(Wired) A few years ago, Rocío van Nierop visited the tech accelerator Y Combinator. Nierop is the cofounder and executive director of the advocacy group Latinas in Tech. As she walked through the building, she passed by photo after photo of the teams that Y Combinator had funded. Nierop noticed they were all white men. “Where are the females?” she asked herself. “Where are the brown people?”
The experience led Nierop to publish a database of Latina entrepreneurs who had raised at least $1 million, to show aspiring founders that they existed. But in the years since, the money going to Latino founders has hardly increased. Data from Crunchbase shows that US startups with a Latino founder received just 2.1 percent of venture capital funding in 2021. That’s slightly up from 1.8 percent in 2018. Latinos’ share of early-stage funding, which can be the most critical for underrepresented startups, has slightly decreased since 2018.
Another recent report, from Bain, looked at the top 500 venture capital and private equity deals in 2020. Fewer than 1 percent involved a Latino founder. The report also found that investors cut smaller checks to Latino founders on average, such that Latino founders needed roughly twice as many investors to get the same level of funding as startups with white founders.
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