UK tech startups dominate Google’s Black Founders Fund

Google has revealed 40 black-led tech startups from Europe that can obtain $100,000 (£82,000) funding from its $4m (£3.3m) Black Founders Fund, with 26 of the startups being UK-based.

The Black Founders Fund comes from the tech big’s Google for Startups initiative that helps founders scale their startups. The fund was created to deal with racial inequality in enterprise capital funding.

This week the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan held a meet-up for London-based founders, as a part of London Tech Week.

Khan mentioned: “London celebrates the range of its enterprise neighborhood and it’s incredible to see that 60 per cent of the businesses chosen for Google’s newest Black Founders help programme are from London.”

This continues Khan’s campaign to attract tech funding into the capital. Khan final month went on a tour of the US, together with Silicon Valley to satisfy with senior tech executives.

UK startups on the checklist embody vogue tech Sojo UK, synthetic intelligence firm Yuty, fintech Goodloans and on-demand enterprise college Framework.

Framework’s co-founder Asha Haji featured on UKTN’s Founder in 5 sequence, talking about scaling up a enterprise.

“Final yr’s founders have generated important returns for buyers – in some circumstances greater than 10 instances the preliminary funding in lower than a yr,” mentioned Rachael Palmer, head of VC and startup partnerships, EMEA, Google.

Founders of the 2021 cohort have gone on to boost £64m in additional funding in response to Google.

Members of the cohort will probably be allotted $100,000 (£82,000) in non-dilutive money awards, as much as $200,000 in cloud credit and advert help, mentoring in addition to entry to Google’s connections.

The fund was launched final yr with £1.5m funding earlier than this lower than 0.25% of enterprise capital went to black-led startups within the UK in response to State of European Tech.

“By the fund, we’re hoping to ignite the change wanted throughout your entire startup ecosystem, ship extra alternatives for underrepresented entrepreneurs and in the end change the face of what a profitable founder seems to be like,” added Palmer.

Final month noticed the UK’s competitors watchdog launch an investigation into Google over on-line advert dominance in addition to dealing with a UK lawsuit over its use of NHS medical knowledge belonging to 1.6 million folks in 2015.