Billionaire girls club: Why Southeast Asia needs more women investors
Closing the region's funding gap requires more women making investment decisions, not just more women launching startups.
The most iconic moment in the history of Shark Tank is when Aaron Krause, the inventor of Scrub Daddy, waltzed into the tank to pitch a highly engineered polymer foam sponge with a smiley-face design. The male investors dismissed it. Lori Greiner, the sole woman on the panel, did not. She understood the household economy in a way the men at that table simply did not, invested $200,000 for a 20% equity stake, and secured the show’s most successful deal in history. Scrub Daddy has since crossed $1.4 billion in lifetime sales. Lori made over $100 million dollars.
When women are absent from the pitching room, entire economies get written off. For Southeast Asia’s booming startup ecosystem, keeping the investors’ pool a boys’ club means the region is blindfolding itself to its next economic giants.
Southeast Asia does not need more women to pitch. It needs more women to write the checks.
The status quo: Funding is going down, not up
Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem raised over $13 billion in venture capital in 2025, yet women-led ventures are receiving the thinnest slivers of that pie. All-women founding teams secured just 21 equity funding rounds in 2025, accounting for only 4.6% of total deal volume and a mere 3.2% of total capital raised, while all-male teams captured 83.7% of deal value. There is an obvious ceiling, and it is calcifying.
The popular rebuttal is that there are simply not enough women founders in the pipeline. Women own approximately a quarter of small and medium enterprises across the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, which puts that argument to rest immediately. The sharper question to ask is who sits on the other side of the table deciding whether they are worth funding. Only 17.9% of investment decision-makers at Southeast Asia-headquartered venture firms are women, and that figure has barely moved since 2023. A pipeline cannot fix itself when the gatekeepers are almost uniformly male.
I. Women investors invest more in women founders
A 2023 study by INSEAD Knowledge found that women venture capitalists are twice as likely to fund female-led startups compared to their male counterparts. That statistic is worth sitting with. Doubling the probability of investment is a structural advantage. For a female founder navigating a funding environment where all-women teams secured only 3.2% of total capital in 2025, having a woman on the other side of the table is almost a lifeline.
The reason for this gap in investment behavior goes beyond individual sympathy or shared experience. Investors evaluate founders through a process called pattern-matching: they fund what looks like what they have funded before. Historically, the archetype of a “successful founder” is a young male technologist who dropped out of an elite university, and male investors have been replicating that archetype for decades. The result is a self-reinforcing loop. Male investors fund male founders, male founders build the reference cases, and the reference cases tell male investors what success looks like. Women never enter the pattern, so they never enter the portfolio.
Women investors break that loop. They carry a different set of reference points, different market intuitions, and crucially, a different ability to recognize value in sectors that male investors have historically dismissed. Lori Greiner did not invest in Scrub Daddy because of its smiley-face appearance. She invested because she understood the household economy at a level of granularity that no one else in the room possessed. The same logic applies to every women-led healthtech, femtech, consumer wellness, and financial inclusion startup in Southeast Asia that gets passed over at pitch day because the men around the table cannot map it onto a prior win. Women investors often offer a market intelligence upgrade.
The argument that female founders simply need to perform better collapses under the data. Female-founded ventures perform as well as male-founded ones when controlling for sector, market, experience, and hours worked. The performance record is established. The funding gap persists anyway, which means the variable that requires correction is not founder quality but investor composition. In venture capital, recognition is determined entirely by who holds the pen. That’s why women investors need to be at the forefront of the pitching room.
II. SEA’s venture capital’s “bro culture” is Economically costly
Southeast Asia’s VC ecosystem has a cultural problem it has not yet been honest enough to name. Among firms based in the region, the average women-to-men ratio in senior investment roles stands at 0.25, or one woman for every four men. That ratio means the person deciding which startups get funded, which founders get a second meeting, and which sectors get labeled “too niche” is almost always male. While that is a fact, it also has economic consequences.
Harvard Kennedy School research describes a hypermasculine “bro” culture in venture capital whose symptoms include extreme competitiveness, low psychological safety, a reliance on tight, insular networks, and a near-total absence of accountability around gender bias. For female founders, this culture functions like an invisible tax. Before they even deliver a pitch, they are already navigating an environment designed around the comfort of men. Research shows that female founders are evaluated through a gendered lens, assessed as higher-risk than equivalent male founders, and required to prove themselves to a standard their male counterparts are not held to. Due to this, female-founded teams have secured alarmingly low late-stage deals in the past two years across Southeast Asia.. This is because no one with the power to fund them chose to champion them.
The cost of this culture extends beyond the individual founders it chooses to sideline. When an ecosystem systematically defunds women-led companies, it is eliminating a category of economic actors that has proven its value. Globally, female-led businesses generate higher revenue per dollar invested and reinvest more in their communities. In Southeast Asia, where the household economy is vast and underserved by formal finance, defunding women-led ventures is a category error that the data has been flagging for years
The counterpoint that sometimes surfaces is that gender-lens investing will eventually correct the problem on its own, without requiring women to occupy the actual seats of power. That misunderstands how investment cultures change. A male-dominated firm that adds a gender-lens policy without adding women to its investment committee is hanging a sign on a door while keeping the door locked. Culture in venture capital flows from who is in the room. If bro culture is the disease, male monoculture in the partnership is the condition that allows it to thrive. Dismantling it requires presence, not just intention.
III. Gender-lens investing needs women investors to survive
Gender-lens investing has built a compelling business case. Private equity firms with at least one woman in a senior investment role have raised $29.36 billion across 72 funds since 2020, capturing 67.8% of PE capital raised in the region. All-male teams, by comparison, captured just 32.2%. Gender-diverse investment teams have built a track record that outperforms. The financial argument for including women in investment decision-making has already been written by the data.
But here is what that track record cannot do on its own: it cannot survive without women in the rooms where decisions are made. Gender-lens investing is a strategy that requires its practitioners to see what others miss, to identify the market opportunity in a women-led healthcare platform or a femtech startup that male pattern-matching writes off as niche. That kind of sight is not guaranteed by policy. It is cultivated by experience, by having operated in markets that male investors have never had to navigate, and by understanding the consumer behaviors that women-led businesses are built around.
Consider what happens when a fund adopts gender-lens principles without diversifying its investment team. The deal sourcing still runs through male networks. The due diligence still applies male-centric benchmarks of what traction looks like. The board seats still go to candidates who fit a profile the male partners recognize. Gender-lens investing without women investors is a framework without a practitioner. The strategy exists on paper, yes, but the judgment required to execute it faithfully is missing. Research on investor behavior shows that women VCs are twice as likely to fund female-led startups, precisely because they possess that judgment organically. To want the outcomes of gender-lens investing while refusing to build the investor base that makes those outcomes likely is a contradiction the data refuses to sustain.
Every check written by an investor is a vote for what the economy prioritizes next. The sectors that women build, such as consumer health, financial inclusion, caregiving technology, and education, form the infrastructure of Southeast Asia’s economic future, even when they are treated as peripheral by the investors who should be competing for them. Women will own 75% of global discretionary spend by 2028. The companies serving that market will be worth trillions. The investors who recognize that value early will have outsized returns. The investors who do not will be funding the equivalent of a room full of men who passed on Scrub Daddy.
IV. Economic empowerment requires women to control capital
Entrepreneurship alone cannot close the gender wealth gap. A woman can build the company, assemble the team, grow the revenue, and still find herself structurally excluded from the networks that decide who gets funded at scale. The ceiling in women’s economic participation sits at the capital table, where the decisions about who gets to grow are made by people who were never taught to see her potential.
Capital is power in the most literal sense available to an economy. It determines which ideas survive, which markets get served, and which founders build the companies that define the next decade. When women control a proportionate share of that capital, the decisions that flow from it shift. The sectors that get funded expand. The founders who get championed diversify. The reference cases that investors use to pattern-match begin to include women. The loop, finally, runs in a different direction.
This is why increasing the number of women investors is as urgent as increasing the number of women entrepreneurs. A female founder who clears every hurdle and builds a successful company without a single female investor in her cap table has proven that individual excellence can survive a hostile system. But she has not changed the system. Changing the system requires women on the investment side, women who can redirect capital, build new reference cases, and make the next generation of female founders marginally less likely to spend their best years pitching in rooms that do not believe in them.
V. Limits: women investors cannot do it alone
The case for more women investors is compelling, and the data that supports it is unambiguous. Intellectual honesty requires asking what this article does not resolve, because the structural barriers facing women in venture capital are not limited to the question of who writes the checks. They extend to who gets to build the career that eventually leads to writing them. Among Southeast Asia-based firms, 67.2% of regional venture investors still have no women in an investment decision-making role, a figure that has barely moved in three years despite mounting evidence that gender-diverse teams outperform. The persistence of that number points to a problem that sits upstream of the partner level: women are not entering the investment profession in sufficient numbers, and those who do are concentrated at junior levels with limited authority over final investment decisions. In many cases, women are the only female voice in predominantly male teams, with limited sway over investment decisions. Being present in a room and having the power to change its outcomes are two very different conditions, and conflating them flatters the progress that has been made.
The deeper problem is one of scale. Even where women investors exist and are actively championing female founders, female VCs do not yet control sufficient assets to continue investing in female-led firms as they scale. The concentration of women investors in early-stage and impact-focused funds means that female founders who clear the seed hurdle often encounter an all-male wall at Series A and beyond. That is precisely why all-women founding teams secured no late-stage deals across Southeast Asia in 2024 and 2025. The women investors who back them at the start do not have the fund size to follow through, and the male investors who do have that capacity remain unconvinced. According to a CrossBoundary analysis, Southeast Asia lags behind Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in adopting gender-lens investing at scale, despite having a larger and more developed startup ecosystem than either region. That gap is not explained by a lack of female founders or a shortage of financial instruments. It is explained by the absence of women at the senior levels of the funds, large enough to move the needle at the growth stage.
This matters for the article’s core argument because it means that calling for more women investors, without simultaneously addressing the structures that exclude women from investment careers in the first place, risks treating a systemic problem as though it has a compositional solution. More women at the table is necessary but not sufficient if those women remain outvoted, underfunded, or siloed in roles without full investment authority. Closing the gender finance gap requires a syndicated effort from investors, ecosystem builders, and policymakers working in parallel, not sequentially. The argument for more women investors is an argument for the transformation of the venture capital profession itself: in how investment careers are built, how fund managers are selected by LPs, how networks are accessed, and how the definition of a credible investor gets written and rewritten over time. Southeast Asia does not just need more women to enter the investment profession. It also needs the profession to change in ways that make women’s presence within it durable, powerful, and capable of compounding.
The Way Forward: The Philippines Is Already Moving
The Philippines, long regarded as one of Southeast Asia’s more gender-progressive economies, is beginning to translate that reputation into infrastructure. Backed by Investing in Women, an initiative of the Australian Government that catalyzes inclusive economic growth through women’s economic empowerment across Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the Philippines, two Philippine-based initiatives are doing the structural work that the market has consistently failed to do on its own.
Kerubin Capital, founded in 2021 with the support of Investing in Women and the Manila Angel Investors Network, is building the Gender-Smart Investing Map of the Philippines, which is the first and only initiative of its kind in Southeast Asia. At the helm is Tina di Cicco, whose work as a gender-lens investor and leader exemplifies exactly what the data prescribes: a practitioner who can read a market that male pattern-matching has systematically undervalued. Under her stewardship, Kerubin operates as a living ecosystem tool designed to make visible, in granular detail, exactly where capital flows and which women-led businesses are positioned to absorb it. The map aggregates founders, investors, accelerators, intermediaries, and policy bodies into a single intelligence layer, which turns what is an invisible market into a legible one. That matters because the gender financing gap in the Philippines persists partly as an information problem: capital that would move toward women-led businesses cannot find them, and businesses that deserve capital cannot find the investors equipped to evaluate them. In a region where gender-lens investing has lagged behind the rhetoric supporting it, Kerubin is building the connective tissue the ecosystem has always needed.
Meanwhile, ARQ SME BDC has launched SheSecure, a private debt fund developed under the leadership of female investor Abigail Tan, that does more than lend to women-led businesses. It financially rewards them for deepening their gender equity practices, offering financing of up to PHP 30 million per enterprise with interest incentives tied to measurable improvements in workplace gender equality. The instrument is designed for the most neglected segment of the Philippine economy: businesses with assets between PHP 35 million and PHP 100 million, the range where women’s ownership drops sharply from a majority to just 16%. SheSecure is proving that gender-smart capital structures are commercially viable. The “missing middle” of women-led businesses has gone unfunded because the right financial instruments were never built for it, which is a design failure, not a market one, and one that Abigail Tan’s work at ARQ is now actively correcting.
Investing in Women is the common thread behind both initiatives, and that is precisely a point to note. Without catalytic public funding willing to absorb first-loss risk and underwrite the cost of building new models, neither Kerubin Capital nor SheSecure would exist. The market did not produce these tools on its own. They required a female investor and an organization with a vision broad enough to see the structural problem and patient enough to fund the solution before it was profitable. That is what Investing in Women provides, and why its role in the Southeast Asian gender-investing ecosystem is foundational rather than supplementary.
Southeast Asia has enough women building extraordinary things. What it lacks is enough women and enough men who see and understand the data in the rooms where those things get funded. The billionaire girls’ club is not a fantasy. The only question is whether Southeast Asia is willing to build the investment ecosystem that gets us there.
This article reflects reporting and analysis made by The Southeast Asia Pacific Frontier. If you have additional context, a different take, or a perspective we’ve missed — whether you’re a researcher, a policy practitioner, or someone living with these realities on the ground — this is an evolving story and we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below or get in touch.
About Author
Samantha Reese Han is an undergraduate Political Science student of Adamson University whose advocacy work spans youth civic engagement, legal literacy, and women’s empowerment in entrepreneurship. Professionally, she is a builder operating in the intersection of policy, capital, and advocacy. She serves as an Events and Partnerships Intern for the Senate of the Philippines, a Venture Capital Intern for Kerubin Capital, and a Deputy Director for Justitia Lab currently. She loves seeing ideas transform into social impact.
