DIDI Gan’s mother built a textile manufacturing business while raising five children as a single parent.

Years later, Gan got an inkling of how that must have felt as she pitched her biosciences startup N&E Innovations to investors while pregnant. Support for women entrepreneurs has grown since her youth, but Gan believes the industry needs more role models like her mother.

South-east Asia’s tech industry remains male-dominated, although more capital is going towards startups with women in their founding teams. Startups with at least one female founder accounted for 18.3 per cent of private capital raised in 2023 – higher than the 12.6 per cent share the year before, said a DealStreetAsia report released on Mar 8.