New report reveals of 10,238 venture deals from 2012-2014, only 24 involved black women founders, who raised $36K on average; white male average raise is $1.3M
Davey Alba / Wired :
Context & Ripple Effects
Davey Alba's Wired analysis puts hard numbers on a gap that had been mostly anecdote: across 10,238 venture deals from 2012–2014, just 24 involved Black women founders, and their average raise of $36K was roughly a thirty-sixth of the $1.3M white male founders took home. The report lands two weeks after a [[a:863973|Female Founders Fund tally showing women led only 16 of 204 Bay Area Series A rounds in 2015]], making February 2016 the moment demographic accounting of deal flow became a beat of its own.
What makes this report durable rather than a one-off is how the later coverage tracks against its baseline: a 2019 Crunchbase study still found 77.1% of VC-backed founders were white and 9.2% female, and by 2020 only about $1B of roughly $150B in US venture funding went to Black founders — so the 2016 snapshot reads as the reference point the industry keeps being measured against.
First-order effects
- Black women founders now have a quantified benchmark for the raise gap — $36K versus $1.3M on average — that shifts the conversation with VCs and LPs from anecdotal exclusion to documented disparity in deal selection.
- Venture firms face immediate reputational exposure, since the 24-in-10,238 figure gives journalists and researchers a citable denominator for evaluating any firm's or fund's portfolio demographics.
Second-order effects
- Data providers like Crunchbase expand demographic tagging of deals into standard practice, because the Wired report demonstrates the demand for population-level fundraising statistics that didn't previously exist.
- Funds and programs targeting underrepresented founders gain an evidence base for their pitch to limited partners, converting what was a diversity argument into a market-inefficiency one.
Third-order effects
- If the measurement discipline holds — 2016 baseline, 2019 follow-up, annual dollar totals by 2020–2021 — demographic breakdowns of venture deployment become a standing accountability metric, pressuring allocation even where absolute dollars remain small, as with the ~$494M to Black-women-led startups in 2021 still equaling just 0.34% of US venture funding.
The trend: Venture capital is moving from undocumented homogeneity to annually measured, publicly compared funding demographics — with the Wired report as the founding data point and Crunchbase's ongoing tallies as the ledger.