For Saumya Bhatnagar, being the only woman in a room is far from a new experience. An engineer by training and currently co-founder and product director of the start-up Jeeva, an AI sales representative, she remembers being the only girl among the 170 people in her high school. coding course – and that none of her male peers would sit next to her.

“I had to make space for myself, and there were a lot of micro and macro attacks in the grand scheme of things that I had to speak out about,” she told Business Insider. “At the end of the day, it’s a man’s world in the field of venture capital, startups and AI.

Bhatnagar is not alone in her journey. Although the number of startups founded by women has increased, less than 3% of venture capital funding has gone to all-female founding teams in 2022, according to PitchBook.

A handful of women recognized as leaders in the field of AI, including “Godmother of AI” Fei Fei LiAnthropic President and Co-Founder Daniela Amodei and former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. But other startup founders say they face a variety of gender-related barriers to success, including bias in the fundraising process, limited mentoring opportunities and difficulty establishing meaningful business relationships with men.

In the AI ​​sector in particular, which has grown in popularity since the release of ChatGPT two years ago, the challenges for female founders are even more pronounced. AI continues to attract significant interest from venture capitalbut women in this space face additional barriers compared to their male counterparts, starting with education level.

While an engineering or computer science degree is not a requirement for starting an AI company, it is often a prerequisite for technicians who build foundational models to solve complex machine learning problems. Women made up just 22% of AI and computer science doctoral programs in the United States in 2019, according to a Deloitte study.

In 2020, women accounted for approximately 26% of data and AI-related positions in the workforce, according to a report from the World Economic Forum. And recent UK data shows that only about 4% of AI startups in the country have female founders.

Although Bhatnagar is one of a small group of women in the field with advanced technical skills, she says she still notices the gender imbalance in the AI ​​world – and that it has sometimes led her to feel the imposter syndrome and burnout.

Developing relationships with other women working in AI has become a vital lifeline, she said. An active member of online and in-person groups, including Women and AI And Women we admireBhatnagar said she made connections that helped her navigate difficult business dynamics, connect with female investors and find solace in shared experiences.

“Women aren’t comfortable asking for help, and there’s this idea that perfectionism needs to be displayed at all times,” she said. “Finding a community of women helped me take risks and realize that I’m OK,” she said.

Vivien Ho, a partner at seed fund Pear VC, has observed the meteoric rise of hot AI startups over the past two years and noticed that many of them are led by men, said she declared. But as a longtime community builder in the Bay Area tech scene, that didn’t match what she was seeing on the ground. Many women were interested in starting AI companies, she said. Many simply didn’t know where to start.

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

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

“Three of our FFC founders have already raised Series Bs, which is pretty incredible,” Ho told BI. “First we meet them, they’re very shy, and then three years later they’re running a 100-person business and making eight figures. It’s amazing how we can build a community that makes a difference.”

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

Funding in this area has fallen dramatically over the past two years, and women continue to struggle to connect with investors and close funding rounds. Forbes recently reported.

For Shreya Rajpal, Pear VC’s FFC was one of the first times she felt genuine and positive support from those around her. As a software engineer who cut her teeth at startups and on Apple’s machine learning initiatives, she was used to being the only woman whose work was judged more carefully than that of of his male colleagues.

“There are a lot of men who aren’t very supportive of you, and being the only woman on a team means they often pay undue attention to your work, so you stand out, for better or worse,” Rejpal says 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 people.”

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 progressed in her career, she strived to create community with other women in tech. It’s time-consuming work, but “life-changing” in terms of success as a founder and worth it, she said.

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

In addition to participating in larger groups like FFC, Rajpal sought mentoring opportunities with other women in engineering, machine learning, and project management.

“I became friends with a woman who is five or six years older than me and has been in the industry much longer, doing the things I wanted to do,” she said. “Hearing her talk about herself and what worked for her, in terms of changing jobs and talking to her about how she made those decisions, was what really made an impact for me.”

Stephanie Guo, a partner at San Francisco-based Sapphire Ventures, constantly hosts community events for women interested in AI that strike the right balance between information — think fireside chats and roundtables — and means informal opportunities for women to establish connections that develop into mentoring relationships.

These events aren’t just for aspiring founders: Guo says that while the number of female-funded AI startups can sometimes seem “extremely small,” she’s encouraged by the number of women holding leadership positions in AI startups, funds and projects. larger companies.

“We are creating both a space for dialogue, but also an opportunity for networking,” Guo told BI. “These relationships continue and business opportunities arise from them.”