Surge in ‘bootstrapped startups’ defying drop-off in VC funding

Toronto – June 18, 2024

Web Summit founder and CEO Paddy Cosgrave has hailed a new generation of founders who have overcome the recent decline in VC funding to achieve success.

Speaking at Collision in Toronto, Paddy said a wave of “bootstrapped startups” – startups that don’t seek external funding to launch – was transforming the tech ecosystem.

“My expectation over the last number of years has been – as venture capital has begun to decline sharply, that is the deployment of venture capital, or VC, into startups – that the number of startups we would see getting started, not just attending Collision, but just being started in general, would begin to decline,” Paddy said.

“But actually, the opposite is happening. There is a very stark decoupling of venture capital and startups. The sort of dependency that emerged over the last decade seems to have broken down,” he added.

“What are the reasons for it? I don’t really know. Perhaps they’ll be discussed on some of these stages. But the number of bootstrapped startups that we have at Collision this year is extraordinary. And whilst there were always bootstrapped startups at our events in the past, the ratio is changing, and changing very dramatically.”

Paddy also noted a significant increase in female founders launching bootstrapped startups, which may have helped them navigate challenges within the VC funding model.

“A decade ago, the number of female-founded startups was less than 5 percent, and the change in a decade is just absolutely extraordinary,” said Paddy. “What we’re seeing out there, on the floor today and over the next three days, is that the number of bootstrapped startups founded by women is just going completely through the roof.”

The founder pointed out that Web Summit’s women in tech program supporting female founders had been hugely successful. “I’m very proud of our women in tech program at our events, which we’ve been running for almost a decade.”

Paddy also added that he believes the increase in female founders has come about despite the odds being stacked against them in the past: “If I’m to venture just a little thesis, I do think that there may have been – although it’s very difficult to prove – some degree of systemic bias in the deployment of venture capital towards men… I believe that was holding back a huge number of female entrepreneurs. But I’ll say no more.”

Paddy also paid tribute to those who had helped make Collision such a success, ahead of Web Summit taking over from Collision to host its first North American event in Vancouver next year, Web Summit Vancouver.

“This is our sixth year in [Toronto]. We came here in 2019 because of Mayor Tory and Sunil Sharma, and it is going to be our last… Next year, we’re launching, for those who don’t know, a new North American flagship event in Vancouver, in May 2025. The new event, Web Summit Vancouver, joins our international roster of events, and I’m very excited about the global tech community that we aim to gather next year in our new home in Vancouver,” said Paddy.

“It is Web Summit’s mission to connect people and ideas that change the world, and I believe that Web Summit’s role as a place for connection and community is more urgent than ever. Here in Toronto, and in cities across the globe, we’ve brought people together as a springboard to do remarkable things – to launch companies, find investors, unveil projects and advance new visions of the world. This week will be no different.”

Paddy’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on VC funding at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have traveled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:
● Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
● Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
● Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
● Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
● Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
● Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
● Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
● Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
● Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
● Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

All of our summaries will be published on the Web Summit Summary Service page.

For any questions about this or any other Web Summit Summaries content, please contact us at media@websummit.com.

About Web Summit: 

Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

This year alone, Web Summit has hosted sold-out events in Qatar, which welcomed more than 15,000 attendees, and in Rio, where more than 34,000 people took part. Our events have been supported by partners including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. 

Web Summit’s mission is to enable the meaningful connections that change the world. Web Summit also undertakes a range of initiatives to support diversity, equality and inclusion across the tech worlds, including Impact, women in tech, Amplify, our scholarship program, and our community partnerships.

Useful links

Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
About Web Summit: www.about.websummit.com