Anthemis, StartOut and Series Q Announce LGBTQ+ Founder Office Hours
The events of this past summer have shown us our collective power in numbers, from all corners of the globe. Whether it’s speaking out and advocating, protesting or boycotting — we are all agents of change. Leveling the playing field in terms of allocation in venture capital (VC) has risen to the top of many company agendas. While significant strides have been made in the last couple of months, much work is still to be done collectively to bring parity to the funding landscape.
In the spring, we partnered with Ladies Who Launch and Diversity VC to host our inaugural Virtual Office Hours focused on female entrepreneurs. Together with over 40 funds, we conducted 180 one-to-one matches between investors and entrepreneurs. We inaugurated the Female Innovators Lab in partnership with Barclays last year to tackle the female funding gap head on. Female-founded businesses raised only 2.8 percent of VC dollars last year in the United States (US). That statistic went up to 12.4 percent when startups were co-founded by female and male entrepreneurs.
The picture isn’t much brighter when you turn your attention to entrepreneurs from the LGBTQ+ community. According to data gathered by Backstage Capital, fewer than 1 percent of US deals go to LGBTQ+ founders, with 37 percent of entrepreneurs from the community choosing not to ‘out’ themselves to investors, according to StartOut. This October, we are partnering with StartOut and Series Q to bring our second installment of Virtual Office Hours. The purpose of the event is to foster connections between founders and investors, create a forum for networking in the distributed environment and provide realtime support for the diverse pipeline of entrepreneurial talent across the US and Europe.
At Anthemis, authentic collaboration is an integral part of our guiding principles; by partnering with other investors, our goal is to combat the alarming statistics in our industry. More importantly, collaboration is an essential ingredient that will help to reach the shared goal of creating greater parity in capital allocation. We recognize that this is a step, not a silver bullet. We aim to continue the work that some of our peers in the industry have started — like our friends Playfair Capital — and lean on the experts to help us carry this out.
StartOut is a leading non-profit organization in the US whose mission is to increase the number, diversity and impact of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs and amplify their stories to drive the community’s economic empowerment. Series Q is the leading network for LGBTQ+ people at startups in the United Kingdom (UK). At Anthemis, we continue to build our work on allyship, and to celebrate the diversity and uniqueness that each of us brings to this world. We are committed to engaging in more in-depth work on allyship, microaggressions and privilege.
We have an incredible cross-section of investors taking part and we are excited to introduce you to them over the next couple of weeks; if you or someone you know is an LGBTQ+ founder and would like to be a part of the virtual office hours, please apply here!
