Though black women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the United States, their companies aren't being funded at the same rates as their peers--receiving only 0.2 percent of all venture funding in the past five years. Kathryn Finney set out to find out why--and to shed a light on the details. Calling black women entrepreneurs the "real unicorns of tech," #ProjectDianne was launched to show that there are viable startups founded by black women, as well as to promote the founders as part of a documentary. Finney hopes that these efforts, and the information collected through them, will help foster greater numbers of black women-led startups being funded.
Read about her efforts here and in the full article on Forbes.com.
forbes.com - Black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S. They own 1.5 million businesses between them, up 322% since 1997. Their companies generate $44 billion a year.
So why is no one investing in their startups? Why have black women received only .2% of all venture funding in the past five years?
That was what Kathryn Finney set out to uncover when she launched Project Diane, a definitive study of the state of black women in tech entrepreneurship that took the better part of a year to complete.
“We knew it was bad, but no one was quantifying it,” said Finney, founder of Digital Undivided, a social enterprise that runs an accelerator program for startups led by black and Latina women. “It was just, ‘there are no black people, there are no black women.’ Anecdotally, we knew it to be true.”
Of these, only 11 have raised over $1 million in outside investment.
Read the rest here.