The Black Founder List
In honor of Black History Month, a group of Black founders, VCs, and tech professionals put together the most comprehensive list of US-based venture-backed Black founders ever.
This is a guest post by a collective of Black startup founders based in The Bay Area.
In honor of Black History Month ✊🏾, a group of Black founders, VCs, and tech professionals put together the most comprehensive list of US-based venture-backed Black founders ever. We hope this will be an inspiration to a generation and serve as a running historical record of Black founders, both past and present.
The release of Jessica Livingston’s book “Founders At Work” has inspired many startup founders as she covers virtually every successful tech founder in recent history. It has almost become standard reading for many, but for most Black founders it fails to inspire as the stories a don’t feel inspired when they read stories about white founders- it’s too far out of reach. What would be more inspiring for them is reading stories about founders that look like them. We’re excited to share a comprehensive list of Black founders who’ve raised VC.
We captured almost every US-based, Black startup founder that has raised venture capital. We expect to look back on this list in a couple of years and be in awe at how much larger it has gotten. Our hope is that a subset of this list eventually turns into the table of contents for a book titled “Black Founders At Work” that somebody, some day, will write.
There are a number of individuals that helped compile this list, key contributors include:
- Yonas Beshawred
- James Norman (Transparent Collective)
- Sefanit Tades
- Sydney Paige Thomas (Precursor Ventures)
- Black Founders, VCs, and tech professionals
P.S. If you know of a founder that is missing, please just edit the doc and we will make sure to add them to the list!
P.P.S. If you’re a fellow founder on this list, hop in this new Google Group 👉🏾 https://groups.google.com/d/forum/the-black-founders-list
