When Matt Barnard set out to build DayOneLead, a platform that tracks newly registered businesses across the United States, he did not expect to become a chronicler of the sheconomy. Yet the data his company collects has produced one of the clearest pictures yet of how quickly women are reshaping American small-business formation.
Nearly 40 percent and climbing
DayOneLead ingests new business filings from state registries every day and enriches each record with verified owner contact information. Analyzing a random sample of approximately 45,000 Florida limited liability company filings recorded between 2022 and early 2026, Barnard's team found that women now account for nearly 40 percent of all new LLC filings in the state, up from roughly 30 percent in 2022.
That ten-percentage-point shift is among the largest movements the platform has captured for any founder cohort. Applied to Florida's annual baseline of roughly 200,000 new filings, it implies about 88,000 women-founded LLCs in 2026, up from about 60,000 four years earlier. In practical terms, that is roughly 77 additional women-founded businesses registered every single day compared with 2022.
Where the growth is
The growth is concentrated in service sectors. Within the sample, women made up the majority of new founders in beauty (82 percent), healthcare services (69 percent), cleaning services (65 percent), broader healthcare (56 percent), and nonprofit organizations (54 percent). They remained a smaller share in the trades, including transportation, contracting, and construction. The pattern suggests the surge has been driven by service-sector entrepreneurship rather than entry into historically male-dominated fields.
Data the moment it happens
For Barnard, the finding is a byproduct of a larger mission: making the formation of new businesses visible the moment it happens. DayOneLead classifies each filing using artificial intelligence, including a model that estimates whether the registered owner's name is most likely male or female. Aggregated across years, those labels reveal trends that traditional economic data, often reported on a long lag, cannot surface in real time.
"The women-founder story is one of the most striking trends in our data," Barnard says. "It is happening right now, and it is accelerating." If the current trajectory holds, he notes, women could account for a majority of new Florida LLC filings before the end of the decade.
Barnard sees the research as an early example of what daily, comprehensive business-formation data can reveal about the economy. As DayOneLead expands beyond Florida into additional states, he expects the same lens to surface comparable shifts nationwide, offering founders, journalists, and policymakers a real-time view of who is building, and where.
Matt Barnard is the founder of DayOneLead, a business-intelligence platform that tracks newly registered companies and delivers verified, AI-matched leads to subscribers every day. He works at the intersection of data engineering and small-business growth, and writes about what daily business-formation data reveals about the American economy.
Website: dayonelead.com
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