

In addition 43% of all seed funding went to teams with at least one team member who went to an elite university.” “Only 0.24% of venture funding over the last 10 years going to (38) Black founders, 0.02% going to Black female founders. “The data we have shown today is stark and makes for uncomfortable reading,” Extend Ventures’ co-founder and technology entrepreneur Tom Adeyoola told TechCrunch. The implications for social justice and social mobility are clear. The report illustrates one impact of this long-standing inequality around access to the elite education - as it shows it carries through to decreased opportunity, post-university, for accessing VC funding.
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In the U.K., the debate about how to widen access for underrepresented students to the country’s top two universities has been raging for years - with progress toward diversification of the Oxbridge student body still hard to see. VC invested at seed stage during the period was invested in founding teams with at least one member from an elite educational background (narrowly defined to mean Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford and their respective business schools).

Here the report found that 42.72% of U.K. It also found just one early-stage (Series A or B) venture capital investment recorded for a Black female, compared to 194 early-stage investments in white female entrepreneurs.Įxtend Ventures’ research also looked at educational background - spotlighting the role of elite universities in the distribution of venture capital in the country. “A total of 10 female entrepreneurs of Black appearance received venture capital investment (0.02% of the total amount invested) across the 10-year period, with none so far receiving late-stage funding,” the report notes. who were found to experience the poorest outcomes. The picture is starkest for Black female entrepreneurs in the U.K. The report found that a large majority (68.33%) of the capital raised across the seed, early and late VC funding stages went to all-male teams 28.80% to mixed gender teams and just 2.87% to all-female teams, with female teams also raising lower sums of money than their male counterparts at each funding stage. female entrepreneurs face in accessing VC funding versus male counterparts. On gender the research underlines the scale of the challenge U.K. “Despite ethnicity usually being a self-determined categorisation, we believe this is justified because the data we collect is subsequently anonymised and is being used to improve access to capital,” they note, adding: “Ethnic or gender prejudice is dependent on the perception of the person holding the purse strings to funds.” “Alongside their teams, they received just 0.24% of the total sum invested,” it adds.Įxtend Ventures used machine learning and computer vision technology as a tool to understand demographic factors - “including age, perceived gender, ethnicity and educational background of founding members” - relying on a perception of ethnicity or gender to categorise founders for the research, based on analysis of publicly available images of entrepreneurs. “While all ethnic entrepreneurs are underfunded, those who are Black experience the poorest outcomes of all,” the report notes, finding just 38 Black entrepreneurs received VC funding over this decade. The U.K.’s Black and multi-ethnic communities, meanwhile, now comprise 14% of the U.K. It found that all-ethnic teams received an average of just 1.7% of the venture capital investments made at seed, early and late-stage over this decade.

between 20 - providing data on 3,784 entrepreneurs who started 2,002 companies over this period. The report, by the not-for-profit community interest company Extend Ventures, looked at how VC has been invested in the U.K. The finding of baked-in bias holds true across all funding stages, per the findings.

VC has been invested over the past decade according to race, gender and educational background makes for grim reading - with all-ethnic teams and female entrepreneurs receiving just a fraction of available funding versus all-white teams and male founders.
