Study of VC-backed deals over the last five years finds that 77.1% of VC-backed founders were white, 1% were black, and 9.2% of startup founders were female
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News :
Context & Ripple Effects
Crunchbase News's five-year founder tally lands midway through a string of studies that have been measuring the same gap from both ends of the deal table. On the investor side, a 2015 study of senior investment teams at 71 top VC firms found 92% male and less than 1% Black membership; on the founder side, an earlier analysis of 10,238 venture deals from 2012–2014 counted just 24 involving Black women founders, averaging $36K raises against $1.3M for white men.
The 2019 numbers — 77.1% white founders, 1% Black, 9.2% female — matter because they became the baseline later coverage measured against: only $1B of the ~$150B raised by US companies in 2020 went to Black founders, and Black women founders' ~$494M in mid-2021 still represented just 0.34% of total US venture funding.
First-order effects
- Crunchbase's dataset gives limited partners and diversity-focused fund managers a concrete benchmark — the 1% Black-founder share and 9.2% female share become the numbers any new fund has to argue against when raising or deploying capital.
Second-order effects
- The persistent gap pushes investors toward workarounds rather than pipeline fixes: as the Wall Street Journal reported, some Black founders found investors more accessible in 2020 via Zoom, and dedicated diversity-focused funds emerged as the main channel redirecting checks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — repeated measurement, marginal dollar movement — the likely structural outcome is a parallel track of small diversity-focused funds allocating fractions of a percent of total venture dollars, while the core allocation of the ~$150B annual market remains concentrated among the same founder demographics.
The trend: Venture capital's demographic gap is now tracked annually across both investors and founders, but each successive study shows dollar flows shifting far more slowly than the headline percentages suggest.