Arctic Wolf Chief People Officer Kristin Dean in 2021 told Site Selection that Minnesota had the right talent base for the unicorn company’s global headquarters.
Photo courtesy of Arctic Wolf
During Women’s History Month it makes sense to pay attention to high-value firms with female founders.
Following recently released reports on the outlook for private equity and venture capital in the year ahead, that’s what Pitchbook is doing with “All In,” a new 26-page report on female-founded companies in the VC ecosystem (minus OpenAI deals). The report reveals the usual suspects and a few outliers in terms of company location.
The Bay Area always leads the way, even when its overall female-founded deal value dipped from a high of more than $20 billion in 2021 to just over $10 billion in 2023. Of the top 15 female-founded unicorns, nine of them are in the region. Last year saw the region’s deal value surge back up to nearly the record level of 2021. That’s a big proportion of the $38.8 billion in total funding of U.S. female-founded firms in 2024, a 27% rise from 2023’s total.
“The number of transactions contributing to this total declined by 13.1%, however, as VC deal activity continued to concentrate among a smaller population of companies,” Pitchbook reports. “Overall, female founders took home a smaller share of total US VC funding for the year in terms of both deal count and value. Sociopolitical tides are shifting with renewed action against diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) and ESG initiatives, which may impact the trajectory of founder demographics in the U.S.”
That said, female founders secured a record 24.3% of total U.S. VC exit count.
U.S. VC deal value ($B) for Female-Founded Companies by Top MSA
Graphs courtesy of PitchBook
Year over year, female-founder VC deal count was down in every region of the United States except “other territory,” which was up by 57.1% but only tallied 11 deals. The regions down by the least were the Mountain region (174 deals valued at over $1 billion) and the Southeast (263 deals value at $1.7 billion). Here’s how the top metros aligned by 2024 female founder deal count:
| Region | No. of 2024 Deals | ||
| Bay Area | 688 | ||
| New York | 465 | ||
| Boston | 213 | ||
| Los Angeles | 210 | ||
| Philadelphia | 90 | ||
| Miami | 82 | ||
| Seattle | 82 | ||
| Chicago | 81 | ||
| Austin | 73 | ||
| Washington, D.C. | 65 |
Among the more compelling graphs in the report is a figure comparing the compound annual growth rate of female-founded companies in VC deals over a 10-year period by top metro areas to overall CAGR for all VC deals in those regions. When all deals are examined, Philadelphia has the highest CAGR. Among female founders, Miami surpasses even the Bay Area with CAGR approaching 20%.
“Examining the past 10 years of annual deal counts reveals stronger CAGRs of 5.5% for all-female-founded companies and 3.8% for female-founded companies compared with 1.1% for all-male-founded companies,” Pitchbook reports.
Female-founded VC deals reaching unicorn status ($1 billion or more in value) peaked at 88 deals with a cumulative value of $18.8 billion in 2021. After dropping to 62 deals in 2022 and 25 deals (equivalent to 2019’s total) in 2023, the number of unicorns surged back up to 43 in 2024, with a cumulative value of $13.9 billion, nearly three times the value of the unicorn deals in 2023.
Pitchbook’s list of the Top 15 US female-founded unicorns by most recent post-money valuation includes five involved in the AI industry vertical and three whose activities include digital health. All the unicorn dates took place between 2018 and 2022, led by the January 2024 valuation of San Francisco-based AI and machine learning software firm Anthropic, founded by Daniela Amodei, at $19.4 billion. According to the Conway Projects Database, the company in 2023 occupied 230,000 sq. ft. in San Francisco. And it’s growing fast: Earlier this month Anthropic announced it had raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation.
Daniela Modei, Founder, Anthropic
Photo courtesy of Anthropic
The data get more intriguing the deeper you dig. Last month, Anthropic itself unveiled a new tool called the Anthropic Economic Index, which it called “an initiative aimed at understanding AI’s effects on labor markets and the economy over time.” The Index’s first report is based on millions of anonymized conversations on the company’s Claude.ai AI tool. Anthropic has open-sourced the dataset and also invited economists, policy experts, and other researchers to provide input on the Index. Meanwhile, companies using Claude are seeing record output. Among case studies cited in its new funding announcement, Anthropic says Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, has used Claude to reduce clinical study report writing from 12 weeks to 10 minutes.
Positioned at No. 13 among those top 15 unicorns is Arctic Wolf, a cybersecurity-focused software company based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, that was originally founded by Kim Tremblay in Sunnyvale, California. Arctic Wolf Senior Vice President of People (now Chief People Officer) Kristin Dean was interviewed by Site Selection’s Ron Starner for a story published four years ago this month.
“I think this state gets overlooked sometimes,” she told us then. “Minnesota has an immense population of software developers and security engineers.” In 2021, 210 of the company’s 700 people were located in Minnesota. Today it is thought to employ over 2,500 people.
Founded in the Bay Area with another main office in tech hotbed Waterloo, Ontario, the Arctic Wolf team looked at Utah and Waterloo as HQ options, Dean told Starner, “but with our leadership team based in Minnesota, this location made the most sense. We conducted the site search by asking, ‘Where is the most amount of talent?’ The answer is right here.”
