By Sara Gilgore and Andy Medici

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A growing body of investors, startups and supporters are looking to stem the funding divide for women and people of color.

Groups such as female angel investor network Citrine Angels and Halcyon, which runs a Georgetown incubator for social impact startups, are also taking the angel investor and funding paths to better support diverse founders. Currently, 51% of Halcyon’s portfolio startups have a female founder, and 63% have a founder of color. And that investment pays off, according to the organization. Halcyon’s alumni have raised more than $100 million and created more than 1,000 jobs since the program was founded in 2014 by biotech entrepreneurs and philanthropists Sachiko Kuno and Ryuji Ueno.

Its calculus has not been by coincidence, said CEO Kate Goodall.

“We started to open the aperture and really question — ‘What were our networks? Where was the message getting?’ — just to increase the pipeline, because I know for sure there’s a pipeline,” Goodall said. “I hate the pipeline problem excuse. … It’s laziness. When people say there’s no pipeline? No. It’s because it’s not in your network, because you haven’t done a good enough job and hard enough work in opening your network up. So we were very intentional about that.”

She added: “A lot of it, I believe, is very unconscious, but we have to stop being lazy about where we’re unconscious. That’s not an excuse anymore.”

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Black Girl Ventures, which started up in 2016, has worked to fill some of those gaps, helping 76 founders get grant-based funding through its pitch sessions and later connecting them with other investors as they mature, said Shelly Bell, founder and CEO.

Of those 76, none had previous funding. But after the grants, about 75% were able to stay in business for the next year. Ninety percent grew through more partners and customers, Bell said. “Peer-to-peer mentoring and learning is essential in business, and it should be at the forefront.”

As should more accelerator programs and training beyond business fundamentals, founders said. Take Anika Hobbs, owner of Nubian Hueman, an 8-year-old retail store in Anacostia and Baltimore focused on goods made by people of color. She’s now six months into Halcyon’s opportunity zone incubator, which zeroes in on companies located in opportunity zones — federally designated areas where investment is incentivized because they are traditionally underresourced.

That coaching and development has been “a huge resource through the pandemic,” especially compared with other entrepreneurial training programs she found to be “remedial,” Hobbs said. “At that point, it’s no longer serving us to have that basic level, that seed level, that ideation-level type of training. I think there needs to be graduated steps for where we are in our business.”

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