In the U.S., for example, only a fraction of venture capital has gone to solely female-founded startups. In fact, historical data points to a decline, with startups that only have female founders accounting for 0.8 percent as of 2026 as opposed to 1.8 percent in 2008, PitchBook data showed. The number goes significantly higher—as high as over 50 percent this year—if there were also male founders in the team.
It’s against this backdrop that the New York Fashion Tech Lab (NYFTL) featured its largest group of female-led tech startups to-date since it began more than a decade ago. This year the startups are pushing the envelope in business-to-business retail technology by applying AI across a wide range of applications from fraud detection in product returns to agents in charge of quality control.
Related Stories
GreyOrange Acquires Site Bionics, the Digital Twin Platform
How Rust Coast is Eliminating Apparel's Multimillion-Dollar Fit Problem
NYFTL is using a revised format this year. Instead of the traditional single-cohort model, it’s debuting “The Collective” with 11 tech startups which include Maeve AI, a co-pilot that turns disconnected data into actionable insights, TruRating, which provides consumer intelligence at the moment of purchase, and SeeMe Index, an identity measurement platform.
“I think it’s a great turnout,” Jackie Trebilcock, managing director at the tech lab, told Sourcing Journal during the event. “We’re doing this for the first time during New York Fashion Week ,” she said, noting that the lab typically hosts this NYFTL in June until it decided to launch “The Collective” at a time when the rest of the industry celebrates the best of fashion.
Source link
