Black Founders Get 0.4% Of VC—Operator-Investors Are Changing That
The U.S. venture capital market has split into two. AI startups now account for nearly two-thirds of US VC investments, while everyone else competes for a shrinking share of capital, according to PitchBook. Black founders, who received just 0.4% of all U.S. venture funding in 2024—down from 1.3% at the 2021 peak—face that bifurcation at its sharpest edge, according to Crunchbase.
Black Operator Ventures (Black Ops VC), a $20 million Oakland-based seed fund built by and for Black founders, was designed for exactly this structural gap. Partner Antonia Dean—Harvard Law graduate turned brand operator, fund builder, and corporate venture investor—brings an operator's eye to a market that now demands one.
The Bifurcated Market And Who Pays The Price
The numbers behind the split are stark. Half of all venture dollars in 2025 went to just 0.05% of deals—capital concentration at a level that squeezes everyone outside the AI mega-round tier, according to PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. For non-AI seed companies—and for Black founders in particular—that squeeze compounds an existing structural gap. The 0.4% share Black founders received in 2024 represents a more than two-thirds decline from 2021, a drop that outpaced the overall VC market contraction by a significant margin.
Dean sees this dynamic clearly and she reframes it. During the 2023–24 capital slowdown, her deal flow didn't shrink so much as it hollowed out. The quantity of pitches stayed high, she says, but quality dropped—not because founders got worse, but because the best ones went inward.
"When they are hearing from the news, from publications like Forbes, that the capital markets have cooled," Dean observes, "a lot of those founders went inward and focused on building more resilient companies, they focused on business development, on converting new clients, on increasing customer value."
That observation carries a structural implication: The founders best positioned for a disciplined 2026 market are the ones who built discipline when capital dried up.
The Operator Advantage: Art, Science, And The Exceptional Deal
Black Ops VC was co-founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneurs James Norman and Sean Green—not finance-track investors, but operators who had raised capital for their own companies and understood, from the inside, where the system fails Black founders. Dean joined the team in 2023, bringing prior experience leading startup pipeline strategy at Comcast and raising a venture fund at Venture for America.
The result is a fund whose GP team evaluates deals the way operators, not analysts, would. Dean describes a selection framework that pressure-tests founder quality, not just market size. "Is this a good deal? Is this a great deal? Is this an exceptional deal?" she says. "Having the wherewithal to walk away when the answer is great but not exceptional"—that discipline, she argues, is what separates durable funds from vintage-specific ones.
The criteria go beyond traction metrics. "How does this person learn? How quickly can they react to what they've learned? How are they able to filter the advice and input that they're getting?" Dean notes. "Truly, that's what we're betting on. You're investing in the person at the seed stage."
That framing is increasingly aligned with where the broader market has landed. Nearly 90% of the value of the VC asset class is driven by the top 10% of companies, making selectivity not a philosophy but arithmetic, according to Cambridge Associates.
The Pivot Test: Edvisorly And Why Operators Invest Differently
The fund's investment in Edvisorly illustrates the operator model in practice. Black Ops backed Edvisorly, a Zillow-style platform that helps community college students identify transfer opportunities. The market reality was clear: Roughly 88% of students who enroll in two-year programs intend to transfer to earn a four-year degree, but only 6–12% annually do. The bottleneck, it turned out, wasn't awareness—it was transfer credit evaluation.
The founder pivoted to build EddyAI, a software platform that reads and transcribes academic transcripts with 99% accuracy, enabling students to see transfer pathways proactively and universities to process applications at scale. Dean didn't resist the pivot. "If I would say, no, no, you can't do that because I want you to still be Zillow for community college students," she says, "we would be missing a huge opportunity in the market."
For Dean, the lesson is structural, "The right person will follow the right opportunity. It may change from what they initially set out to solve."
What Founders Say: Partnership Over Capital
The operator model shows up in how portfolio founders describe their experience—in terms that go beyond capital deployment.
"I was intentional about partnering with investors who have actually built companies, and Black Ops VC stood out for their operator perspective—knowing when to lean in, when to connect us to the right expertise, and when to simply be present," explains Erica Plybeah, founder and CEO of MedHaul, a platform connecting medically underserved patients with transportation. "Founders need both a hug and a hammer, and the best investors know when to provide each. Antonia and her team truly embody that balance."
Jannae Gammage, co-founder and CEO of Cyphr, a communications security company, describes a similar dynamic. "Three key elements when thinking about Black Ops VC: genuine partnership, trust from day one, and consistent follow-through post-investment," Gammage says. "Black Ops VC has been the most dependable and helpful investors on our cap table. Their belief and partnership changed the trajectory of our company."
Fund II And The Long Game
Black Ops has its sights set on a second fund—a milestone that tests whether a thesis built during a downturn can command institutional capital in a recovery. Dean's goal is explicit and long-range. "Anyone can raise the first fund. I want to make sure Black Ops has raised a 15th fund, and I'm off retiring somewhere, and this firm is enduring," she explained.
Fund I was constructed with that durability in mind—institutional LPs including university endowments, corporate backers, and financial services institutions, rather than a base of individual high-net-worth investors. Notable backers include the University of Michigan, unicorn founders like Drew Houston of Dropbox, and venture investors like Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z. Two portfolio companies are currently in market and expected to close significant markups—the measure of valuation growth between rounds.
The timing is deliberate. Deal activity at pre-seed and seed has held steady, and median pre-money valuations across all stages are reaching new highs, according to PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. This is a signal that the disciplined Black founders built during the lean years is now the profile the market rewards most.
The Market Case for Closing the Gap
The argument for operator-investors backing Black founders is not a social argument, it is a market efficiency argument. Capital mispricing creates opportunity. Black founders who survived 2023 and 2024 without the VC lifeline built leaner, more capital-efficient businesses. Dean's fund is positioned to identify those companies at seed stage, before the broader market corrects.
"If all we can do is write a check," Dean says, "we will pass the deal along to someone who can add more strategic value."
In a market that now demands discipline, distribution advantage, and operator pattern-recognition above all else, that standard may be Black Ops VC's clearest edge.
Originally published in Forbes