Founder Office Hours Pt 3: Black History Month

Anthemis Announces Black Founder Office Hours

With the onset of COVID and shift to a work from home environment, Anthemis wanted to think about ways to keep our community connected, as well as provide founders access to investors that weren’t already in their network. Those serendipitous encounters at cocktail events were no longer, but the need to connect investors and founders to increase access to capital remained.

Last Spring, we partnered with Ladies Who Launch and Diversity VC to host our first Virtual Office Hours, focused on female entrepreneurs, conducting over 180 matches between investors and founders. Later on, in October, we hosted our second Office Hours event, this time focusing on LGBTQ+ founders, resulting in 140 matches.

February is Black History Month in the US and, in honor of this, our next Office Hours event, hosted on February 25, will be focused on Black founders. Right now, Black founders receive <1 percent funding and, in the UK, in the 10 years up to 2019 only 0.24 percent of capital went to teams of Black entrepreneurs, including just one Black female. At Anthemis, we know the power of the network effect, and we are hosting the Black Office Hours event to continue our search for ways to help connect Black founders to investors in the VC community. We want to provide another opportunity for founders to build their business and raise capital, and ensure that each founder is matched thoughtfully with an investor based on the investor expertise, as well as the founder’s aspirations.

At Anthemis, we believe that diversity and inclusion are essential in the businesses that we support and we aim to hold those values true within our own team. We strive to have as diverse of a team as possible because we believe that makes us better investors and supporters of our entrepreneurs. At Anthemis, 54 percent of our team are female, 38 percent identify as a person of color, and 11 percent of employees identify as LGBTQ+.

We have a fantastic network of investors taking part across the US and Europe and will be introducing them to you over the next few weeks in our Meet the Investors blog series. In the meantime, if you are a Black founder — or someone you know is — and would like to take part in the Virtual Office Hours event, you can apply here.