to follow.

Last year offered early signals of a shift. Airobot, which develops humanoid robots, Korea Deep Learning, an AI solutions company, and Sizzle, a smart factory startup, each raised more than 10 billion won — the first visible cluster of women-founded deep tech companies crossing that threshold in a single year.

This year’s larger deals point in a similar direction. The three women-founded companies that raised more than 20 billion won in the first half of 2026 were Galaxs, an AI drug design platform; Kurly, the retail tech company; and First BioTherapeutics, which is developing immuno-oncology treatments. Biotech and healthcare have become an increasingly prominent part of the women-founded landscape since 2024.

The diversification is real. But roughly 40% of women-founded companies remain concentrated in consumer tech, and the rest are still early in the transition. The market, meanwhile, has already moved several steps ahead.

There is another factor that rarely surfaces in aggregate data. For three of the four years between 2020 and 2023, Kurly alone accounted for between 30% and 50% of all investment raised by women-founded startups in Korea. No comparable company has emerged to replace it.

The absence of a new anchor company makes the structural fragility more visible. Women-founded startups have historically attracted most of their funding at the earliest stages. When the market turned in 2022 and investors began concentrating capital in proven, later-stage companies, that preference hit earlier-stage, consumer-oriented women-founded companies disproportionately hard.

The government has responded with dedicated programs — a women’s venture fund in 2024, followed by an annual 10-billion-won women’s fund-of-funds last year. These measures can sustain early-stage deal flow. What they cannot do alone is carry companies into later rounds.

For that, private capital needs to engage. Without it, the pattern risks repeating: women-founded companies reach a growth stage without sufficient follow-on funding, investors move on to companies with demonstrated returns, and the pipeline stalls. The gap between early-stage public support and later-stage private capital is where the structural problem lives — and unless that gap closes, the 2% share is unlikely to move.

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