Over 40 years ago, Piper was founded by one man and three women, including Libby Gibson, who remains a partner today. These origins mean that we are committed to supporting women to be leaders, grow brand legends, and become investors themselves. We prove that commitment through our investing. Across our last two funds, we have invested £79m in female-led or co-founded brands, and in our current Fund VII, 50% of investments have been in all-female founder brands.
Beyond Piper, the wider market picture is far starker. Women-founded businesses generate 70% higher average revenue than male-founded businesses1, but just 2% of funding goes to solo female-founded businesses2.
To better understand why this gap persists, we recently asked over 200 female founders and business leaders, to complete a Piper Female Founders survey exploring the challenges and frustrations they face and identify where the real barriers lie.
Their experiences are a familiar mix of challenges: the work-life pressures shared by many women, the team building struggles common to every growing business, and the persistent difficulty of financing growth. What caught our attention wasn’t these issues, but how female founders are responding to them. This is the first of two newsletters drawing on what they told us, and we’re starting with the part of a founder’s life that rarely makes the growth-curve story: everything happening outside the business.
In the survey we asked about revenue and investment, but we also asked about balancing work and home life, maintaining energy and making personal sacrifices. The responses revealed recurring issues shared by female founders. 34% said work/life balance kept them awake at night, making it the second biggest concern among our respondents. For 38%, their biggest challenges were time management, capacity, and avoiding burnout. 62% described their current pace as only “somewhat sustainable”.
For many, building their businesses was just part of the story. Of the women we spoke to, over 45% had children when they started their business, and more than 30% currently had children under the age of eight. When we asked what they had sacrificed to focus on their brand, founders said, “income”, “friendship, family relationships, mental and physical health”, “time with children, time for myself”, and “everything”.
These demands are not simply pressure. They reflect the surrender of fundamental parts of life. But there is an upside that often goes unrecognised. Juggling a business alongside family, health and everything else gives female founders a sense of perspective and proportion. Having to balance makes you more balanced.
That balance shows up most clearly in how the founders handle people and team management. 53% find hiring and building a team the most challenging part of growing a business, and 53% said dealing with people kept them awake at night. This isn’t a lack of people management skills, it’s care and consideration for their teams. 47% said the hardest thing was letting people go who weren’t right, and 43% struggled with knowing when to hire senior talent. These are the worries of founders who take making the right choice seriously.
The same is true of delegation. When a business has lived entirely in a founder’s head, letting go is deeply personal: 71% said they were only moderately to not at all confident in letting go of control and delegating. Yet this is not reluctance to step aside. 65% have thought about succession, 26% are already planning it, and only 4% said they were concerned about letting someone else run their business. They think hard about when to delegate and when to step aside, because the business matters to them beyond their own role in it.
At Piper, we believe in building brand legends. The investment community obsesses over speed, growth curves and exit multiples. We prefer the word legend, because it’s about growing brands that endure. Brands are like living organisms: grown too slowly they lose their culture, grown too quickly they experience serious and sometimes terminal growth pains. It is no surprise that many female founders instinctively seek balance, not burnout. When 30% told us the conversation they would most value was “scaling without burning out”, they were describing exactly the kind of founder we want to back. Brand legends need to be built well; at the right pace, with care and balance.
Our thanks to everyone who took part in this survey. The founders and leaders who responded shared their time and their candour, and these pieces only scratch the surface of what they told us. We will run the survey again in 2027, and we would like it to grow. In the meantime, please share these insights. If anything here resonates, or you would like to talk through the findings with us, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch, hello@piper.co.uk.
1From money.co.uk analysis on female entrepreneurship in 2025
2Investing in Women Code Report 2026