- The startup wants to invite more Black investors to embrace the entire community.
- Today the company has just under 15% of Black employees in the number of employees it has right now.
It is normal for you to expect that a startup that makes community-building software would be successfully running during a pandemic when it is so difficult for others to be successful. Bevy is a startup company that has raised a $40 million Series C. Accel led this round which saw the participation from Upfront Ventures, Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith, and LinkedIn. But the most notable part of this investment which makes it remarkable is that it includes 25 Black investors. These investors represent about 20% of the investment.
James Lower is a management consultant and entrepreneur who is one of those Black investors. He also happens to be the first Black employee hired at McKinsey in 1968. He saw this opportunity for the approach to be a model to bring about investment from other under-represented groups. “I know for a fact because of my friendship and my network that there are a lot of people, if they had the opportunity to invest in opportunities like this, they will do it, and they have the money to do it. And I think we can be the model for the nation,” Lowery said.
In a very less fortunate situation, there has been a dearth of black VC investments in startups like Bevy. Only about 3% of Venture Capitalists are black. Whereas about 81% of VC firms don’t have even a single Black investor.
Black VC investments:
Kobie Fuller is a general partner at investor Upfront Ventures and a Bevy board member. He runs his community called Valence. According to him investments like this can lead to a flywheel effect. This can bring about an increased amount of Black investment in the startups.
“So for me, it’s about how we get more Black investors on cap tables of companies early in their lifecycle before they go public, where wealth can be created. How do we get key members of executive teams to be Black executives who can create wealth through options and equity? And how do we also make sure that we have proper representation on the boards of these companies? We can make sure that the CEOs and the C suite is held accountable towards the diversity goals,” Fuller said.
He sees Bevy which is a software platform facilitating community as a logical starting point for this approach. Free things that the company needs to look at the broader communities that have been serving so far. Making sure that our workforce is appropriately represented from a perspective of having appropriate levels of Black employees to the board to the actual investors is just good business sense,” he said.
But the angle of diversity has not deterred the investor group. Bevy CEO and co-founder Derek Anderson said last May when George Floyd was murdered. His firm did not have a single person of color within the company’s 27 employees and not a single Black investor. He wanted that to change and found that diversification was not only the right thing to do from a human perspective it was also correct from a business perspective.
Anderson’s response:
“We realized that if we started including people from the Black and brown communities inside of Bevy that the collective bar of talent was going to go up. We were going to look from a broader pool of candidates, and what we found as we’ve done this is that as the culture has started to change, the customer satisfaction is going up, our profits and our revenues — the trajectory is going up — and I see this thing is completely correlated,” Anderson said.
Last summer the company set a to wear gold to acquire 20% of employees being Black. Why the number of employees is still very tiny, the startup went from 0 to 5% in June and by September it had already reached 10%. Today it is just under 15% and has expectations to hit 20% by summer.
