PayPal Veteran Molly Huyck’s Plan to Address Gender Bias in Venture Capital

Although women in the US launch nearly half (49 percent) of new businesses, they received only 2.1 percent of all venture capital in 2024. That number dropped to 1.1 percent by 2025 as investors focused funding on AI companies. Molly Huyck, who spent more than two decades at PayPal, sees that imbalance as a structural problem and is now trying to address it directly. Her focus shifted from PayPal’s broader mission of financial democracy to a specific mission: connecting historically underfunded female founders with everyday investors.

Huyck joined PayPal in 2003 and most recently served as senior director of global operations strategy, where he helped build and scale global operations from his location in Omaha, Neb. That experience navigating complex financial systems and global infrastructure informed the launch of her new venture earlier this month: AeQuitas Invest (AQi), a regulatory crowdfunded marketplace for businesses dedicated to women.

AQi allows everyday investors to make initial investments. The goal is to help women-founded companies grow into the types of exits typically associated with VC-backed firms, such as acquisitions or initial public offerings.

Reg CF, created under the 2012 JOBS Act, is a new investment framework that allows non-accredited investors to purchase equity in private startups through online platforms. Unlike traditional venture capital or private equity, which are largely restricted to institutional or high-net-worth investors, Reg CF lowers the barrier to entry and expands those who can participate in early stage investing.

The model has been growing. US Reg CF platforms raised $378.3 million last year, an 11 percent increase over the previous year. Although the number of campaigns fell by 29 percent to 1,006, more money went to a few companies, reflecting a broader trend of money in businesses. The largest platform, Wefunder, has raised nearly $110 million across campaigns by 2025.

Still, Huyck sees a gap within the ecosystem itself. She estimates that the largest Reg CF platforms—including Wefunder, StartEngine and Republic—average only about 6 percent of female founders launching campaigns. “It doesn’t make sense to me that half of the new businesses are started by women,” she told the Observer.

AQi is designed to change that. Its first venture, Blockchain Homes, is raising $300,000 to build a blockchain-verified property history platform similar to how Carfax tracks car histories, but applied to real estate.

Named after the Roman goddess of fairness and justice, Aequitas, the platform is already working with a pipeline of 20 female founders to prepare campaigns. That preparation includes putting together legal documents, completing accounting reviews and building marketing strategies—steps that Huyck knows from experience can make or break a fundraising effort. He aims to fund 50 founders in AQi’s first year.

In Reg CF, success is defined as whether a campaign reaches its fundraising goal; companies can reach $5 million under current rules. Of the 1,189 campaigns closed last year, nearly two-thirds reached their goals. Performance varies by company growth: startups generating at least $10 million in annual revenue had the lowest failure rate at 2 percent, while pre-profit startups had a failure rate of 7.1 percent. In AQi, if the company does not meet its minimum funding goal, investors’ money is returned.

Learning and learning on PayPal

Huyck’s time at PayPal planted the seeds of his career today. Through PayPal’s partnership with the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Women in Business Mentoring program, she mentored three female entrepreneurs and was exposed to the broader dynamics of gender inequality in the global economy.

In discussions with Blair, Huyck found that closing the economic gender gap could increase global GDP by 3 to 6 percent annually—the equivalent of $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion. However, progress was slow. “This division has not changed because the system has not changed,” said Huyck, pointing to the reliance of venture capital on matching patterns, the practice of supporting founders like those who have been successful. “They will look for the same person with the same education, often with the same network and from the same place, and usually male.”

At AQi, you try to redesign parts of that system instead of working around it. One important lesson from PayPal involves how to interact with regulators. As a registered brokerage, AQi operates under the supervision of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which set rules to protect investors and ensure transparency.

“Regulators can really help investors be honest, and they’re not just trying to find wrongdoing,” Huyck said. “At PayPal, we have been working hard, but AQi has built a strong relationship with them [these regulators] until they change their practices, because we give them feedback.”

Another lesson came from the limitations of legacy systems. “I remember the days when we couldn’t make a change [PayPal] product because of Maxcode,” he said. PayPal’s original code, written mostly by co-founder Max Levchin, was so centralized that only a few people could modify it, which limited product development. “No one else knew how to change it,” Huyck said.

Over two decades, Huyck has seen PayPal go through multiple ownership phases, including its time under eBay, and six different CEOs. While he credits that experience with teaching him how large organizations operate, he also identified what he wants to avoid, such as the constant re-organization and delays that come with iterating to new leadership.

“I had a male leader who deliberately brought many women to his table, that’s when I saw that women work, earn and work in a different way, and the results we got as a group were more than we expected,” said Huyck. “Taking the diversity theory and really bringing it to life was an ‘aha’ moment.”

AQi is not a quick fix for the gender funding gap. Reg CF investments tend to be longer-term and less liquid than public market investments. But Huyck believes the model creates a different kind of momentum—one that focuses on participation rather than choice.

“When people invest in businesses they believe in, something powerful happens,” he said. “They are not just investors but advocates, customers and community builders.”