Who are the LPs that are investing in underrepresented led VC managers?

Dec 20, 2020

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued growth with the emerging manager landscape.

While the level of diversity continues to improve in VC (particularly in the sub-$100MM category), there still remains much work ahead to get to a genuinely healthy capital environment for founders.

Thankfully many LPs are stepping up by actively backing underrepresented managers (primarily women-led firms and people of color) through direct mandates or an increased focus and preference toward investing in underrepresented managers.

To help bring an increased level of transparency, we've put together a list of LPs we have come to understand that are focused on solving venture capital's diversity issue.

This list can be found here. A few notes on this list.

Defined Mandate refers to LPs that have actual mandates or pools of capital dedicated to backing underrepresented LPs.
Prefers DEI refers to LPs who have expressed that while they don't have a written mandate, they are currently strongly inclined toward backing emerging managers.
Interested in supporting DEI refers to LPs that are actively helping underrepresented managers or actively meeting with underrepresented managers for potential investment.
Given the LP world's opacity, the list isn't likely comprehensive, please use this link to help offer adds/edits-- Specific call to action to those LPs that are active and want to be added. If you know an LP that you know to be active, please encourage them to add themselves -- It is important that we maintain a public list that only includes LPs known to be comfortable with their name being public-facing. For example, we have a separate private list of family offices interested in backing underrepresented managers but have not explicitly opted in to this list.

Thanks in advance for fostering more transparency and providing a lift to this important, and hopefully growing, ecosystem segment.