We’ve partnered with the East London Inclusive Enterprise Zone (ELIEZ) for a series of events that encourage an open dialogue on race and culture following the Black Lives Matters movement and look at the issues faced by ethnically diverse and neurodiverse business founders.

Research suggests that just 0.24% of UK venture capital investment went to Black founders between 2009 and 2019, a total of just 38 entrepreneurs – with only 0.02% of venture capital investment going to Black female founders. At early-stage rounds of venture capital investment, only one Black female entrepreneur received funding – compared to 194 white female entrepreneurs. As a whole, businesses with ethnic minority teams received far less funding, but it was Black founders who fared the worst. Black people make up 3.3% of the UK population. It’s statistics like these that inspired Barclays Eagle Labs and the ELIEZ community create this series of events.

For our first event, we have partnered up with Social Tech Trust to speak with Nathalie Richards, founder of Edukit on how Nathalie created her app, which aims to help understand changing student mental health and wellbeing needs, provide students with instant, relevant support and view reports on issues and progress. We explore with Nathalie how she successfully is driving business growth and ask about challenges she experienced as a black female business leader she may have faced on her entrepreneurial journey.

This session will be live and fully accessible with live captioning taking place throughout and you will have the ability to ask your own questions.

Details to join will be sent out to everyone the day before, thank you for signing up and we hope you are looking forward to it as much as we are.