INNOPOWER AND ELEVATE VENTURES ORIGINS
In its groundbreaking report entitled, The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction1, the Kansas City-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a thought leader in entrepreneurship noted: “Put simply, this paper shows that without startups, there would be no net job growth in the US economy.
This study reveals that new businesses less than five years old create all the latest job roles. The report explains that existing businesses generally create and destroy jobs at a relatively equal pace, which means that though job functions change, the number of openings doesn’t. Startups only develop new roles with no destruction function, so they stand alone as the driver of new job creation. Said more succinctly: no new startups, no new jobs.
Indiana is stepping up to create an environment that supports the startup, growth, and sustainability of Black Founders. Elevate Ventures/InnoPower Origins initiative aims to discover and develop early-stage startups by teaching them the skills and intelligent strategies to build big businesses with limited capital. Skilled entrepreneurs are the foundation of the free market. We aim to unleash the untapped potential of Black communities in Indiana and across America.
We aim to get more Black Founder from the pre-seed stage into the Seed Stage, where they can access financial support from Elevate Ventures.
This is where founders take the initial idea and turn it into a “Minimum Viable Product” or MVP. This is the first complete release of the offering, and while it may not have every feature needed, it’s enough to get it in the hands of some pilot users and gather their feedback, which is used to improve the product and build the “Go to Market Strategy” to engage and win customers.
The latest Crunchbase data shows that Black startup founders in the United States raised around $264 million out of the total $33.6 billion in venture capital allocated in Q4 2022. That’s an uptick from the $178 million — or 0.43% — the group raised in Q3.
U.S. Black founders raised an estimated $2.254 billion from the $215.9 billion in U.S. venture capital allocated last year. That’s about 1%, a slight drop from the 1.3% raised in 2021.
