  One of the main challenges of startups is to raise capital from investors.
For startup founders, it is therefore crucial to know whether investors have a
bias against women as startup founders and in which way startups face
disadvantages due to gender bias. Existing works on gender studies have mainly
analyzed the US market. In this paper, we aim to give a more comprehensive
picture of gender bias in early-stage startup funding. We examine European
startups listed on Crunchbase using Semantic Web technologies and analyze how
the share of female founders in a founding team affects the funding amount. We
find that the relative amount of female founders has a negative impact on the
funding raised. Furthermore, we observe that founder characteristics have an
effect on the funding raised based on the founders' gender. Moreover, we find
that gender bias in early-stage funding is less prevalent for serial founders
with entrepreneurial experience as female founders benefit three times more
than male founders from already having founded a startup. Overall, our study
suggests that gender bias exists and is worth to be considered in the context
of startup funding.
