For women building AI startups, finding community has been the key to success

For Saumya Bhatnagar, being the only woman in a room is far from a novel experience. An engineer by training and currently the co-founder and chief product officer at AI sales rep startup Jeeva, she remembers being the sole girl in her high school's 170-person coding class — and that none of her male peers would sit next to her.

"I had to make space for myself, and there were plenty of micro and macro aggressions in the grand scheme of things that I had to talk my way through," she told Business Insider. "At the end of the day, it's a man's world in the VC, startups, and AI space."

Bhatnagar isn't alone in her journey. Although the number of women-founded startups has increased, less than 3% of venture capital funding went to female-only founding teams in 2022, according to PitchBook.

A handful of women who are well-known as leaders in the AI space — including "Godmother of AI" Fei Fei Li, Anthropic president and co-founder Daniela Amodei, and OpenAI's former chief technology officer Mira Murati. But others building startups report facing various gender-related obstacles to success, including bias in the fundraising process, limited mentorship opportunities, and difficulty building meaningful business relationships with men.

In the AI sector specifically, which has surged in popularity since the release of ChatGPT two years ago, the challenges for female founders are even more pronounced. AI continues to attract significant VC interest, but women in the space face additional barriers compared to their male counterparts, starting at the education level.

While a degree in engineering or computer science isn't a requirement for launching an AI company, it's often a prerequisite for techies building foundational models to tackle complex machine-learning problems. Women accounted for just 22% of AI and computer science PhD programs in the US in 2019, according to a Deloitte study.

Women in 2020 made up an estimated 26% of data and AI positions in the workforce, per a World Economic Forum report. And recent data from the UK shows that only about 4% of AI startups in the country have women founders.

Although Bhatnagar is among the small group of women in the space with advanced technical chops, she says she still notices the gender imbalance in the AI world — and that it, at times, has led to her feeling impostor syndrome and burnout.

Developing relationships with other women working in the AI space has become a vital lifeline, she said. An active member of online and in-person groups, including Women and AI and Women We Admire, Bhatnagar said that she's made connections that support her in navigating difficult business dynamics, connecting with female investors, and finding solace in shared experiences.

"Women are not comfortable asking for help, and there's this idea that perfectionism needs to be showcased at all times," she said. "Finding a community of women has helped me take risks and realize that I'm actually doing okay," she said.

Vivien Ho, a partner at early-stage fund Pear VC, has watched the meteoric rise of buzzy AI startups during the last two years and noticed that many are run by men, she said. But as a longtime community builder in the Bay Area tech scene, this didn't jive with what she was seeing on the ground. There were plenty of women interested in building AI companies, she said. Many just didn't know how to start.

This observation was the catalyst for the Female Founder Circles, a community for women engineers interested in building AI startups. Each FFC cycle welcomes a cohort of around 50 women for two months of programming that includes fireside chats with existing female AI founders, company-building workshops with Pear investment partners, and other in-person events designed to help women build meaningful relationships with one another, such as pitch competitions, spa days, and public speaking practice.

Demand for FFC has exploded, Ho said, with more than 500 women applying for the most recent cohort that kicked off last month. And the program has already been a success: more than 70% of participants end up incorporating their startups, and at least five women have matched with another female co-founder in their cohort, she said.

"Three of our FFC founders have already raised Series Bs, which is pretty incredible," Ho told BI. "We first meet them, and they're really shy, and then three years later, they're running a 100-person company and making eight figures. It's incredible to see how we can build a community that makes a difference."

As women in AI create opportunities that could help them succeed, their work parallels women in another once-white-hot subsector of the startup world: at the height of the crypto craze, female-led blockchain startups earned about 6.4% of venture dollars in the third quarter of 2022, according to data from Bitget.

Funding in the space has dropped off dramatically during the last two years, and women continue to struggle when it comes to connecting with investors and closing rounds, Forbes recently reported.

For Shreya Rajpal, Pear VC's FFC was one of the first times she felt genuine, positive support from the people around her. As a software engineer who cut her teeth in startups and on Apple's machine learning initiatives, she was accustomed to being the only woman whose work was judged with more scrutiny than that of her male coworkers.

"There are a lot of men who aren't very supportive, and being the only woman on a team means that they're often an undue level of attention on your work, so you stand out, for better or for worse," Rejpal told BI. "Pretty early on, it was obvious that I kind of needed to justify my space in the room a lot more compared to other folks."

Fast forward to today, and Rajpal is the CEO and co-founder of Guardrails AI, which builds risk and reliability systems for generative AI programs. As she's progressed in her career, she's made an effort to build community with other women in tech. It's work that takes significant time, but it's been "life changing" in terms of succeeding as a founder and well worth the effort, she said.

Guardrails earlier this year raised a $7.5 million seed funding round led by Zetta Venture Partners with participation from Pear, Bloomberg Beta, and GitHub Fund.

In addition to participating in bigger groups like FFC, Rajpal has sought out mentorship opportunities with other women in engineering, machine learning, and project management.

"I became friends with a woman who is five to six years older than me and in the industry for that much longer, doing the things that I wanted to do," she said. "Hearing from her and what worked for her, in terms of changing jobs and talking to her about how she made those decisions, was the stuff that ended up being really impactful for me."

Stephanie Guo, a partner at Sapphire Ventures based in San Francisco, is constantly iterating on community events for women interested in AI that strike the right balance between informational – think fireside chats and panel discussions – and informal ways for women to form connections that turn into mentor relationships.

These events aren't just for would-be founders: Guo says that while the number of female-funded AI startups can sometimes seem "abysmally small," she's encouraged by the number of women who hold leadership positions at AI startups, funds, and bigger companies.

"We're creating both the space to have dialogue, but also a networking opportunity," Guo told BI. "These relationships stick, and there are business opportunities that actually form from them."