MENA Female Founders Raise Just 0.14% of Regional Venture Funding
Female-founded startups in the Middle East and North Africa captured only $2.5 million of the $1.7 billion in venture capital deployed across 242 deals in the first half of 2026, according to Wamda data, even as women own a majority of small businesses in the region.
Female-founded startups in the Middle East and North Africa captured just $2.5 million of the $1.7 billion in venture capital that flowed into the region during the first half of 2026, according to data from the tech accelerator Wamda. That amounts to 0.14% of total funding across 242 rounds, while male-founded companies raised $1.6 billion across 213 deals.
The gap is not a single-quarter anomaly. Wamda's aggregate figures show that female-founded and mixed-gender founding teams accounted for less than 4% of all equity transactions deployed across the Gulf Cooperation Council between 2019 and 2025, even as the region's startup ecosystem produced a string of unicorns and drew growing international attention.
The disparity stands out because women are launching businesses across the region at a rapid clip. A 2025 Global Entrepreneur Survey conducted by GoDaddy found that 51% of surveyed small businesses in MENA are owned by women, and 63% of those were founded within the past five years. Abu Dhabi alone issued 3,058 new business licenses to Emirati women in the first half of 2026, underscoring their expanding role in the emirate's economy.
Industry figures point to the investor side of the table as a central cause. Lucy Chow, a limited partner at the U.K.-based venture firm Pact whose remit extends to MENA, said Gulf investor networks remain heavily male-dominated, particularly at the decision-making level. «That matters because deal flow follows networks,» said Chow, who also serves as secretary general of the UAE office of the World Business Angels Investment Forum. «I've been saying for years that we need more female check writers, but men have to help solve this too, by actively backing deserving female founders.»
Basil Moftah, managing partner at the Dubai-based venture secondaries asset manager Key Capital, echoed that assessment. He said the venture industry both regionally and globally is dominated by male general partners, and that while most people would say they are not biased, «surely there is a bias in there.» Moftah added that it is hard to ignore the impact that has on funding outcomes.
Data from the Founders Forum Group, a U.K.-headquartered organization supporting entrepreneurs worldwide, illustrates how much investor composition matters. Venture firms with at least one female partner are 2.3 times more likely to invest in female founders, and firms where women make up at least 30% of partners invest 4.7 times more in female-founded companies than all-male firms. Female angel investors direct roughly 35% of their investments to female founders, compared with 13% for male angels.
In the absence of institutional capital, many women have turned to bootstrapping. Chow said female founders frequently self-fund by leveraging alternative personal income streams, and she cited a Mastercard study published last year showing that 56% of women entrepreneurs in the UAE run a side hustle to achieve financial independence and bankroll early business concepts. «Founders are resourceful and patch together funding, but non-traditional capital won't replace VC when it comes to scaling,» she said.
Sophie Smith, founder and CEO of the UAE-based Nabta Health, the first dedicated platform for women's preventive healthcare in MENA, described how she worked around the shortage of backers. When Nabta began raising its seed round in 2021, it set up a special purpose vehicle to accept smaller tickets of $1,000 or more from angel investors. After searching publicly available lists for female angels, Smith and a group of friends founded 2022 Female Angels to identify and publicly list 2,022 female angel investors across the region. The team now runs workshops and bootcamps to train women as angel investors and manages a list of about 350 active angels, 44 of whom are female. Last November, Nabta Health closed a $2 million pre-Series A round, bringing its total funding to $4.5 million.
Other efforts include Women Spark, founded in Saudi Arabia by Deemah AlYahya, which focuses on training, mentoring and facilitating angel investments into female tech innovators. Chow argues the region should treat the imbalance as a capital allocation problem rather than only a founder problem, calling for more women angels, limited partners and investment committee seats, alongside government measures that encourage capital to flow. The lack of major exits among regional female startups has created a catch-22: investors need success stories to unlock capital, but capital is needed to create those success stories. In the meantime, many founders rely on public innovation grants from entities such as Dubai SME and Abu Dhabi's Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development to bridge the gaps between equity rounds.
