Female first focus for Minderoo Foundation with backing of Startmate accelerator
Female entrepreneurs represent one of the largest untapped opportunities in Australia’s innovation economy, yet female-only teams receive just 2 per cent of venture capital funding nationwide. To help tackle this deeply entrenched gender gap, Minderoo Foundation has partnered with Startmate, a leading startup accelerator.
Minderoo has already invested $2 million in the Startmate Accelerator Fund and will commit up to $8 million over four years to expand its reach and support a deliberate strategy to increase the capital available to women building high-growth companies in Australia.
“Research shows female-founding teams are consistently underfunded and operating with fewer resources, globally. That hasn’t changed, despite strong performance from women-led teams and clear evidence they deliver results, often outperforming their male peers,” Minderoo Foundation CEO John Hartman said.
“Minderoo Foundation’s strategic investment with Startmate is about getting more capital to entrepreneurs earlier, strengthening the pipeline for women coming through and backing more women to build and scale high-growth companies.”
A report by Boston Consulting Group and study by Kaufman Fellows found companies established and led by women achieve higher returns on investments – while two separate studies over a 10-year period by First Round and Female Founders Fund discovered companies with a female founder performed better and burned through less capital than those with all-male founding teams.
For Startmate, achieving its ambition to become the world’s leading early-stage investor means backing more exceptional women-led businesses. The partnership with Minderoo Foundation will strengthen the entire pipeline – helping inspire more women into the ecosystem, improving their pathway into the accelerator and ultimately ensuring they are backed with early-stage capital.
Since 2019, 43 per cent of companies backed by Startmate have at least one female co-founder, putting Startmate significantly ahead of the industry average of only 24 per cent.
Standout founders from recent cohorts include:
- Julia Reisser, who is replacing plastic with seaweed at Uluu,
- Grace Brown, a mechatronics engineer and the visionary behind Andromeda, a robotics company building companion robots for the elderly, and
- Remy Tucker, the founder of On The House, a startup tackling period poverty by installing free period product dispensers across public venues.
Beyond funding, Startmate has supported more than 880 women since inception to participate in the startup ecosystem as founders, employees and angel investors. Experience shows that the gender gap in entrepreneurship begins early: fewer women enter the startup ecosystem, even fewer reach the founding stage, and those who do are far less likely to secure early institutional backing.
“Last year 51 per cent of the capital we invested from our accelerator funds went to women-led startups (defined as having at least one female co-founder with meaningful equity), and 33 per cent was deployed into companies with only women founders” Startmate CEO Phoebe Pincus said.
“But these numbers only tell a small part of the story. For years now, Startmate has had a strong focus on building communities that serve women at all levels in the startup space.
“As a result, we’ve seen a much higher number and proportion of women-led startups apply for the accelerator, from 100 (20 per cent) in 2019 to nearly 600 (43 per cent) in 2025.
In the most recent Winter ‘2025 cohort, 54 per cent of startups included at least one woman in the founding team.
Remy Tucker is one of those, with her company installing free feminine product dispensers across workplaces, universities and public venues, which are paid for through advertising on packaging and displayed on digital dispensers. Since completing the program, On The House has raised a $1.7 million seed round, built a team of five and is rolling out 55 machines across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Ms Tucker said: “Startmate was the best unfair advantage as an early-stage startup. The network, the momentum, the motivation… prior to Startmate, I did not have any experience in the startup ecosystem. They gave me what I needed most at the time.”
Founded in 2011, Startmate has now backed more than 300 companies with a combined portfolio valuation exceeding $4.5 billion. Its performance ranks it as a top quartile fund globally for 9 out of the last 12 years.
In addition to the investment in Startmate, Minderoo has recently made strategic commitments both domestically in Australia, and across the Asia-Pacific that focus not only on increasing the flow of capital going to women-led businesses but also on advancing decent work opportunities and enhancing financial inclusion for women and girls across the region. These include:
- Scale Venture Fund 1 – Australia’s first women-led venture capital fund exclusively backing women-led startups in Australia and New Zealand. The fund reached its first close in December 2025.
- Impact Investment Exchange’s Women’s Livelihood Bond 7 – set to become the world’s largest Orange Bond and listed on the Singapore Exchange. This strategic investment is expected to benefit over 900,000 women and girls across India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, through initiatives spanning financial inclusion, clean energy, agriculture, and access to water and sanitation.
- $100 million investment from the Minderoo corpus into Future Generation Women - an investment fund managed by women portfolio managers applying a gender-lens to investment decisions. The fund also supports not-for-profit organisations improving the lives of women and girls.