A VC treated my sexuality as “founder risk.” Has anyone else experienced something like this?

I’m a founder currently fundraising in China, and one conversation with a VC has been stuck in my head ever since.

My co-founder and I are also partners, but that’s private information and not something we wanted to bring into a fundraising conversation.

They kept pushing anyway.

They asked what our relationship was.
Whether we were a couple.
Whether we lived together.

At some point I asked them directly: Why is this relevant to the investment?

Their answer was basically that they were worried about investing in a “couple-run company.”

What if the relationship became unstable?
What if we broke up?
What if one person eventually wanted to sell their shares?
What if personal conflict spilled into the company?

I told them that this wasn’t an actual issue in how we run the business.

But they kept treating it as a major concern.

Then they told us they had dealt with another founder couple before, and when that couple was having marital problems, the investors literally went to their home to try to convince them not to get divorced.

I remember sitting there thinking:

How did we get from discussing a startup to an investor asking who I sleep with, whether we live together, and what might happen if our relationship ends?

And after learning about our relationship, another concern suddenly appeared: apparently we didn’t have a sufficiently clear “No. 1” founder.

Maybe neither of us was dominant enough. Maybe the leadership structure wasn’t clear enough. Maybe being a couple made decision-making too complicated.

Again, these can all be legitimate questions in isolation. Investors should absolutely care about founder dynamics, governance, equity, and what happens if co-founders fall out.

But there’s a difference between asking:

“What happens if the co-founders disagree?”

and repeatedly asking:

“Are you two a couple? Do you live together?”

especially after we had already made it clear that we didn’t want to discuss our private relationship.

That distinction has been bothering me.

There have also been several firms that barely engaged with us at all, or conversations that just disappeared. I’m not going to claim those were all because we’re LGBTQ — I obviously can’t know that.

But after having one investor explicitly turn our relationship into a “founder risk,” it becomes difficult not to wonder how often this is happening quietly.

Founders already accept being judged on almost everything: execution, ambition, judgment, personality, leadership, resilience, market understanding.

Fine.

But I never expected fundraising to include having to justify why my relationship shouldn’t make me less investable.

I’m genuinely curious whether other LGBTQ founders — or founders in relationships with their co-founders — have experienced something similar.

Where do you think legitimate founder-dynamics diligence ends, and discrimination begins?