💸Funding dispatch💸

it will be quick, I promise

Hello, and welcome to a dispatch edition of The Black Cat, where I will be sharing the latest funding data for Black founders and women.

Feel free to send around, email me your reflections, and follow me on Instagram at dominicmadori.

This month I’m reading: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: In A Sentimental Mood by Duke Ellington

---

💢From the Chatterbox💢

Not that anyone cares anymore, but as a public servant I feel it my duty to inform the public on the latest funding data for women and Black founders.

Black founders raised 0.4% of all venture funding last year, according to Crunchbase data. That’s about $732 million raised out of ~$183 billion.

Last year, I reported that Black founders raised 0.48% of all venture funding, around $661 million out of $136 billion. The dollar amount that went to Black founders increased but it can never quite catch up with the billions that flood to everyone else.

The two years before that saw them raise at least 1%, but that number has steadily declined over the past few years and as the blowback to diversity, equity, and inclusion hits a new stride. (I guess it is fair to say, in some ways, that the 0.4% is not that dramatic of a drop from 0.48%). Maybe this is the beginning of rock steady…

Female-founded companies are also weathering whatever storm this is. The latest Pitchbook data shows that the deal count to female-founded companies dropped and that the representation of women as founders is dipping Excluding Anthropic — which has a woman on its seven-person founding team — $36.1 billion out of $209 billion in venture dollars went to companies with at least one female founder. Companies with at least one female founder on their team raised 21.7% of all venture dollars last year, a drop from 25.2% in 2023. Companies with all-female founding teams raised 1.8% of venture dollars last year, a drop from 1.9% the year before.

There frankly isn’t much more to add here. The only updates left are the lawsuits (like the venture firm founder suing PayPal for being left out of a program for Blacks and Latinos), and the rollback of numerous DEI measures that Trump signed on his first day into office. There are people still committed to doing the work to get funding into the hands of marginalized communities, but change is quite slow, leaving us with updates that look more or less the same.

The back and forth is the same, too. On one side, people say the inclusion of women and people of color will be good for returns, good for business. On the other side, people say they want meritocracy (deep down, some are saying they want something else, too, if you can read between the lines). The honest ones, though, say they just want everyone to have a fair chance at getting ahead. In a perfect world, both sides are saying the same thing. But, alas…

---

💫Kitty Talk💫

Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met:

• The Guardian, “Consuming arts and culture is good for health and wellbeing, research finds”

• WSJ, “At the Trump Inauguration, Fashion Means Business

• New York Times, “Musk Is Likely to Get a West Wing Office for His Cost-Cutting Project”