Commentary: The old guard in venture reigns supreme

Black founders raised $212 million out of $29 billion this Q2, picking up just 0.71% of the capital allocated to U.S. founders this quarter, according to Crunchbase. In Q2 2022, Black founders raised $602 million out of $62 billion, or 0.97%, of the capital allocated.

In total, Black founders raised around $565 million out of $75 billion in H1 2023, which is 0.75% of all capital raised in the U.S. so far this year. That, too, is a drop from the $1.8 billion out of $144 billion, or 1.25%, that they raised in H1 2022. Overall, funding to Black founders has gone down from previous years, but the overall amount of funding allocated has gone down, too.

This isn’t surprising. Black founders have never raised more than 2% of capital in any given quarter, and the funding to them has been on a steady decline since the first quarter of 2022. Black founders picked up at least a billion in every quarter of 2021, momentum pushed forward by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. But quietly, attention has moved elsewhere, and the consistent decline in funding proves the waning investor interest.

There seem to be two different worlds within the venture ecosystem. There is the old guard, the ones who have billions of assets under management, who operate in their bubble and rarely leave. Founders must go to them. Then there is the new guard, the emerging fund managers, many of whom are diverse, who are here to shake up the playbook. The problem is that they don’t have billions of AUM (assets under management), so even though their intentions are good, their checkbooks are dry.