W35: The door nobody opened

W35: The door nobody opened

by Sofia Correia de Sousa, co-founder at W35 – Young Women Founder’s Community.

I was in my first year of University when I decided I wanted to build a startup.

I had the idea. I had the plan. What I didn’t have was a room to walk into.

No community, no mentor who’d been there, no ecosystem that saw me as someone worth betting on, no support from teachers, no open doors. So the idea stayed on paper.

A few years later, another startup built almost exactly the same thing. Two years after that, I ended up helping them grow, a product validated at scale and an investment round supported.

The idea was right. The timing was right. The only thing missing was someone opening the door for the 18-year-old me.

Maybe I would have failed. Probably, even. But I would have failed earlier. Learned faster. Built sooner.

I don’t tell this story to complain. I tell it because it isn’t unique. I’m not the only one. It is, in fact, the rule.

The European reality

In Europe, women-led startups captured just 12% of all venture capital between 2020 and 2025. That’s the figure from the European Commission’s own landmark study. Not a gender advocacy report. The Commission.

For founding teams made up entirely of women, the number is worse. In 2024, all-female founding teams raised 2.3% of global VC. And only around 9% of women founders start a company before the age of 25. The earlier you are, the less the ecosystem sees you.

What makes this harder to swallow is where the drop happens. At seed stage, women founders hold their own. The pipeline looks almost reasonable. Then Series A comes. The room changes. The introductions dry up. The pattern matching kicks in. And the numbers fall off a cliff.

This is what researchers call the leaky pipeline. I call it the moment when the ecosystem decides, quietly, who it was really built for.

It is not a pipeline problem. It is a power problem. Only 16% of General Partners at European VC firms are women. They collectively manage 9% of assets under management. The people writing the cheques are not representative of the founders they are supposed to back. That is not an accident. It is a structure.

And yet. Women-led startups generate twice the returns per dollar invested.

The ecosystem is not just being unfair. It is leaving money on the table.

The mentorship problem nobody names

There is no shortage of mentorship for women founders. Events, programmes, panels, office hours. The ecosystem has convinced itself it is trying.

But there is a difference between mentorship and relevant mentorship.

The operator who scaled a B2B SaaS in London in 2014 cannot tell you what it feels like to raise a pre-seed round as a 26-year-old woman in Porto today. The advice is well-meaning. The context is missing. And context is everything.

What young women founders actually need is access to people who have been precisely where they are. Who made the mistake two years ago, not twenty. Who can say “I know that investor, and here’s what he responds to” instead of “believe in yourself and the money will follow.”

Warm intros. Honest feedback. Rooms where the right conversations happen before the pitch deck is even ready.

That is the gap. Not the willingness to help. The specificity of it.

Why W35 exists

Last November, Ana, Beatriz and I were having a conversation, the kind where someone says out loud what everyone has been thinking. “Where are the communities for women founders?” and more specifically “Where are the communities for young women founders?” Not the panels. Not the networking events with a gender filter. The real thing.

We couldn’t find it. So we built it.

W35 is a curated community for first-time and young women founders across every stage. Built around intimate gatherings, relevant mentorship, and the kind of access that used to be gatekept. We are not trying to fix the ecosystem by shouting at it. We are building the room that should have always existed.

The 18-year-old who has the idea and the plan but not the door to walk through. She deserves better than waiting twelve years to find out she was right.

If you are building something, or know someone who is, find us at w35.org.