2,225 female founders told researchers what actually built their businesses, and the answer wasn’t funding. The Rise Report, released February 27, 2026, by Female Founders Rise and Barclays, found that 78% of women surveyed named human connection as the driving force behind their entrepreneurial journey.
The study is one of the largest grassroots research projects of its kind, capturing experiences from founders whose businesses collectively generate £1 billion in annual revenue and collecting 436,000 words of qualitative responses, according to Tech.eu’s coverage of the release. (Researchers literally counted nearly half a million words women had to say about building. God is in the details, and apparently so are these founders.)
The spiritual parallel writes itself, and we’ll get there, but the full data deserves its own moment first.
What the Data Says
When female founders described what helped them grow, The Rise Report found that 39% pointed to peer networks as the most effective form of support available to them. Mentorship and coaching came in at 32%. Their answers kept circling back to one another, not to capital or strategy alone.
Meanwhile, 27% of the founders surveyed by Female Founders Rise reported burnout and persistent self-doubt. The loneliness data did not spare founders who had scaled, either. Tech.eu’s coverage of the report notes that women running larger, more established businesses reported isolation at rates nearly identical to founders in their first year. The size of your operation offers no automatic protection from the weight of doing it without a real community around you.
On the funding side, The Rise Report found that 45% of respondents named capital access as their primary obstacle, and according to Tech.eu, women-led startups still receive a staggering 2% of all venture capital. Two percent. (I’ll give you a second.)
So female founders are out here building businesses that collectively generate billions in revenue, and the VC industry is still directing 98% of its money toward other directions. The gap between what women are producing and what women are being invested in remains enormous.
The Thing the Church Has Always Understood
Now, I need you to sit with something.
A number one success factor for female entrepreneurs, according to The Rise Report by Barclays and Female Founders Rise, is community. Belonging. People who will show up when things get heavy and celebrate when something finally breaks through. Women need women around them to build well.
The Church has been saying this for two thousand years.
Acts 2:44–45 describes the early believers as a group that was together, held everything in common, and cared for each other’s practical needs. They weren’t a motivational seminar crowd. They weren’t followers exchanging likes. They were a community that showed up in embodied, material, costly ways for one another. And the result? The movement spread in ways that outlasted every empire that tried to stop it.
Ecclesiastes 4:9–10 puts it plainly: “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor. When either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.”
Solomon wrote that thousands of years before Female Founders Rise commissioned a single survey. The data isn’t new. God put the research in the Scriptures a long time ago, and a lot of Christian women in business have been trying to go it alone anyway. (I include myself in this indictment.)
A Loneliness Problem Nobody Talks About Enough
The 27% burnout statistic from The Rise Report deserves its own paragraph because I want you to notice something. Female founders who are scaling, generating significant revenue, and building teams are still burning out and doubting themselves at rates we should find alarming. Success did not protect them from isolation. Growth did not automatically bring community.
A lot of women building businesses right now are doing so inside a church community that has no framework for what they’re carrying. Sunday service is wonderful. A small group studying a marriage book is wonderful. A prayer circle that stops short of asking how the Q2 numbers look, or whether your launch worked, or what it cost you emotionally to fire someone you really believed in… that’s a gap.
The Rise Report essentially described what entrepreneurial women need: spaces where both things are welcome. The spiritual and the strategic. The prayer and the profit-and-loss statement. Where someone can cry about a client situation and then someone else can pull out a notebook and say “okay, walk me through what happened.”
What Proverbs 31 Was Describing
The Proverbs 31 woman is often held up as a productivity icon, and I get it, the woman is clearly not idle. But read the chapter again with The Rise Report data in mind, and notice she does not operate alone. She has a household. She has people around her. She conducts business in relationship, not in a solo vacuum where she white-knuckles her way through every obstacle.
The pursuit of “doing it all” in total isolation is not a Proverbs 31 calling. Faithfulness to your calling includes building the kind of community that can actually hold what God is building through you.
What to Do with This
The practical application here isn’t complicated, but it does require you to be intentional.
Find your peer network before you need it, because the women in that 39%, per The Rise Report, who credited peer networks with driving their success did not find those networks in a crisis. They built them when things were okay, so there was somewhere to land when things got hard.
Be specific about what you need from community. Vague connection does not produce the outcomes The Rise Report describes. The founders who benefited most were in spaces where they could be specific about their challenges, get real feedback, and receive both encouragement and accountability.
And if you lead a ministry, a church community, or a women’s group, The Rise Report is essentially a brief for why entrepreneurial women need a seat at your table. Not as a trendy addition to your programming. As a theological response to the reality that isolation and burnout are diminishing women God has specifically called to build.
Read This Twice
The number one success factor for female founders, according to The Rise Report, is the same thing God designed the Church to be. That overlap is not a coincidence. When 78% of entrepreneurial women surveyed by Female Founders Rise say connection drove their journey, and Ecclesiastes 4 says two are better than one, and Acts 2 describes a community that shared everything and watched God multiply the results… we should probably stop treating community like a nice supplement to building and start treating it like the foundation.
You were not called to build alone. The data agrees. More importantly, so does Scripture. 🫶
Source: The Rise Report by Female Founders Rise and Barclays. Published February 27, 2026. Full report findings via Tech.eu.
