Spain’s startup ecosystem is booming: just last year, the combined enterprise value of the country’s startups exceeded €110 billion for the first time – doubling since 2020.
The country is now the fourth-largest European market by number of investment operations, home to more than 12,000 startups and 480 scaleups. Success stories such as Glovo, TravelPerk, Factorial and Cabify have further cemented its position on the European tech map.
On the surface, this paints a pretty picture. Yet beneath the momentum, a significant gap remains unaddressed.
Out of the 8,580 active companies that Spain’s tech ecosystem hosts – generating €14.8 billion in annual economic impact – only 17% of founders are women. The figure drops to just 10% in scaleups.
Across the wider European region, female founders raised €9.5 billion in 2025 – but all-female teams, representing 4% of funded startups, received just 1% of total investment. Deal count and cumulative value continued to fall from post-pandemic highs, and startups with only female founders are on track to miss the €1 billion mark for the first time since 2020.
Why the gap exists
Helena Torras, an independent board director at fragrance company Lucta, told Novobrief that the root of the gender gap is often less visible and more entrenched. Unconscious bias, she argued, is the main driving factor – so prevailing that she’s even recognised it in her own behaviour.
“I was literally applying the ‘promotion-prevention’ bias — asking men about gains and women about risks,” she said.
The male-dominated nature of the startup industry leads to a cycle in which this unconscious bias is perpetually reinforced. “Investors unconsciously look for founders who remind them of previous successes, or even of themselves,” Torras explained.
This results in a system where male investors instinctively dismiss startups that cater to women, such as those in FemTech.
At the earliest stages, where hard data is limited, these patterns become even more pronounced. Drawing from her own experience as an investor, Torras explained that when KPIs are thin, funders tend to lean on subjective evaluation. “This leads to pattern matching,” which in turn explains why investors rely on their unconscious biases when assessing whether to fund a new startup.
Meanwhile, Rosalia Mazza, founder of fintech media platform The Bright Minded, spoke to Novobrief about her experience as a female entrepreneur, arguing that women are often expected to prove far more before being taken seriously by investors:
“Every female founder I know tells the same story: getting funds is harder, the bar is higher, and they are often the only woman in the room,” she emphasised.
As a result, women who do receive funding are frequently expected to demonstrate stronger early results, broader networks, and greater visibility before investors are willing to back them.
Research from Yale School of Management, for instance, found that women entrepreneurs are less likely to receive VC funding than men with similar entrepreneurial histories, while a separate Columbia Business School study found that female-led ventures are disproportionately overlooked throughout the investment pipeline.
“Many women I know came to entrepreneurship because it was the only way to build something they could really consider meaningful,” Mazza explained. “Accepting funding means accepting dilution, opinions about your decisions, timelines that are not yours.”
In other words, women founders might deliberately avoid investor culture altogether because of the challenges.
Startup culture often rewards traits traditionally associated with male leadership – such as aggressive confidence and certainty – while women founderstend to approach leadership as more of “a responsibility than a power position,” Mazza said.
The present climate
Visibility is improving, however, according to Torras. “We see more female-led startups getting early-stage funding.”
This observation is backed by the numbers, with Spain being at the forefront of women-founded startups. In 2025, 12% of the startups were created by all-female teams, compared with an average of 10% across Europe – showing the country is edging ahead of its regional counterparts when it comes to closing the startup scene’s gender gap.
However, while Spain may be outperforming some of its European counterparts, the broader funding landscape reveals how difficult it remains for female founders to scale beyond the early stages.
Torras observed that while the ecosystem is beginning to recognise more female founders, “it still struggles to provide the large capital injections needed to scale them into unicorns.”
The gap is stark: in 2025, just five new European unicorns were female-founded, compared with 22 founded by men.
For Torras, the solution requires a shift in mindset as much as capital: “We need to move from seeing diversity as a nice choice to seeing it as a requirement for a successful business.”
As Spain’s startup ecosystem continues to expand, then, the debate is no longer simply about getting more women into the room, but about whether the culture of the room itself is willing to change.
