Why only 25% of startup founders in Colombia are women

In Colombia, only 25% of startup founders are women, and that figure hasn’t moved in the last three years. That’s according to Ana Mayorga, who leads the startup ecosystem practice at KPMG and is behind the Colombia Tech Report, in the latest conversation on The Seat, the podcast we record in a car at Startus.

A gap that lack of interest alone doesn’t explain

The first reaction to a number like that is usually to push for visibility: more talks, more panels, more success stories. Ana is clear about it: that helps, but it doesn’t get at the root of the problem. The gap opens long before anyone decides to start a company. In Colombia, only 23% of STEM graduates (science, technology, engineering and math) are women, and that number decides from the outset who even reaches the starting line for building a tech company.

There is also a psychological mechanism that reinforces the gap without anyone choosing it on purpose: people tend to connect with those who look like them. When most of the founders, investors and mentors in an ecosystem are men, that affinity bias ends up reproducing the same makeup, one funding round after another.

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The Colombia Tech Report: a compass, not just a ranking

The gender gap is one of the findings of the Colombia Tech Report, the annual study Ana coordinates at KPMG to map the real state of the country’s startup ecosystem. This year the report placed Colombia 35th in the global ranking of tech ecosystems, driven mainly by the strength of its community and its level of activity rather than by the amount of capital available.

Another figure from the report shows where the ecosystem is maturing: 90% of Colombian startups today are B2B, and traction (real users, real revenue) has become the number one criterion investors use to decide where to place their bets, ahead of a good idea or a charismatic team.

Bogotá dominates, but the ecosystem is on the move

46% of the country’s startups are in Bogotá, the city with the highest concentration, although Medellín has the highest density of startups per capita. Cali, for its part, keeps growing thanks to local initiatives that support entrepreneurship. The ecosystem still leans heavily on the capital, but it is no longer an exclusively Bogotá phenomenon.

That regional concentration sits alongside a bigger constraint: access to capital. Latin America as a whole raises barely 1% of the venture capital raised in the United States, and a huge share of that US capital (68%) stays in California alone. For Colombian startups, that means competing for a very small slice of capital that is also concentrated on the other side of the world.

What can the ecosystem do beyond visibility?

Ana’s answer to that question isn’t a campaign or a one-off event: it’s working on the foundation. More girls in STEM programs from school onward, more women in investment roles (not only as founders, but also deciding what gets funded) and real, sustained mentorship, not just symbolic support. These are interventions that take years to show results, but they are the only ones that change the underlying number, not just the conversation about it.

The next guest on The Seat

Every episode of The Seat ends with the same question: who would you like to see in the seat on the next episode? Ana chose Valentina Agudelo, founder of Salva, a health hardware startup, for her steady work beyond the noise and the marketing.