10 Black Women in Venture Capital Making an Impact

According to a 2019 Harvard University Kennedy School Women and Public Policy Program report, just 2.4% of the VC industry’s billions went to companies founded by women of any race or ethnicity on average over the past 30 years. 

Although Black women launch businesses at a higher rate than anyone else, in 2020, VC firms invested less than 0.35% of available money in companies founded by Black women, according to Crunchbase, a business information company.

Furthermore, over 80% of VC firms don’t have even one Black investor on their team, not aligning with the demographics of our country and missing out on critical representation. 

To combat this, Black women are launching a new generation of funds, and every few months, it seems, another barrier is broken. From the largest woman-founded firm to even more funds led by Black investors,  the “no limits” mantra is truer than ever before. 

The barrier to entry in venture has continued to fall – thanks to organizations and individuals. Slowly but surely, the old (white) boys club’s stronghold on the venture ecosystem is loosening. Meet some of the women driving this change. 

Serena Williams

23-time Grand Slam champion tennis player Serena Williams is no stranger to success. Off the court, after founding her venture capital fund, Serena Ventures, back in 2014, she’s invested in 14 startups that have now reached unicorn status. 

Focusing on underfunded women, people of color, and underrepresented founders. 54% of Serena Ventures-backed founders are women, 47% are Black, and 11% are Latinx. Williams has said: “A lot of times when you do invest in these companies… (they) tend to do just as well, if not better because it’s a woman or a person of color leads it.” 

She feels that women and people of color often have to work harder to get where they are, and she attests the unicorn status of the 14 Serena Ventures-backed companies to this hard work. Melanie Platt, VC Fundraising Expert, attributes the success of Serena Ventures to Williams’ unique position as a Black female VC in a field where few others exist. She says “This distinct vantage point enables her to see potential in startups where others might hesitate, fostering deeper exploration into ventures that promise growth.” 

Black Women in Venture Capital

Ayana Parsons

In 2018, Ayana Parsons and her co-founder Arian Simone founded Fearless Fund, America’s first VC firm founded by women of color. The fund invests exclusively in tech and consumer-goods companies owned exclusively by women. Since then, their success stories have been myriad. 

Together Parsons and Simone have invested over $27 million in 44 companies, including the restaurant chain Slutty Vegan, the cosmetics company Lip Bar, and the digital platform COMMUNITYx. 

Late last year, the Fearless Fund became embroiled in a lawsuit filed by the American Alliance for Equal Rights, alleging that Fearless engages in racial discrimination by operating a grant contest awarding money to early-stage Black-women-owned businesses. 

Against the backdrop of backlash against diversity and inclusion programs, Parsons made appearances everywhere from The View to The Breakfast Club, explaining that the Fearless Fund grants are legal and for the public good. Parsons stepped down from Fearless Fund earlier this year in April

Candice Matthews Brackeen

Candice Matthews Brackeen is a dynamic economic development organization founder/CEO and venture capital investor. She began inspiring change when she was just one of 88 black women in the country to be the CEO of a VC firm. 

Through her leadership at Lightship Foundation and Lightship Capital, Candice has guided hundreds of growth-stage tech startups led by women, entrepreneurs of color, LBGTQ+, and disabled founders to more than one hundred fifty million dollars in funding. 

Lightship is an idea that streaked out of a play date gone bad eight years ago and is now a company that has mentored, connected, and helped grow about 3,000 minority-owned tech businesses while supporting and raising $225 million. Her commitment to advancement and inclusion has most recently been recognized by organizations such as the Cincinnati Bengals (2022 Inspire Change Changemaker Award) and Doritos and Pepsi Co. (2023 Doritos Change Maker). 

Matthews Brackeen is such a fan of the Cincinnati Bengals that while she is a prime mover in the tech business world, she decompresses by going to games at Paycor Stadium. Candice also serves on the Cincinnati Innovation District Advisory Council and the Endeavor Northwest Arkansas Board of Directors and is a University of Cincinnati Kautz Uible Fellow.

Related Post: 10 Black Women Making Waves in AI

Stacy Brown-Philpot

Best-known as the former CEO of TaskRabbit, Stacy Brown-Philpot led the transformation of the fast-growing startup into a global business with local operations in more than 70 major markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, and Spain. 

After just three years at TaskRabbit, a company that provides short-term freelance labor, Brown-Philpot rose to its top job. As CEO, she oversaw its successful acquisition by the IKEA group. In 2015, she was made a director on the HP board; in 2017, she was appointed to the board of luxury retail giant Nordstrom. 

Before TaskRabbit, Brown-Philpot had spent nearly a decade heading global operations for some of Google’s most widely used services, including Google search, spending time in India as head of online sales and operations for Google India. 

Ranked by Business Insider as one of the 46 Most Important Blacks in Technology, Brown-Philpot founded the Black Google Network and is a founding member of the SoftBank Opportunity Fund, a $100million fund established to invest in Black, Latinx, and Native American founders.  

In addition to HP and Nordstrom, she is on the board of directors for Noom, StockX, Joy, and Black Girls Code. She was named a 2016 Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute and one of Fortune’s 2015 40 Under 40.

Kathryn Finney

Kathryn Finney, one of the most influential women in tech and venture capital (Inc Magazine, Business Insider, Entrepreneur Magazine), is the Managing Director of Genius Guild, bestselling author, founder, and CEO. Genius Guild is a Chicago-based venture capital firm that invests in high-growth startups led by diverse founders using the social determinants of health framework to build market-driven solutions. 

Kathryn is also the founder/founding CEO of digitalundivided, a groundbreaking social enterprise focused on creating a world where women own their work, growing the company to its 7 figure budget. As the author of Wall Street Journal bestseller “Build the Damn Thing: How to Build a Successful Company When You’re Not a Rich White Guy”, Finney is ready to put her money where her mouth is. 

In April 2020, she founded The Doonie Fund with a $10,000 personal donation to support black women entrepreneurs during the COVID-19 crisis. Since then, the Doonie Fund has supported over 2,000 Black women entrepreneurs. 

Her accolades include a spot on Entrepreneurs Magazine’s “Woman to Watch”, Ebony Power 100, and Black Enterprise’s “40 under 40” list. She was also chosen as a White House Champion of Change and a past member of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) appointed by the Obama Administration. 

Veronica Reaves

Veronica Reaves is best known for her role as Senior Associate at Serena Ventures, Serena Williams’s multi-million dollar VC fund. Reaves went from experiencing homelessness to graduating from Howard University on a full-ride scholarship, securing a summer internship at Deloitte and a full-time role as a strategy consultant for Deloitte when she graduated. 

After working her way up to Senior Consultant, she found her calling in the venture capital world, motivated to make it a more equitable place. She helped launch the African Leadership University, which Fast Company named one of Africa’s most innovative companies in 2016. She founded Black Women in Venture Capital, a community of over 200 Black women in venture capital who envision an equitable VC system.

Sydney P Thomas

Sydney P Thomas is the founder and CEO of her firm, Symphonic Capital. She says “As conductor of Symphonic, my job is – as another great conductor said – not to make a sound. Instead, my power depends on my ability to make other people powerful. I take this job seriously through working alongside Pre-Seed founders to ensure they are able to achieve their goals.” 

With six years of experience and 250 companies’ worth of investments under her belt from a stint as the first hire at Precursor Ventures, Thomas had built a fund that backs founders at the pre-seed stage and doubles down at the seed stage. 

After graduating from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, Thomas scaled Precursor from a firm handling less than $5 million in committed capital to raising tens of millions in venture financing to back other startups. She supported pre-seed companies democratizing access to products and services for what Thomas calls the “mass market economy.” 

Thomas also founded and hosts the “Be About It” podcast, where she profiles companies that fit the thesis. On deciding to found her own VC firm, Thomas has said “Once I started [investing], in very much Virgo energy, I could not stop thinking about it,” Thomas said during the interview. “So, I decided to jump into it.”

Jewel Burks Solomon

Ex-head of Google for Startups US and the first person to hold the role, Jewel Burks Solomon is now Managing Partner at Collab Capital, an early-stage VC fund she launched to close the funding gap for Black entrepreneurs. Having created initiatives at Google that deployed a cool $45 million in capital to Black and Latinx-led businesses, she founded her own company, Partpic, in 2016. 

Partpic raised over $2 million in seed funding, and Jewel successfully sold the company to Amazon in 2016. She serves on the boards of The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, Endeavor Atlanta, JP Morgan’s Advancing Black Pathways, and the Center for American Entrepreneurship. 

Jewel has been featured in the Washington Post, Forbes, Essence, and Inc. In an episode of the Morgan Stanley Access & Opportunity podcast, she discusses her difficult exit from Partpic, navigating the investing landscape, and starting her own company in Atlanta. 

Solomon founded Collab Capital in 2019. It calls itself “a new institution for Black entrepreneurs.” It is growing a Black community of founders by providing an investment model to bridge the US racial wealth gap. Since 2019, Collab has invested in 35 companies in over 12 cities across the US. 

Related Post: Black-Owned Whiskey Brand Uncle Nearest Approaches Unicorn Status

Mercedes Bent

Stanford and Harvard grad Mercedes Bent, a former Financial Analyst at Goldman Sachs, is now heading up the Latin American regional investment fund for fintech at Lightspeed. 

Mercedes’ path to VC is a true convergence of her life experiences — managing P&Ls at two consumer startups (including growing one from $2 to $100M in revenue in 4 years), founding two startups of her own, and her long-term goal of empowering communities she cares about. 

During her startup career, she served in almost every functional role – something she touts as highly important to advising and relating to her founders. She frequently shares her wisdom with the community as a contributor for Business Insider on critical topics such as trends in the creator economy and retail investment apps. 

She’s also received media attention; in 2016, she was named a 40 Under 40 for Tech Diversity in Silicon Valley, and in 2021, WSJ named her one of 9 “Women to Watch in VC.” While at General Assembly, one of the startups she grew, she designed and launched the Opportunity Fund, their Social Impact arm, driven to improve diversity and access to the company’s engineering training programs. 

She’s also on the board of Birthright AFRICA, a not-for-profit committed to providing a free educational trip to Africa for every youth and young adult of African descent ages 13 – 30 in the United States. 

Kim Folsom

Serial entrepreneur Kim Folson has founded and led innovative companies for over 25 years. Folsom founded Founders First Capital Partners, the most significant minority- and women-owned lender for small- and medium-sized businesses. “Founders First is my seventh company, as I say, and final. 

On my 25-year journey as an entrepreneur, I saw the things that I achieved, saw that there were a bunch of gaps in the market, and saw an opportunity to address the gaps,” says Folsom. 

She is also the founder of Founders First Community Development Corporation, a small business growth accelerator. Under her leadership, SDF rolled out a first-of-its-kind global on- and off-ramp service for digital wallets. Her goal is to create a bridge between cash and cryptocurrencies. 

MoneyGram International is a partner in the initiative. In 2022, Folsom partnered with the Treasury Department and Vice President Kamala Harris’ office on an inclusive entrepreneurship initiative that deploys a $10 billion fund to help small businesses. 

Since 2015, she has raised $130 million in impact lending from investors, including the Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and The Schultz Family Foundation. Folsom has a monthly Inc.com column that “unlocks the secrets for zebra businesses to grow by leveraging other people’s money”. Folsom is also the author of “Million Dollar Conversations” a book where Folsom and others share strategies for mastering business, life and relationships. 

Main Image: Serena Williams