Despite women in the U.S. launching nearly half (49 percent) of new businesses, they received just 2.1 percent of all venture capital funding in 2024. That figure dropped to 1.1 percent in 2025 as investors concentrated funding in A.I. companies. Molly Huyck, who spent more than two decades at PayPal, sees that imbalance as a structural problem and one she is now trying to address more directly. Her focus has shifted from PayPal’s broad goal of financial democratization to a specific mission: connecting historically underfunded women founders with everyday investors.
Huyck joined PayPal in 2003 and most recently served as senior director of global operations strategy, where she helped build and scale operations hubs around the world from her base 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 regulation crowdfunding (Reg CF) marketplace dedicated to women-founded businesses.
AQi allows everyday investors to invest in startups. The goal is to help women-founded companies grow to the kinds 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 relatively new investment framework that allows non-accredited investors to buy equity in private startups through online platforms. Unlike traditional venture capital or private equity, which are largely limited to institutional or high-net-worth investors, Reg CF lowers the barrier to entry and broadens who can participate in early-stage investing.
The model has been growing. U.S. Reg CF platforms raised $378.3 million last year, an 11 percent increase from the year prior. Although the number of campaigns declined by 29 percent to 1,006, more capital flowed into fewer companies, mirroring a broader trend in venture capital. The largest platform, Wefunder, raised nearly $110 million across campaigns in 2025.
Still, Huyck sees a gap within the ecosystem itself. She estimates that major Reg CF platforms—including Wefunder, StartEngine and Republic—average only about 6 percent women founders launching campaigns. “It just doesn’t make sense to me with half of the new businesses being started by women,” she told Observer.
AQi is designed to change that. Its first campaign, Blockchain Homes, is raising $300,000 to build a blockchain-verified property history platform—similar to how Carfax tracks vehicle 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 women founders to prepare campaigns. That preparation includes assembling legal documentation, completing accounting reviews and building marketing strategies—steps that Huyck knows from experience can make or break a fundraising effort. She aims to support 50 founders in AQi’s first year.
In Reg CF, success is defined by whether a campaign reaches its funding goal; companies can raise up to $5 million under current regulations. Of 1,189 campaigns that closed last year, about two-thirds met their targets. Performance varies by company maturity: startups generating at least $10 million in annual revenue had the lowest failure rate at 2 percent, while pre-revenue startups had a 7.1 percent failure rate. On AQi, if a company does not meet its minimum funding goal, investor funds are returned.
Learning and unlearning from PayPal
Huyck’s time at PayPal planted the seeds for her work today. Through PayPal’s partnership with the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Mentoring Women in Business program, she mentored three women entrepreneurs and was exposed to the broader dynamics of gender inequality in the global economy.
In conversations with Blair, Huyck learned that closing the economic gender gap could increase global GDP by 3 to 6 percent annually—equivalent to $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion. Yet progress has been slow. “This disparity hasn’t changed because the system hasn’t changed,” said Huyck, pointing to venture capital’s reliance on pattern matching, the tendency to fund founders who resemble those who have succeeded before. “They’re going to look for the same person with the same education, who usually has the same network and comes from a similar background, and is typically male.”
At AQi, she is trying to redesign parts of that system rather than work around it. One key lesson from PayPal involves how to engage with regulators. As a registered funding portal, AQi operates under oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which set rules to protect investors and ensure transparency.
“The regulators are really an enabler of trust for investors, and not just out there trying to find something wrong,” said Huyck. “At PayPal, we were very reactive, but AQi has built a strong relationship with [these regulators] to the point where they’re actually changing their processes, because we’re giving them feedback.”
Another lesson came from the limitations of legacy systems. “I remember days when we couldn’t make a change to the [PayPal] product because of Maxcode,” she said. Early PayPal code, largely written by co-founder Max Levchin, was so centralized that only a small number of people could modify it, slowing product development. “Nobody else knew how to change it,” said Huyck. “So I’m building a platform that’s scalable, sustainable, easy to adapt and change.”
Over two decades, Huyck saw PayPal evolve through multiple ownership phases, including its time under eBay, and through six different CEOs. While she credits that experience with teaching her how large organizations operate, she also identified what she wants to avoid, such as constant reorganizations and the delays that come with repeatedly onboarding new leadership.
“I had a male leader who intentionally brought more women to his table, and that’s where I really became aware that women work, lead and operate differently, and the results that we achieved as a team far exceeded expectations,” said Huyck. “Taking the theory of diversity and actually bringing it to life really was an ‘aha’ moment.”
AQi is not a quick fix for the gender funding gap. Reg CF investments are typically long-term and less liquid than public market investments. But Huyck believes the model creates a different kind of momentum—one rooted in participation rather than exclusivity.
“When people can invest in businesses they believe in, something powerful happens,” she said. “They don’t just become investors. They become advocates, customers and community builders.”
