Anu Duggal learned early how to confront a challenge. The founding partner of Female Founders Fund started her career as a consultant at McKinsey the week of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Then, she graduated business school weeks before the onset of the 2008 financial crisis and saw half of her class accept roles at soon-to-be-underwater Lehman Brothers. Her own job offer at Starwood was rescinded.
When Duggal had the idea to launch a venture firm that would invest in women in 2012, her timing finally came with a stroke of luck. After the initial challenges of raising a fund as a first-time manager—she took 700 meetings to raise $5.85 million—things were looking up. “I was lucky to start at a point in time when things were definitely on the upswing,” she remembers. “Every few months, we were seeing our companies raise a Series A or Series B. Market dynamics were very strong.”
But luck couldn’t last forever. Since late 2022, the venture market has struggled mightily. Exits crawled to a standstill and fundraising slowed to a trickle. In 2023, total deal value in the U.S. was less than half what it was in 2021 and exits hit a six-year low. 2024 saw some early signs of recovery, including higher deal activity, but it remains a very challenging environment, especially for emerging managers. Yet Duggal’s early experience overcoming challenges and the strategy she put in place as an underdog VC firm have helped her weather the storm.
“I thought that was the hard part and once you’re past that it gets easier,” she says of her first time raising a fund. “I’ve recognized that it’s always hard.”
A winding path
Duggal, 45, took a winding path to venture capital. She grew up around the world thanks to her father’s job in finance, which took her and her sister to Hong Kong, Manila, New York, and Tokyo; as an adult she’s also lived in London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, Shanghai, and Toronto.
While working her first full-time job at McKinsey, she moonlit in the kitchen of restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Indian since-closed restaurant Tabla. When McKinsey required her to move from New York to Massachusetts if she wanted to stay in her role, she quit, backpacked through Southeast Asia, and went to cooking school. (She still makes 50 jars of jam each summer and distributes them to coveted spots on her “jam list.”) When she was ready to return to the workforce, she found a role supporting corporate sales for Zagat, the restaurant guide. Then she said yes to an opportunity to move to Mumbai and open what was the city’s first wine bar, in collaboration with the wine brand Sula.
Then came business school and the Great Recession’s rescinded job offers. Duggal had learned about changing consumer behavior in the Indian market, and instead of diving into the struggling corporate world she cofounded and sold a luxury shopping platform called Exclusively. She worked for a short stint on a Bollywood dance platform; both experiences exposed her to the world of venture capital.
She started angel investing; her first check went to Loverly, a weddings platform. As she surveyed the startup landscape, she came up with a thesis: investing in women would deliver outsize returns.
Network effects
After 700 meetings, Duggal found enough LPs who agreed with thesis her to launch her own fund. But $5.85 million wasn’t enough to make a splash, she thought. “With $5.85 million of AUM, no one's going to really pay attention,” she thought. “But if we could build a brand through creating an ecosystem and creating content that really highlights female founders broadly, that is going to set us apart.”
A decade later, her fund is widely known for its annual events in New York and the Hamptons, which bring together well-known founders, many of whom are part of the Female Founders Fund portfolio. Her early checks went to direct-to-consumer brands, a reflection of that era of venture capital. There was Georgina Gooley’s Billie, the razor brand, which was acquired by Edgewell in 2021; the plus-size brand Eloquii, which sold to Walmart (and was later sold again, to FullBeauty Brands); as well as Jennifer Hyman’s Rent the Runway and Shan-Lyn Ma’s wedding platform Zola.
An early bet on women’s health tech helped the firm achieve a major milestone last year. CEO Kate Ryder’s women’s health unicorn Maven, which is a closely watched IPO candidate but hasn’t yet exited, allowed early investors to participate in a secondary sale. That put Female Founders Fund over the hurdle of returning its first fund. It was a “huge sigh of relief” to achieve that milestone, Duggal says. She’s proud, however, that other exits also helped that fund return its value. “It’s not just one company that has driven the returns,” she says. “We have multiple exits and success cases.” She shared that lesson in a reflection on 10 years of her fund: "mid-market acquisitions are worth celebrating," she wrote.
Today, Duggal is most interested in investing in digital health, beauty and personal care, and climate tech. In a politically volatile environment for startups in the women’s health space, Duggal says most of her firm’s portfolio isn’t affected—for a different reason. Maven is a category leader in women’s health, and Female Founders Fund’s early investment conflicted it out from investing in many other women’s health startups (the fund did back Oula, a midwife-driven maternity care company).
Duggal has directed some of her energy toward a bipartisan political group called the Women’s Health PAC that has tried to find consensus on issues other than abortion rights—like reimbursement rates for doctors performing women’s health procedures, which are typically lower than equivalent procedures for men.
Female Founders Fund is now on its third fund and has raised a total of $125 million from LPs including Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and Plexo Capital. Some of the founders in the firm’s portfolio have come back as investors in the firm’s more recent funds as well.
Duggal sees that as an example of her thesis coming to life. “We can build our own ecosystem for women,” she says.
Deal flow
Duggal sees signs the market is improving—even for a firm that proudly and loudly backs female founders, in an environment where many companies’ gender equality efforts have been a casualty of Trump’s anti-DEI agenda. In the first two months of 2025, the firm has closed two deals, one for a pet care business and another for an AI company—a higher volume deal flow than usual.
When making investments, Duggal looks for resilience in founders—just like she was forced to demonstrate as a young professional. “Founders with a little bit of a chip on their shoulder tend to be motivated in a different way,” she says—whether or not they have to make it through 700 meetings.
