Patty Abramson, an entrepreneur who founded a venture capital fund that was among the first in the country to exclusively back businesses owned by women, died on Aug. 24 at her summer home in Nantucket, Mass. She was 74.

Her daughter Jenny Abramson said the cause was complications of cancer.

Ms. Abramson spent the first few decades of her career in advertising and public relations. In 1979 she joined two other women as a partner in Hager, Sharp & Abramson, a communications firm. She left a decade later to start her own company, Abramson Communications.

She shifted to a new field in 1997, teaming up with investors to create the Women’s Growth Capital Fund. At the time, the Small Business Administration estimated that just 2 percent of venture capital funding went to businesses owned by women. Ms. Abramson saw that as both an unfair barrier and a financial opportunity.

“We wouldn’t have done this if money wasn’t to be made,” she told The Wall Street Journal. Her fund raised $30 million in two years and was for a time the largest in the country run by women.