Out of about $150B raised by US companies in VC funding in 2020, only $1B went to Black or African-American startup founders
Last year, U.S. companies raised record amounts of venture capital, at just under $150 billion. But of that capital, only $1 billion went to Black … Tweets: @robinwauters , @pblackshaw , @pauljudge , and @carnage4life Tweets: Robin Wauters / @robinwauters : Depressing stats on this everywhere https://twitter.com/... Pete Blackshaw / @pblackshaw : “Of $150 billion in US venture capital raised in 2020, only $1 billion went to Black or African-American startup founders” says @crunchbasenews. That's less than 1%. What a missed opportunity! https://news.crunchbase.com/ ... v Paul Judge, Ph.D. / @pauljudge : Shout out to the black founders highlighted in this list. Congrats! Still less than 1% of VC funding goes to black founders. There's lots of work left to do. Here's to this list being many times longer next year and the next year and ... https://news.crunchbase.com/ ... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The results are in. Out of the $150B in VC funding that went to U.S. startups in 2020, $1B in funding went to Black Founders. That's 0.67%. It's not even one percent. So much for #BlackLivesMatter https://news.crunchbase.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Crunchbase News' year-end tally lands weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported that some Black startup founders were finding 2020 fundraising easier — investors reachable over Zoom and a wave of new diversity-focused funds [[a:960781]]. Yet the aggregate math shows how thin that access translated at scale: roughly $1B out of a record ~$150B in US venture capital, under 1%, went to Black or African-American founders.
The figure matters because it converts founder allocation into a measurable annual benchmark — one the related coverage keeps re-basing: mid-2021 data on Black women-led startups [[a:968576]], a full-2022 recount [[a:833278]], and quarterly tracking through late 2023 [[a:845480]].
First-order effects
- Black founders raising in 2021 do so against a newly public baseline — about 0.67% of the 2020 total — giving limited partners and commentators a concrete number to hold general partners accountable to.
- The diversity-focused funds cited as the 2020 bright spot become the main viable channel for the cohort, since broad-market allocation stayed near zero.
Second-order effects
- The dedicated-fund channel scales visibly: by mid-July 2021, US startups led by Black women had raised ~$494M — already surpassing the ~$484M they raised in all of 2020 — even while holding just 0.34% of total US venture funding [[a:968576]].
- Firms without visible allocation to Black founders face reputational and LP pressure as outlets like Crunchbase News institutionalize the comparison year over year.
Third-order effects
- The subsequent tallies trace a rise-and-retreat rather than a durable reallocation: a record 1.3% share in 2021, about 1% (~$2.254B) in 2022 [[a:833278]], then 0.13% (~$39.7M) by Q3 2023 [[a:845480]] — consistent with the 2020 commitments having been event-driven rather than structural.
- If the pattern holds, founder-demographic allocation stays a recurring published metric, but the underlying capital flows remain hostage to the broader funding cycle rather than compounding independently.
The trend: Venture capital's share flowing to Black founders hardened into a tracked annual benchmark that spiked with the 2020 diversity-fund wave and then contracted as the funding cycle turned.