Why Five Data Points About Founder Funding Should Shape How This Sector Thinks About Capital Access.

Spoiler Alert! The numbers have not moved much for several years.

There is a version of this story told entirely in percentages.

• LGBTQ+ founders received 0.5% of $2.1 trillion in startup funding over two decades, according to data from StartOut.

• Black founders received 0.4% of all US startup funding in 2024, a figure that had fallen by more than two thirds over three years.

• Female founders in the UK received 3.7% of venture funding in the first quarter of 2025, down from 6.5% the quarter before.

• All-women-founded companies raised $3.2 billion from venture capital in 2023.

• All-male-founded companies raised $114 billion.

• Not a single US AI startup that raised $100 million or more in 2024 was Black-founded.

The percentages are not difficult to interpret. They describe a system in which the correlation between who gets funded and who builds commercially successful companies has structurally broken down. LGBTQ+ founders have been shown to create 36% more jobs, 114% more patents, and 44% more exits than the average startup cohort. The return data is not the problem.

The infrastructure is.

What These Numbers Are Actually About

The familiar narrative around diverse founder funding is that bias and network exclusivity are the primary barriers. Both are real. But the more useful frame, and the one that has the most structural remedy available, is that the infrastructure of startup capital formation is designed for a narrow set of participants.

Venture capital as it currently operates requires a founder to reach a decision-maker who is willing to engage. That engagement depends on warm introductions, pitch meetings, partner discussions, term sheet negotiations, legal documentation, and a closing process that can take six to twelve months and cost a founder a significant proportion of their time and cash resources. The entire sequence is mediated by human judgment at every step, and human judgment is where pattern-matching, network bias, and risk aversion compound.

This is not a moral critique of individual investors. It is a description of a system whose cost structure and access requirements produce a narrow pipeline.

What Is Changing

Several things are changing, and the changes are real even if the headline percentages have not yet moved at scale.

In the UK, the British Business Bank launched its Investor Pathways Capital initiative in 2025, committing £400 million to support diverse and emerging fund managers, with at least 50% of investment targeted at female fund managers. The initiative backs emerging managers through the Enterprise Capital Funds programme, invests in microfunds, and supports early-stage investors from underrepresented backgrounds to build track records.

The programme is live in 2026 and represents the most substantial direct intervention in UK VC fund-level diversity to date.

At the fund management level, firms including Ada Ventures, Cornerstone VC, and Impact X Capital are operating with explicit theses around overlooked founders. Ada Ventures has published data showing that its open application process, which removes warm introduction requirements, produces a significantly different pipeline composition than closed network funds. The methodology matters: open applications, structured scoring, and defined diversity criteria change outcomes in ways that aspiration alone does not.

At the operational level, alternative capital structures are expanding. Revenue-based finance, community shares, and steward ownership models are growing as genuine routes to capital for founders whose businesses are valuable but not venture-backable in the traditional sense. These are not consolation prizes. They are often better-aligned with the commercial realities of purpose-driven businesses than equity venture is.

Where Tokenisation Enters

Tokenisation is one emerging answer to the infrastructure problem, not the only one, and not yet a complete answer.

The structural case is straightforward. Tokenised equity can reduce the cost and administrative time of running a fundraising round. It can automate cap table management, removing one of the ongoing operational burdens that disproportionately affects founders without legal and financial support. It can, in principle, allow founders to reach a broader pool of qualifying investors within whatever regulatory perimeter applies, without depending on warm introductions to a closed network.

None of this removes the need for investor judgment on individual businesses. But it changes the economics of reaching investors and the mechanics of completing a transaction. For a founder currently spending nine months and significant legal fees to close a seed round, a more efficient infrastructure changes what is possible.

The PISCES sandbox for secondary trading of private company shares is still in early operation. The FCA and Bank of England joint framework is under consultation until July 2026. The mechanics are not yet ready for widespread use in early-stage fundraising. But the direction of infrastructure development, a regulated, scalable layer for tokenising and transacting in private company securities, is consistent and accelerating.

The Close

The percentages at the start of this piece describe a problem in the present. They do not have to describe the future.

The British Business Bank's intervention, the emergence of funds with open-access pipelines, the growing variety of capital structures available to founders, and the developing infrastructure for tokenised equity are each partial answers to different parts of the same problem. None will resolve the access gap on its own. Together, they represent a set of structural changes that could shift what is possible for founders who have been systematically underserved by the current model.

Gender parity in venture capital arriving in 2065 at current rates is not a prediction. It is a description of what happens if nothing changes. Things are changing. Slowly, unevenly, and insufficiently at scale so far. But the direction is not ambiguous.

Key Takeaways

• Recent data shows underrepresented founders are still receiving a fraction of available venture capital: 0.5% for LGBTQ+ founders over two decades, 0.4% for Black founders in the US in 2024, and 3.7% of UK VC for female founders in early 2025.

• The structural problem is not simply bias: it is the cost structure and access requirements of a capital formation system designed for a narrow pipeline.

• The British Business Bank's £400 million Investor Pathways Capital programme and emerging funds with open-access pipelines represent concrete structural changes underway in the UK.

• Tokenisation offers efficiency and reach improvements to the infrastructure of capital formation, including lower round costs, automated cap table management, and broader qualified investor access.

• The direction of change is positive but not yet sufficient at scale; the most important near-term milestone is how PISCES and the FCA wholesale markets framework shape the UK regulatory environment for private company transactions.

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Sources: StartOut Index | Crunchbase | Equidam | Female Tech Leaders | mvemnt.com | Female Founders Fund | British Business Bank | Source: Inbox newsletter from Considered Capital (hello@consideredcapital.io)