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.
Fundraising came up again and again as one of the hardest parts of growing a business. 37% named it their biggest challenge, 53% said financial constraints were limiting their ability to scale, and 32% said not having the financial backing they need kept them awake at night. It would be easy to conclude that women simply find it hard to raise money. What founders told us suggests the opposite.
Let’s start with what these founders have already built. 66% of respondents’ businesses generate over £8m, half over £18m, and 74% are already scaling or established. These brands are not unproven ideas; they are successful. Yet formal capital has largely passed them by. 67% have self-funded, used a bank loan, or a mortgage, and 62% have raised from friends and family, while just 20% have received PE funding and 25% a VCT. Female founders running businesses of real scale are reaching for personal debt before institutional money.
The responses from the survey are clear that this isn’t due to a lack of ambition or capability. 76% said self-doubt only occasionally or never influences their decisions, and 78% still say their end goal is to build a business they can sell. But 82% said they were only moderately to not at all confident in raising money. Fundraising is the area where the female founders most often said their confidence is undermined.
From our own conversations with women over many decades, a common thread has been personal confidence. The responses to our survey showed patterns where confidence dips and rises. The majority reported being confident to extremely confident in driving growth and making high-stakes strategic decisions, but 43% felt least confident in financial forecasting and metrics, an area investors prioritise. This could explain a barrier to investment. It isn’t leadership strength; it is the disproportionate weight placed on a founder personally owning financial forecasting, a skill that in practice is usually a team capability rather than a prerequisite for great leadership.
Some of this could also come down to how leadership is rated. Investors often prioritise traditional traits: decisiveness, analytical rigour, and results orientation. The founders we surveyed describe themselves differently: 36% as enthusiastic and engaging, 32% as values driven and supportive. They build brands rooted in lived experience: 43% made a product to solve a problem they had experienced personally, and 74% started their brand after working in two or more businesses. 66% said that if they had to pick, they would call themselves a feeler over a thinker.
What the data reveals is not a gap in capability, but a gap in perception. These founders are scaling meaningful businesses by leading with empathy, conviction, and lived experience, qualities that build stronger products, loyal communities, and resilient cultures. Far from being a weakness, values-led and intuitive leadership is often what enables brands to navigate complexity and sustain growth. The issue isn’t women’s ambition or capability, but an investment environment that still expects a certain type of leadership and too often overlooks proven potential. Those who have raised recognise its value: 63% said their investors added meaningful support. The capability is there, and so is the scale. The opportunity, and it is a real one, is for investors to broaden the definition of what great leadership looks like.
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.
1 From money.co.uk analysis on female entrepreneurship in 2025
2 Investing in Women Code Report 2026