Closing the Glaring Gap

Two things are true at once, and this page states both.

Women now start about half of all new businesses in the United States, own 40.6% of them, and are adding businesses at roughly twice the rate men are.^8,13 Florida is ahead of that national rate: 46.4% of Florida businesses are women-owned, which puts the state third in the country by count and second by employer firms.⁹

At the same time, all-women founding teams took 1.1% of American venture dollars in 2025.¹⁴ That number has barely moved in a decade.

The distance between those two facts is what Embarc Collective named the Glaring Gap. The rest of this page is about who is closing it — starting with the organizations a founder or a prospective investor can actually walk into.

Read those two columns together and a pattern shows up: the further a measure sits from institutional venture capital, the closer women are to parity. Business formation is at about half.⁸ Angel investing is at 39.1%.¹² Senior venture partner roles are at 20%.¹⁶ All-women teams' share of venture dollars is at 1.1%.¹⁴

That ordering is why a programme aimed at training investors rather than founders is a reasonable place to intervene, and it is the premise the Glaring Gap Summit has run on since 2020.¹ Over the ten years to 2024, venture deal count for all-female-founded companies grew at a 5.5% compound annual rate against 1.1% for all-male-founded ones — slow, but compounding in the right direction.²⁰

Florida is not an average state on this measure. It is one of the strongest.

46.4% of Florida businesses are women-owned — 1,393,979 of them, including 115,979 with employees — against 44.6% nationally on the identical measure.^9,10 Rank the states on that same table and Florida comes third for women-owned businesses overall and second for women-owned employer firms, behind only California; those ranks are derived from the profiles rather than printed in them.⁹

Three Florida metros placed in the national top ten for women-owned business clout in 2024: Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater fourth, Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach fifth, Jacksonville sixth. Tampa grew its women-owned firms 38.4% and their employment 50.2% over five years; Miami has the highest density of women-owned businesses in the country, at 5,205 per 10,000 women.¹¹

The venture picture is the harder half, and the contrast within a single year is the sharpest number on this page. In 2025, South Florida startups with at least one woman founder raised $478 million across 70 deals — 12% of the region's dollars — down from $806 million the year before, in a year when total South Florida startup funding rose 49%.²¹ All-women teams accounted for $82 million of it, about 2%.²¹

Two caveats worth carrying. Those metro rankings are from the 2025 edition, measuring 2024; in the 2026 edition no Florida state or metro appears in the top ten at all.¹¹ And Florida's ownership lead does not carry through to scale: 8.3% of women-owned Florida businesses have employees, against 16.7% of men-owned ones.⁹

The Glaring Gap started as a measurement problem. Embarc Collective launched the Glaring Gap Report in 2020 to establish what the gap between women and men actually was in Florida — in founding startups, in raising investment, and in writing cheques.¹ The Summit was the action attached to it: identify fifty women a year and train them to evaluate a startup investment.

Two Reports were published, in 2020 and 2021. The Summit has run every year since.^3,7

Embarc Collective runs the Glaring Gap, so its own record belongs on this page rather than in a footnote.

Fifty women have been trained per cohort every year since 2020, and the programme had passed 150 women across Florida by 2022 — the last year for which Embarc published a cumulative figure.^4,6 A Florida Senate funding request filed by Embarc records that 27% of its membership was female as of 2023.²² Its 2022 Impact Report records that nearly 67% of member programming speakers came from underrepresented backgrounds — a broader measure than gender, and worth reading as such.²³

Embarc has not published a breakdown of its coaching team by gender, or a portfolio-wide count of women-founded member companies, so neither appears here. Where a number is not public, this page leaves the space empty rather than filling it.

These are organizations whose stated purpose is backing women founders or training women investors — accelerators, funds, angel networks, university programmes and nonprofits. Every one was checked against its own website, and every pin was checked to fall inside the state it claims.

With two exceptions this list appears here and nowhere else on the site — it is a national reading list for a Florida founder or a prospective investor deciding where to apply, not a second directory competing with the Florida one. The two organizations that also hold a full record in the Florida directory are marked, and link through to it.

One absence is worth naming. Florida's twelve entries are all Women's Business Centers, chambers and membership communities — real support, and free at the point of use. We could not verify a single currently-operating, Florida-headquartered venture fund, angel network or accelerator dedicated to women founders. The Florida attempts we checked have either wound down or cannot be confirmed as active. That gap is the Glaring Gap in its most literal form, and it is why the Summit trains investors rather than founders.

If you are building in Florida, the nearest doors are the Florida ones — and the state's position is better than the national averages suggest.⁹

If you are thinking about writing cheques rather than raising them, that is where the numbers say the leverage is. Women are 39.1% of American angels but 20% of senior venture partners, and the Glaring Gap Summit exists to move the second number by training the first.^12,16

And if you are quoting any figure from this page, follow its footnote first. The measures here are not interchangeable: dollars are not deals, all-women teams are not women-inclusive teams, and employer firms are not all firms.