Golden Seeds

In 2004, when a group of Wall Street women founded Golden Seeds, women represented 5 percent of all angel investors in the United States, and women-led companies received fewer than 3 percent of all startup funding. The founders of Golden Seeds did not regard these statistics as a diversity problem. They regarded them as a market inefficiency — one of the largest and most persistent in American private capital — and they built an institution designed to correct it systematically, at scale, over time.

Two decades later, Golden Seeds has invested more than $185 million in more than 250 companies led by women, through a national network of nearly 300 angel investors across nine chapters, including the United States' largest angel network investing exclusively in women-led startups. The portfolio companies have collectively raised well over $2 billion in total follow-on capital — a figure that speaks not to the charitable generosity of the network's investors but to the quality of the companies they identified and the credibility of the institutional signal that a Golden Seeds investment provides.

Co-CEOs and Managing Partners Loretta McCarthy and Jo Ann Corkran have led the firm for the better part of two decades, building it from a New York-based experiment into a multi-chapter national institution with chapters in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, New York, the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, and beyond. McCarthy's background in investment management and Corkran's in technology and entrepreneurship reflect the breadth of expertise the firm has brought to early-stage investing in healthcare, consumer products, enterprise technology, and a full range of sectors where women founders have historically been underrepresented in capital formation. The Center for Venture Research reported in 2023 that women now represent 46.7 percent of the angel market — up from 5 percent in 2004. Golden Seeds did not cause that change alone. But it was one of the institutions that built the proof of concept.