Not Much Changes For Female Founders, Barcelona's Tech Scene, & Seed Series With Iris Choi

Welcome to the Crunchbase News Weekend Update. An email form of this post went out Saturday morning. Happy reading!

About 3 percent of global venture capital dollar volume went to female-founded companies.

That’s true for this quarter. And the three preceding.

So, we asked venture capitalists for an explanation. Read what they said in our most recent diversity quarterly report, then tweet me your thoughts and follow-up questions for the next quarter.

While funding going into female founders is underwhelming, contract management startups raised $170 million across two rounds; a Berlin-based mobile banking startup also raised $170 million for its Series D; and there was a new $35 million fund esports along with a new $850 million fund for software companies.

At the earlier stage of deals, healthtech startup Mahmee raised $3 million to help improve maternal and infant outcomes; WAVE, a meditation music app, raised $5.65 million; and Finix raised $17.5 million to help companies make payment processing in-house.

To learn more about the capitalists behind these deals, Gené Teare interviewed Iris Choi, a partner at Floodgate for the Seed Series. To portfolio founders she says, “we want to know the three things keeping you up at night, and then all of us are going to be in place to help you through those things.” As part of our Proust Goes Tech series, I chatted over black tea with Firefly’s CEO Kaan Gunay, and we were only distracted twice: when two cars sporting Firefly displays passed by.

We’ll end the week by stepping out of San Francisco. DouYou, a China-based private technology company focused on esports, priced its IPO in a region that is struggling to attract notable global VC investment. We also waded “through the fine threads of Catalan politics,” and how Barcelona’s startups are pushing forward despite the political challenges.

To 1.5 million more words with you all,

Natasha.

P.S. Here’s your tweet of the week: