A computer programmer and laboratory scientist are teaming up to help boost the number of Black founders and investors in tech startups.
Evan Poncelet and Jesse Posey are the co-founders of Dreamward Ventures, a new Seattle-based emerging fund that plans to invest in diverse founders, including early stage startups led by Black entrepreneurs. It caters to startups that need technical due diligence, or expert evaluation of their platforms.
They met at a Seattle Angel Conference event and decided to do something about the giant gaps that exist in venture capital for Black founders and investors.
Black-founded startups received less than 0.5% of venture funding in the U.S. last year — down 71% year-over-year, outpacing the broader venture capital decline, Crunchbase reported. And Black investors made up just 5% of investment professionals in 2022, according to Deloitte.
Enter Dreamward.
Poncelet and Posey, who trained at the VC Lab Venture Institute, want to use their connections within the tech industry to help match Black founders with potential funding opportunities, either through Dreamward or via other mechanisms.
“It’s hard for the venture capitalists and angel groups to reach out to founders of color, specifically Black founders, because they don’t have a lot of those relationships,” said Poncelet.
Dreamward’s fund is geography and sector agnostic, though it will focus on startups coming out of the Pacific Northwest.
Poncelet and Posey are also behind a related group called the Washington State Black Angel Network (WBAN), which aims to grow the number of Black angel investors. They also helped launch the Black Founders and Funders group, and are trying to spur the creation of a Seattle chapter of BLCK VC, a national nonprofit advancing Black venture investors.
Poncelet was a senior engineer at Cisco and a R&D specialist at Fluke Networks. He’s also the director of information technology at Africatown Central District in Seattle.
Posey worked at Resolution Bioscience and Accelerate Diagnostics before joining Nodes Advisors AG, a Swiss investment group.
“With Dreamward Ventures and Washington State Black Angel Network, I want to help build and connect other diverse people in the ecosystem so that startups and VC doesn’t look quite so homogenous in the future,” Posey said in a statement.
Dreamward is hosting a pitch event on June 8 in Bellevue, Wash., featuring startups led by Black founders.
