Hyderabad: The city ranks sixth in the country after Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Delhi NCR, and Pune, not only in terms of the number of women-led startups but also in the total quantum of funding they have secured to date. Hyderabad has 531 startups with at least one woman as a co-founder, and these have garnered funding of around $417 million to date, according to data provided by Tracxn.
India’s Silicon Valley and startup capital, Bengaluru, leads the pack with 2,093 women-led startups and funding of $10.4 billion, followed by Mumbai with 1,753 startups ($3.9B), Delhi NCR with 1,354 startups ($8.8B), Delhi with 1,451 startups ($913.9M), and Pune with 544 startups ($707.9M), the ‘Tracxn: India Tech — Women-Led Startups Report’ stated.
The overall data for women-led startups in Telangana, provided exclusively by Tracxn to TOI, indicates that between 2019 and 2025, total funding by women-led startups peaked in the state during the years when the world was reeling under the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the overall funding raised by women-led startups in the state reached its highest point at $192.3 million in 2020, in terms of the number of funding rounds, 2021 saw the highest at 47 rounds but at a lower fundraise of $152.3 million.
From $52 million across 38 funding rounds in 2019, post the peaks in 2020 and 2021, funding for women-led startups in Telangana tapered off to $56.1 million in 2022 across 42 rounds, to $18.8 million across 26 rounds in 2023, with a slight increase to $20.1 million across 15 rounds in 2024. India houses over 7,000 active women-led startups that have collectively raised $26.4 billion in funding, with 2021 being the highest-funded year at $6.3 billion, the report said.
However, funding into tech startups co-led by women fell 25% to $1 billion in 2024 from $1.4 billion in 2023, indicating funding challenges. This funding downtrend was witnessed across geographical locations and sectors, it said. In 2025, even as women-led startups have raised $133.1 million so far, which is 13.58% of the total $980 million raised by all tech startups in the country, only one Telangana-based startup clocked a founding round of $115,079.
Discussing the overall growth of women-led startups in the country, Tracxn said only 28% or 2,900 of these 7,000-odd women-led startups have been funded. Of these, only 12.2% have moved to the Series-A stage, while only 2.3% have progressed to Series-C and beyond.
