Crunchbase is expanding the scope of its tagging options in Europe to start tracking how much venture capital funding goes to minority founders on the continent.
Diversity Spotlight is a feature on Crunchbase that lets companies add tags to their profiles to label themselves.
Crunchbase is now making this feature available in Europe.
Crunchbase initially launched the Diversity Spotlight feature in 2020, and last year expanded it to add an LGBTQ+ tag.
Women globally, meanwhile, typically receive less than 2% of venture capital funding across the world.
“When we think about our nation’s IP and leadership globally, it’s synonymous with leadership in space,” Stricklan told me in an interview before the occasion.
To that end Space Workforce 2030 has started with the basics: collecting and understanding the data in order to establish a baseline.
Stricklan told me that thousands of teachers have signed on and they expect to see a lot of engagement next month.
They have different touchpoints to get to those that just don’t understand there could be a future for them in a STEM-related career.” Stricklan told me.
You can learn more about the Space Workforce 2030 effort here.
Black Tech Nation Ventures launched in 2021 to address the funding gap for Black founders amid a wave of venture diversity initiatives after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Three years later, amongst growing backlash against DEI and diversity-focused investments, the firm’s mission may be more important now than when it started.
The firm found initial fundraising success in 2021, and held a first close on $25 million that year, he explained.
“We have seen funding to diverse founders and Black-led venture funds decline rapidly.
The firm will also collaborate with Black Tech Nation, the nonprofit that is run by BTNV general partner Kelauni Jasmyn that created a digital network of Black tech professionals, when it can.
Google is hopeful it will soon be able to ‘unpause’ the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people, per DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis.
The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few weeks”, he said today.
Asked by moderator, Wired’s Steven Levy, to explain what went wrong with the image generation feature, Hassabis sidestepped a detailed technical explanation.
Instead he suggested the issue was caused by Google failing to identify instances when users are basically after what he described as a “universal depiction”.
The issue is “very complex”, he suggested — likely demanding a whole-of-society mobilization and response to determine and enforce limits.
OpenAI has responded to a letter sent by the Congressional Black Caucus that flagged the lack of diversity on its board.
OpenAI’s response letter, which TechCrunch saw, was dated January 5 and signed by CEO Sam Altman and Chairman of the Board Bret Taylor.
The OpenAI board has received criticism for its lack of gender and racial diversity since its reconfiguration after Altman’s ousting and prompt return in November.
In mid-December, CBC Chairs Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Rep. Barbara Lee sent a letter to OpenAI, asking it to “move expeditiously” in diversifying its board.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment regarding its response letter or its plans to diversify its board.
Oklahoma took a stand against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) last month.
The state’s governor, Kevin Stitt, signed an executive order defunding DEI efforts in public colleges and universities and banning it in other state agencies.
He said the move would take “politics out of education” and encourage “equal opportunity rather than promising equal outcomes.” Affirmative action itself has been banned in the state since 2012.
But public colleges aren’t the only ones being affected; this is part of a broader backlash to DEI that has become prevalent in many industries, from technology to academia to fashion.
Supporters of DEI say these initiatives help everyone get ahead, especially marginalized communities that have been historically disenfranchised.
Down under, only 3% of venture capital funding went to all-women-founded teams, and 10% went to teams with at least one woman founder.
In 2021 and 2020, 21% and 25%, respectively, of VC funding in Australia went to startups with at least one woman founder.
A report commissioned by consulting firm the Creative Co-Operative found that in 2021, despite a record increase in VC funding in Australia — about $10 billion — just 0.03% went to Bla(c)k women and women of color founders.
The VC aims to raise another $100 million for its Fund 2 in the spring of 2024.
Beyond just giving women money, Warren and F5 want to create generational change for a billion women across India, Southeast Asia and Australia.
In the past three years, a lot of companies launched DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and we even saw a brief period when those promises were fulfilled.
When the market was on the up and up, Black founders, like many other founders out there, were raising record amounts.
But come 2022, the market dipped, interest rates skyrocketed, investments nearly froze, hiring slowed, and widespread layoffs hit everyone.
Today, it almost feels like many of the promises the venture capital industry made in 2020 have gone unfulfilled.
To find out exactly how many kept their word, we checked up on some of those that made commitments to DEI following the BLM protests in 2020.Who kept their word?
You can’t simply add diversity to your workforce and hope for the best. You need to make sure that your company culture is welcoming to all types of people, and…
