Third, papers investigating gender gap in venture capital funding utilise only country-specific data - mostly from the United States. This does not allow cross-country comparisons, which is particularly restrictive when examining questions where cultural differences are potentially important. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that is able to link a rich set of socio-demographic characteristics of start-up founders to their performance and capital financing in a crosscountry setting. In particular, the work focuses on the effect of founders’ gender on the investors’ funding decisions. A micro-dataset called '‘Crunchbase” is used to characterise, analyse and explain the gender gap in funding of high-growth innovative start-ups across OECD, Colombia and BRICS. The sample used for this report contains 70 362 start-ups across the OECD, Colombia and BRICS economies.