In March 2022, Serena Williams closed a $111 million fund with one explicit goal: back the founders traditional venture capital keeps passing over. Norwest, LionTree, the Kapor Foundation, and Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG all wrote checks into it. Today, roughly 79% of her portfolio founders are women or people of color, and 14 of her portfolio companies have hit unicorn status.
Black founders still raise less than 1.2% of all venture capital funding in the U.S. If you are building a company and you keep hitting that wall, I want you to read the rest of this carefully.
What Serena Ventures actually is.
Serena Williams started angel investing around 2014, quietly backing companies like Impossible Foods and MasterClass years before most of the industry took her seriously as an investor instead of a celebrity name. She turned that track record into an institutional fund, closing Serena Ventures Fund I at $111 million in 2022, the same year she retired from tennis.
The fund invests from pre-seed through Series A, mostly in financial inclusion, health equity, and inclusive technology. Of the 85+ companies in the portfolio, 79% are led by underrepresented founders: 47% Black, 54% women, 11% Latino. Fourteen have reached unicorn status, including MasterClass, Impossible Foods, Tonal, and Noom.
Alison Rapaport Stillman, a partner at the fund, has said it plainly: they bet on the best founders, period. The portfolio data suggests the best founders are disproportionately the ones the rest of the industry keeps overlooking.
Who qualifies for the Serena Ventures pitch competition.
Serena Ventures runs an annual pitch competition with Black Women in Venture Capital and LinkedIn, built specifically for Black, Hispanic, Latino, and Latinx founders who don't have a warm introduction into VC. Run through the eligibility list from recent cycles:
At least one founder in the CEO or C-suite seat identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx. This is not a diversity add-on. It is the entry requirement.
You are building a for-profit company. Nonprofits do not qualify. Past cycles have welcomed consumer goods, SaaS, healthcare, fintech, edtech, media, climate tech, AI, and ecommerce, though the fund says it isn't rigid about category.
You are incorporated in the U.S., or you're planning to be.
You have real traction. An MVP or a genuine customer base, not just a deck.
You have raised less than $1 million in dilutive funding. This program targets the earliest stage, before the round that's hardest to close on your own.
Every team member is 18 or older.
Building at an HBCU specifically? Serena also judges a separate track, the Invesco QQQ Legacy Classic pitch competition, run with Amazon's Black Business Accelerator, Audible, and Public.com. Past winner Khalid David, a Morehouse College grad, took home $1 million for TracFlo, his construction cost-tracking platform.
What the application looks like.
Applications open through serenaventures.com/competition. Here's the process, based on the most recent cycle:
You submit online, and a panel of Serena Ventures and Black Women in Venture Capital professionals reviews every application. Five finalists get flown to New York City to pitch live in front of Serena Williams and a panel of industry judges.
First place wins $100,000. Second place wins $50,000. Third wins $15,000. Every finalist, not just the winners, walks away with a spot in the Serena Ventures network.
The exact open dates shift year to year, so confirm the current window at serenaventures.com/competition before you build a deck around a deadline. If the competition isn't open when you're reading this, the fund still invests directly, pre-seed through Series A, in founders who fit the thesis.
Why this matters beyond the check.
Venture capital has a distribution problem. The dollars concentrate at the top, and the founders furthest from that concentration, Black women especially, get filtered out before they ever land a meeting. Serena built her fund and her competition to intervene in that number directly, not just talk about it.
Fourteen unicorns out of a portfolio that's 79% underrepresented founders is the proof the bet works. 1.2% is the proof the rest of the industry still isn't taking it seriously enough.
If you know a Black, Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx founder with real traction and no warm intro to a VC, send them this today.
For another look at what it takes to build a fund for founders venture capital ignores, read how Arlan Hamilton built Backstage Capital from sleeping on airport floors to backing 200+ startups.
Jenny
P.S. Fund criteria and competition windows change year to year. Confirm the current cycle directly at serenaventures.com/competition before you submit anything.