A decade ago, launching a technology company meant raising significant capital early, hiring engineers quickly, and spending months or even years building before heading to market. AI is rapidly compressing that timeline; Founders can now test ideas faster, launch products earlier, and prove demand with smaller teams and less upfront capital.
“The time is now for women in the AI era.”
“You can literally vibe code and build something from scratch that used to take millions of dollars,” serial investor and entrepreneur Michele Romanow told BetaKit.
For Romanow and Christina Fox, the CEO of TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario, a London-based accelerator and incubator, that shift is about more than productivity. They see an opening for women and other founders outside traditional venture capital circles to gain traction and attract more funding.
“The time is now for women in the AI era,” said Fox. “We bring instinct, influence, empathy, real human qualities that create a distinct moat for women-led companies and women investors in Canada. It’s an obvious standout advantage for women now, more than ever.”
Who gets seen, backed, and connected
A growing body of research suggests women-led companies often outperform their peers on revenue generation and capital efficiency, despite attracting only a fraction of available venture capital. According to BCG research, startups co-founded by women generate 10 percent more cumulative revenue over five years than their counterparts, and women-led companies return 78 cents per investment dollar, more than double the 31 cents from their male-led peers. Female-led companies also outperformed all-male founding teams by 63 percent.
“If investors are looking for their greatest ROI, they should be doubling down on women-led companies,” said Fox.
Yet the share of Canadian risk capital flowing to women founders still sits between two and three per cent. Why hasn’t the capital caught up?
Both leaders point to underlying issues: who gets seen, backed, and connected inside Canada’s venture ecosystem.
“If you know the right people, are in the right circles, and are in the right places, you have historically been able to access capital,” said Romanow.
She’s spent enough time in closed-door investor rooms to know the barriers are often subtler than people imagine. “There isn’t some anti-women agenda or intentional exclusion.”
Instead, investors are often weighing risks and concerns they may not say out loud. For women founders, those assumptions can sometimes drift into personal territory, including whether they may step away from the business or how their personal life could affect perceptions of their ability to run a company.
Founders may also underestimate how much fundraising comes down to simply talking to enough investors.
“It’s not about talking to two investors, it’s about talking to 100,” explained Romanow. “You get the best results when you run the widest search.”
Fox noted that venture capital has always been built around balancing risk against the possibility of outsized returns.
“Investors are risk-averse for the right reasons,” she said. “And also, they are the biggest risk takers and are willing to invest in a sector that founders are disrupting—they’re looking for massive, category-defining outcomes.”
The new founder pipeline
If AI is lowering the barriers to building companies, Fox believes it could also reshape where Canada’s next generation of founders comes from. She sees Southwestern Ontario as increasingly positioned for that moment, especially as investors search beyond oversaturated primary markets. London ranked fourth on CBRE’s Top Emerging Tech Markets in North America, and climbed 165 spots in StartupBlink’s latest Global Startup Ecosystem Index. Nationally, the city ranked 12th, ahead of Hamilton, Saint John, Winnipeg, and Fredericton.
“London is known to be Canada’s test-bed market,” Fox said, adding that women-led companies in Southwestern Ontario are building capital-efficient businesses with smaller rounds.
“You can literally vibe code and build something from scratch that used to take millions of dollars.”
Michele Romanow
For TechAlliance, the focus is less on mentorship alone and more on getting women founders investor-ready earlier, like its GROW Accelerator that’s focused on building networks, sharpening fundraising strategies, and connecting with capital sooner.
“We know that women-led companies are over-mentored and under-funded,” she said. “We’re flipping the script on that at TechAlliance.”
Both leaders believe the government has a role in unlocking more early-stage capital. Fox called for more matched funding for women-led startups at a time when Canadian seed rounds remain roughly 40 percent smaller than their US counterparts. Romanow pointed to British Columbia’s angel investor tax credits as one example of a policy designed to move more money into startups earlier.
Fundraising is also shaped by how founders learn to pitch ambition. In Silicon Valley, expectations are often far bigger than first-time founders realize, said Romanow. When she first pitched Clearco, the alternative funding platform she co-founded to extend capital to founders outside of traditional VC networks, she described it as “a bank for every contractor and founder in the United States.” The response? “It wasn’t big enough.”
That, she said, is the bigger shift founders need to embrace. “There are almost infinite reasons why someone can say no to giving you money. Your job is not to think like a beggar. It’s to position this as an opportunity and ask, ‘Do you want in?’”
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