Although the number of women-owned businesses keeps growing, startups led by women continue to fall behind their male counterparts when it comes to raising venture funding.

That’s why former executive teamed up with , a veteran and marketing executive, to found , an -registered, funding portal.

The platform, also called AQi, gives women-led businesses — those that are at least 50% women-owned — a way to raise capital through , a securities framework aimed at opening up startup investing.

Launched in 2024, AQi seeks to help female entrepreneurs reach everyday investors by simplifying regulatory disclosures and business documentation. As a member of the , the platform has passed a rigorous federal vetting process and agrees to operate under strict oversight to protect investors and ensure transparency.

Crunchbase News recently spoke with Huyck and Konwinski to hear more about what led them to start AQi, why they think women don’t need to give up board seats early on, and how they want to help female entrepreneurs raise and hold on to more equity.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Crunchbase News: What is your platform’s mission and what led you to launch this company?

Huyck: I spent 21 years at PayPal, where I mentored women through a partnership with the . It was there I learned about the $5 trillion gap in global GDP resulting from women entrepreneurs lacking access to capital.

In the U.S., while women start nearly half of all businesses, they receive only 2% of venture capital and less than 20% of small business loans. I wanted to build an innovative system to solve this. I considered starting a fund, but many already exist. Instead, I wanted to create a crowdfunding platform exclusively for women, providing an additional avenue to raise money. The economic irony is that women entrepreneurs earn 78 cents for every dollar invested, compared to 31 cents for men. It simply didn’t make sense, and I wanted to build a system that truly enables women.

Konwinski: To add to that, we are a very distinct entity. We are not a broker-dealer; we are an SEC-registered and FINRA-member crowdfunding platform. Following the 2012 JOBS Act, Reg CF (Regulation Crowdfunding) was created to allow nonaccredited investors to invest in private, early-stage companies. There are about 50 active platforms in the U.S., but we are the only one founded by women, owned by women, and exclusively serving women-owned businesses.

Beyond just providing a neutral platform, we act as a “quarterback.” We help entrepreneurs navigate the process — whether they are just starting or ready for a “glow-up” — by providing access to accountants, lawyers and marketing firms. We are creating a community where women can get the resources they need to build their businesses without competing for attention in male-dominated tech circles.

How does your platform differ from sites like ?

Konwinski: Kickstarter and are for charitable gifting. We are not asking for charity; we are facilitating investments. We are on par with platforms like or , but our fee structure is more founder-friendly. On platforms like Kickstarter, you might only keep about 60% of the funds raised. Our success fee is only 6.5%. When investors invest in these businesses, they receive equity in return. Furthermore, there is a clear social return: Studies show that for every dollar a woman earns in her business, she creates significant economic benefit for her community and family.

How many businesses have you helped raise capital for thus far?

Huyck: We spent our first year building the technology and another six months on the rigorous SEC and FINRA registration process. We believe this high level of regulation is critical to ensuring investor trust. We currently have a pipeline of 20 businesses. We closed our first campaign earlier this month and have two more launching in the coming weeks.

Since Reg CF has a $5 million cap per 12-month period, how do you position yourselves for high-growth startups? And do you view this as a permanent alternative to traditional venture capital, or a bridge?

Huyck: I don’t see the VC space changing soon because it is heavily reliant on “pattern matching,” where investors look for people and paths that resemble previous successes. Until that breaks, women founders face significant barriers. Crowdfunding is a vital, viable alternative.

Konwinski: I would challenge the notion that $5 million isn’t enough. For many of the companies we work with, that is a strong runway for 18 to 24 months. Because Reg CF allows for rolling raises, a company can raise up to $5 million every 12 months. We see companies use this to reach a significant milestone and then potentially pursue a Series A later. We aren’t trying to be a broker-dealer for Series A deals. We are here for those who get “ghosted” by VCs or don’t want to leverage their homes to secure an SBA loan.

Does a distributed ownership structure with many unaccredited investors create a “messy” cap table that scares off traditional VCs?

Huyck: We utilize special-purpose vehicles. This consolidates all Reg CF investors into a single line item on the company’s cap table, often with a lead investor managing voting rights. This keeps the cap table clean.

Konwinski: Additionally, one of the greatest benefits of our model is that founders retain autonomy. VCs often demand board seats, veto rights and up to 20% equity. With us, founders usually give up only 5%-10% equity, allowing them to maintain control of the company they built from the ground up.

Without the pressure of a VC board, how do you help founders maintain operational discipline? And what do exit horizons look like?

Konwinski: Women entrepreneurs are natural “hustlers” who are inherently self-motivated. They are also excellent at collaborating and leveraging their community rather than operating with ego. Many of the founders we work with are Gen X, balancing business with family, and they have developed an incredible ability to multitask and execute.

Huyck: We also encourage founders to bring on advisers rather than giving up board seats too early. As for exit strategies, many women founders are mission-driven and haven’t historically been forced to consider an exit. We provide the guidance to help them think through those horizons — whether that’s acquisition or long-term growth — so they can make informed decisions rather than being forced into a timeline by traditional VC pressure.

Finally, how does your platform compare to other equity crowdfunding sites like Wefunder?

Konwinski: It is apples-to-apples in terms of our SEC/FINRA licensing. Where we differ is our value proposition: we provide a “concierge” service. On many larger platforms, you are processed through an AI-driven, automated checklist. We are building relationships, talking to our founders, and acting as their partner throughout the process.

Related reading:

• The Portion Of US VC Funding That Went To Female Founders Hit A New Peak In 2023, Thanks To Massive AI Deals
• How Female Founders Can Access Capital In A Tight VC Funding Market
• Is There A Gender Bias in Funding? Yes. Here’s How Female Founders Can Overcome

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And now, in the same surreal timeline, we’ve got signing — directing the and the to prioritize funding for AI-related research and grants.

You truly can’t make this stuff up and even if you could, you no longer have to.

To be clear: I’m not anti-technology. AI has a role to play in education. Personalized learning, intelligent tutoring systems, data-driven insights — these are powerful tools when used thoughtfully. But let’s not kid ourselves. We’re living through a moment where the Trump 2 administration is taking a DOGE chainsaw to the very foundations of public education. And instead of confronting that, we’re being told to get excited about chatbots in the classroom.

This isn’t leadership. It’s deflection.

Funding for future success

The truth is, AI is not the lifeline our education system needs. Certainly not right now. What we need — what we’ve needed for decades — is serious investment in teachers, classrooms, infrastructure and support services. And we’re getting the opposite.

The Trump administration is proposing deep cuts to key education programs, gutting federal support for public schools, and pushing policies that favor privatization and deregulation over student success. Amid all that, we’re supposed to believe that some AI-powered lesson plans are going to move the needle?

Please.

Let’s start with the obvious: AI doesn’t fix underfunded schools any more than A1 sauce would. You can’t put an algorithm into a building with no heat, no internet and no functioning restroom and expect a miracle. You can’t expect a teacher managing 35 kids on her own to suddenly have the time and training to integrate AI into daily lesson plans (if they even have the time to make one actual lesson plan a week). And you can’t tell communities that are already struggling to get basic resources that what they really need is machine-learning software.

This executive order assumes that what’s missing in American education is innovation. But we don’t have an innovation problem — we have a priorities problem. Our students aren’t falling behind because teachers aren’t tech-savvy enough. They’re falling behind because our country refuses to treat education like a public good.

What’s broken

We’ve normalized schools with outdated textbooks, overworked staff and dilapidated facilities. We’ve made it acceptable for teachers to buy their own supplies, for students to skip meals, and for mental health crises to go unanswered.

And now, in the middle of that, this administration wants to convince us that the real problem is that we’re not moving fast enough on AI.

Let’s also be honest about what AI in schools usually means. It doesn’t mean teachers getting sophisticated tools that make their jobs easier. It means more standardized testing, more data collection, more screen time and more surveillance, especially for kids in low-income communities.

It means feeding student information into systems built by private companies, often with little oversight or transparency. It means potentially outsourcing educational decisions to algorithms that don’t understand context, nuance (sidebar: do any of us get nuance anymore?) or humanity.

It’s a far cry from the glossy pitch the administration is selling.

Widening the digital divide

And let’s not ignore the inequity intentionally baked into all of this. AI-enhanced education requires reliable internet, up-to-date devices, tech-literate staff and digital infrastructure — things that affluent districts are more likely to have. For schools in underserved areas, this push risks widening the digital divide under the guise of modernization.

What’s being framed as progress is actually an elegant Trojan horse for deeper inequality. The schools that most need real, human-centered support are the least likely to benefit from this initiative.

It’s particularly galling that all this is being rolled out with a heavy dose of PR spin. The A1 comment might’ve been a gaffe, but it was also revealing. It showed just how deeply unserious this administration is about the reality on the ground in American schools. It was meant to sound cool, forward-thinking, maybe even meme-worthy. Instead, it became a symbol of how disconnected Trump’s appointee is from what’s actually happening in classrooms across the country.

What schools really need

Teachers aren’t asking for AI. They’re asking for manageable class sizes, fair pay, mental health resources and the ability to teach without being completely buried by bureaucracy. Students aren’t crying out for machine learning — they’re asking for support, stability and a system that sees them as more than test scores or data points. And parents aren’t begging for the latest edtech. They want to know their kids are safe, challenged and cared for at school.

AI is a tool. That’s it. It’s not a savior, it’s not a substitute, and it’s certainly not a replacement for public investment. If the Trump administration were serious about improving education, it would be fighting to expand school funding, not slash it. The administration would be making college more affordable, not reversing progress on student debt. It would be strengthening teacher pipelines, not weakening them. And it would be protecting public schools, not undermining them.

Instead, we get a photo op and a tech policy wrapped in buzzwords.

So yes, Secretary A1, AI has its place. But until we’re ready to fund schools like they matter, treat educators like professionals, and address the real, systemic issues at the heart of this crisis, all the artificial intelligence in the world won’t save us.

And that’s not artificial. That’s just reality.

is the chief strategy officer for . He holds a law degree and has taught entrepreneurship at and the , and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. His writing has been featured in , , , , , , , and many other publications. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize .

Related reading:

• Can We Please Still Have Nice Things That AI Hasn’t Touched?
• Stealing Ghibli: How AI Has Crossed The Line Into Creative Theft
• Who Owns Your Face? The Legal Fight for Identity In The Age of AI
• When Legal Tech Fails: The California Bar Exam Disaster And The Risks Of Blind Innovation

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Let’s jump right in.

BallotReady

and founded in 2014. Niemsczewski told me that the genesis of the Chicago-based company was born when she wanted to prepare herself for the midterm elections; however, she realized there were a lot of candidate names she didn’t recognize.

To solve that problem, she made a personal website to keep track of who was on the ballot. Eventually, she kept hearing people talk about not voting in certain races because they too did not feel informed enough about all the candidates.

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Niemsczewski then enlisted the help of Rosman, who had run for office herself, and approached the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

“We told them we wanted to create this voter’s guide and they gave us $400, which we were very happy about at the time,” she told Crunchbase News.

BallotReady started by making a guide for the Chicago election in 2015. By 2016, it had covered 12 states. Then in 2017, it covered all 50 states.

“It became a much bigger deal because there are more, larger races on the ballot and more attention paid,” she said.

So far, the pair have raised $2.4 million in funding and have 20 full-time employees (as well as more than 100 workers who are seasonal for the election cycle.) Its largest round closed in April and from investors such as and , among others.

“Most people don’t realize that in odd years, there are more candidates up for election,” Niemsczewski said. “So starting on Nov. 7, we’ll be researching those and also giving people information on what offices they can run for, such as eligibility requirements and salaries. There are so many uncontested races, especially at the local level, so people can use our info to figure out if they should run for office.”

Crowdpac

describes itself as “a partisan political crowdfunding startup using technology and data to help citizens engage in politics,” per its Crunchbase profile.

The San Francisco startup was formed in early 2014 by ,,, and. (Hilton and Hilder have since left the company, and is now a Fox News Channel ).

Jesse Thomas, senior vice president for strategy and marketing, relates how Hilton got the idea for the company as a former senior advisor to former Prime Minister David Cameron in the United Kingdom.

“He moved to California and was shocked at the impact of private, individual, and special interest money in the U.S., and he became interested in solving the problem of big money in American politics,” Thomas told Crunchbase News. “So he built a platform to empower everyday citizens[…] to keep people from getting discouraged and no longer wanting to participate in the political process.”

Co-founder Bonica pioneered a model for using campaign finance data to run a network analysis between donors and politicians. The same model was applied to helping people explore running for office and fundraising through the platform.

“We then had thousands of people creating campaigns, and start collecting pledges for a potential run for office,” Thomas said.

Today, he added, an “incredibly diverse slate of non-traditional candidates” use Crowdpac to power their campaigns – 41 percent are women; 20 percent are veterans; 38 percent are educators or professors, 12 percent are scientists, doctors or medical professionals and 29 percent are millennials and/or students.

Here are a few examples of congressional candidates who started fundraising early and explored a run for office with pledges on Crowdpac:

• Lauren Underwood, IL-14 (). A registered nurse with a pre-existing heart condition, Lauren decided to challenge her Representative, Republican Randy Hultgren (IL-14), after he broke his promise and voted for the GOP healthcare plan. With Crowdpac’s Start Running tool, she was able to collect financial pledges before declaring her candidacy. In a crowded seven-person primary, Lauren — as the only woman and the only person of color — took home 57% of the vote.
• Lori Trahan, MA-03 (). Lori Trahan is the former chief of staff to Rep. Marty Meehan and a CEO who has raised over $237K on Crowdpac. She did the majority of her fundraising on Crowdpac and is expected to win her race for MA-03.
• Oklahoma teachers running for office. Crowdpac powered the wave of teachers running for office after the #RedForEd teacher strikes in Oklahoma. , who hadn’t planned to announce her candidacy until she filed, set up a Crowdpac to build on the momentum and collect pledges of support after a video of her representative disrespecting teachers went viral. , a choir teacher from Norman, raised her filing fee in just a few days. And , a school counselor who was fed up with the way teachers were being treated, exceeded her fundraising goal for State Senate in a matter of weeks.

ePluribus

While students at Stanford University, and his brother, , founded in 2016 in the middle of the presidential elections.

“We couldn’t believe how hard it was to get in touch with decision-makers in the government,” he told Crunchbase News. “We felt powerless in a system where our voices were not being heard and realized that our peers felt exactly the same.”

It took the pair—who hail from the Midwest—two years to build out a portal to help people build their “civic identity” and connect with their representatives and elected officials.

The company’s mission is to “fix politics” and to help Americans to be heard. Since ePluribus’s founding, the brothers have raised just over $930,000 through a combination of grants, crowdfunding, and equity financing.

The brothers are starting their closed beta “and are rapidly growing a waitlist for the initial product release,” Aidan McCarty wrote via email.

“ePluribus will ultimately become the portal to your civic ID. When dealing with government, it is paramount that they know who you are,” he explained, pointing out as an example .

An independent investigation found that of those comments were fake or duplicate, McCarty said.

“Real people with real concerns are being drowned out by bots, hackers, and astroturf firms that game the system for their own benefit,” he told Crunchbase News.

ePluribus’s goal is to attack the problem “head-on” by verifying civic information online and giving people complete control over their own data.

“This will help you break through to your elected officials like never before,” McCarty added. “We are bringing democracy into the 21st century and connecting people with their representatives is just the beginning.”

Voatz

was founded in 2015 by Carnegie Mellon grad , who had grown up in India during a time of significant political strife. They were turned off of politics in general and moved to the US, ultimately pursuing careers in tech, according to Hilary Braseth – director of product design and communications.

But then they came up with the idea of people voting with their smartphones and created an app to allow for it. Today, Voatz is “a mobile election voting platform, secured via smart biometrics, real-time ID verification and the blockchain for irrefutability,” per its Crunchbase profile.

The pair unveiled the platform at SXSW in 2015, and won the Hackathon with their idea of “wanting to make voting as safe and available as possible.”

They’ve since run about 33 elections, mostly working with major state political parties in Massachusetts and a few other states, as well as in local towns, cities, and universities. It’s currently working on to allow people who are, for example, out of the country to vote from their smartphones.

There are limitations. The technology is currently only compatible with certain security specifications that its system requires, according to Braseth. For example, many Android devices do not have the necessary specifications to operate with Voatz’s platform.

The company also aims to leverage the biometrics capability of a smartphone—either touch ID or face ID. It also incorporates blockchain technology.

“Once a vote is cast, it is stored and logged on a blockchain network,” Braseth explains. “So there is an anonymized, untampered record of the vote.”

Voatz currently has 14 employees out of Boston and has so far raised $2.2 million from investors such as and .

The company has its fair share of critics, even being called “” by software developer Buzz Anderson.

But Braseth believes that’s to be expected.

“I think election security is one of the critical points of contention of our time,” she told Crunchbase News. “And necessarily so. No system is 100 percent secure, paper included, so we take the perspective that we can’t sit idly waiting for the system to become secure itself. We do believe there’s been very little innovation in this space in past few decades, especially keeping in mind demographic shifts over time. But there’s a responsible way to pursue a new technology and that’s with baby steps.”

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