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This 20-Year PayPal Veteran Takes on Venture Capital’s Gender Bias

Drawing on two decades at PayPal, Molly Huyck is betting that regulation crowdfunding can give women founders a route around a venture system still built on familiar networks and old assumptions.

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.

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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........

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