Twenty weeks’ pregnant with her second child, Heidi Holmes didn’t think she had a chance of getting into a highly prized $75,000 accelerator program to boost her online startup Mentorloop.

Holmes and her co-founder, Lucy Lloyd, didn’t qualify on two counts. The rules of Blackbird Ventures’ Startmate acceleration program say one of the co-founders should have technical expertise (neither could code) and they should be prepared to move from Melbourne to Sydney for the three-month program (impossible for Holmes with a baby on the way).

These are the sort of hurdles that can prove insurmountable for female entrepreneurs. Guidelines around investing in tech startups tend to have been written with a particular kind of founder in mind – and he generally can code.

In Australia, only one in four startups are led by women and 10% to 18% of venture-backed companies have a female founder.

Fortunately for Mentorloop, Startmate had already embarked on a strategy to improve the gender diversity within its portfolio and was prepared to set aside those two rules for Holmes and Lloyd.

Lloyd, who has a background in digital project management, is just about to finish her three months in Sydney. Holmes (who founded and sold the online recruitment company Adage) is preparing to come back into the office for three days a week after working from home for her daughter’s first 12 weeks.

“When it is a startup, you don’t necessarily have a maternity leave policy,” says Holmes, with a laugh. Mentorloop is an online portal that aims to change the way big business runs its mentoring programs.

The gender gap in startup investment is huge and is said to be getting worse. While more female-led companies are being funded by venture capital, US research shows that they are attracting less money on average.

The 16.8 % of companies with at least one female founder attracted an average $US4.5m last year, compared with $6.1m in 2015 and $5.1m in 2014, according to database PitchBook.

Accelerator programs such as Startmate and Westpac’s Reinventure have begun to address the barriers to entry for women, while female-focused programs include SheStarts and Springboard Enterprises.

The venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures’ Startmate invests $75,000 cash in return for 7.5% equity in the startup.

The founders spend three months in Sydney with Startmate mentors/investors, who include the founders of software company Atlassian (Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar) and the Blackbird managing director, Rick Baker. Then, there are two months in Silicon Valley to raise seed capital.

The vice-president of operations for Blackbird Ventures, Samantha Wong, says her company is aiming to increase the number of female-led startups in its portfolio.

Its own research shows that, although female-led companies were only 9% of Blackbird’s portfolio, they contributed to 20% of the value.

“If we widen the scope and include startups with female C-level executives, then those teams contribute 42% of the value yet are only 15% of the portfolio,” says Wong, who is also a partner in Startmate.

With Startmate investing in 15 companies a year, the aim is to get at least half of the companies to have at least one female founder.

To attract more female entrepreneurs to the program this year, Startmate redesigned its website to be less of a “dudefest”, recruited more female tech leaders as mentors, partnered with female tech organisations and actively lobbied women to apply.

Startmate would have met its 50% female target in this January’s intake of six companies but for one of the startups having a founder “break-up”. But the program had almost double the number of applications from female-led companies than the previous year.

Wong says Startmate realised some of its rules were inadvertently disqualifying female entrepreneurs. If Startmate hadn’t “revisited its thinking”, it would not have had a single female-led company in this year’s intake, she says.

She says while there is a perception that female entrepreneurs tend to launch into female-dominated industries, this is not necessarily the case.

One of Blackbird’s investments is into a space tech company, led by a female astrophysicist who is launching a low-orbit satellite network.

“I think we should not fall into the trap of thinking women only start businesses that men wouldn’t start,” she says. “That is an unconscious bias thing as well.”

Equally, more gender diversity means the fund is getting exposed to companies that it would not previously have considered, such as Flaunter, a fashion industry promotional site started by a former fashion publicist.

“We just don’t want companies to be gendered. Problems are problems [to be solved] and that is all we care about really.”

The innovation expert Sandy Plunkett spent 15 years working in Silicon Valley as a venture capitalist and business development executive and says that, when it comes to competing for investment, female founders must play to their strengths.

“Whatever works, you deploy,” says Plunkett, founder of independent consultancy Innovation Clearinghouse. “Not every man is an entrepreneur either. They are a rare breed. Only one out of 100 makes it big.”

She says women tend to want everything to be perfect before they look for funding, and try to be all-rounders, but this is not what venture capitalists want.

“If you are trying to get funded in a male-dominated funding industry, then wow them with one gigantic fact that makes you really different. All the other stuff, the VCs think they can put together over time.”

Plunkett also says that women tend to ask for less money than men but are commonly quizzed by venture capitalists about whether that amount may be too small. “If that money is too modest, they think you don’t understand the challenges of your business and they are not going to back you.”