In the wake of the George Floyd tragedy and subsequent social justice uprisings, a renewed focus on economic inequality emerged across the U.S.

For the venture capital industry, a fresh light was shone on the historic lack of capital made available to Black and brown founders and fund managers.

In late 2020, a team of strategist-researchers from Culture Shift Labs undertook a three-month effort to locate and analyze the state of Black VCs. After successfully identifying 82 of the more than 150 Black-led funds in existence, one of the key takeaways is that the universe of diverse-led VC firms is larger than investors realize. This initial exploratory research effort gathered baseline data on 82 Black-led venture funds. Additional findings are summarized in a 13-page primary research report, which contains previously undiscovered data points, including:

1. The average size and vintage for Black-led venture funds.
2. The aggregate assets under management (AUM) for Black-led venture funds.
3. The geographic distributions of funds with Black leadership.

This research comes at an opportune moment as U.S. companies have committed over $35 billion toward racial equity investing in response to the events of 2020.

We will be updating this report (Volume II) in January 2022, followed by the same report for the Latino VC community, sponsored by UBS.

If you have a story or empirical evidence on Black or Latinx VC Funds, and would like to be considered for inclusion in our future papers, please contact Andrea at agh@cultureshiftlabs.com.