Female-Founded Rocket Ships

Every year, our friend Jeff Bussgang, a general partner at Flybridge and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, publishes a “Rocket Ship Startup List” that is intended to be a starting point for “graduating students hungry to dive into the startup community around the world”. The list helps identify high-growth companies that might be a good fit for their skills and areas of interest, representing launching pads for their careers.

We thought that for many of us, a good fit might also include companies that have a female-founder, so with Jeff’s help, below we sorted the 2019 Rocket Ship list to select out the companies with female founders. As a “gender sort” can sometimes be imprecise based on the underlying data, we apologize in advance for any omissions.

The 2019 Rocket Ship list included approximately 500 companies across 14 geographies. Not surprisingly, the Bay Area had the most companies (132), followed by New York (90), Boston (60), China (42), LA (34), Israel (26), and 8 other cities with 5–15 companies each. Of the total, 14% are companies with a female founder. Given the funding percentages for female-founded companies over the last decade, this number, while depressing, is not a surprise and a core part of what motivated us to form XFactor Ventures.

What was more interesting, however, was to look at regional differences as shown below. If you are a female founder, Seattle, New York and LA are great places to build your company; Salt Lake City, London, and Israel: not so much.

This view is consistent with our anecdotal perspective at XFactor. We have long felt that New York and LA have vibrant and supportive female-founder communities and cultures. As two regions that are on the rise, they don’t have to overcome quite the same inertia that comes from 50 years of male-dominated founder and VC networks. Not surprisingly, when we formed XFactor 2 we added an entire investment team of 6 partners in LA, two new partners in NY, and a partner in Seattle. We look forward to being part of the growth of this list in the years to come!

The female-founded Rocket Ships, organized by geography, are below. If we missed a great company, let us know!