Prime Highlights
- Black women entrepreneurs in Canada are increasingly securing venture and non-dilutive funding, signaling a positive shift in a startup ecosystem that once largely overlooked their potential.
- Founder-led innovation across sectors such as technology, healthcare, sustainability, and cybersecurity is proving that inclusive investment delivers strong business performance and long-term economic value.
Key Facts
- Women-led startups in Canada accounted for just 4% of total venture capital investment in 2021, but this share rose to 12% by the first half of 2024, reflecting a notable improvement in funding access.
- Several Black women–founded companies have now raised more than $1 million each, demonstrating scalable business models, global ambition, and growing investor confidence.
Background:
Five years after a searing reckoning on funding inequity, signs of progress are emerging, though the journey toward parity remains far from complete.
Since then, Henry’s work has spanned venture ecosystems in the UK and West Africa, where she supported founders, helped design accelerators, wrote angel cheques, joined syndicates, and raised capital for her own fund. Returning to Canada’s venture landscape five years later, she now sees progress, incremental, uneven, but tangible.
Globally, venture capital activity involving female-founded or co-founded startups grew by nearly 60 percent between 2014 and 2023. Yet women-only founding teams still receive just around two percent of total venture dollars worldwide. Startups with at least one female co-founder fare better, capturing roughly 21 percent.
Canada mirrors this mixed picture. According to the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA), women-led startups accounted for only four percent of total VC investment in 2021. Henry and her firm Pitch Better have tracked six Black women founders who have each raised more than $1 million in venture and non-dilutive funding, evidence, she argues, of a shifting market rather than isolated exceptions.
Among them is Farnel Fleurant, founder of Montréal-based Workind, a modern benefits platform helping employers offer flexible, human-centred perks. Despite raising a modest $1.4 million seed round in 2023, Workind achieved 30 percent year-over-year growth and a 90 percent customer retention rate.
Also in Montréal, Karine Bah Tahe founded Oasis Learning, which develops just-in-time learning tools for multilingual and global teams.
“Black women founders are building companies that address climate change, healthcare equity, workforce integration, cybersecurity, and education,” she notes. “These are not niche ideas; they are the foundations of Canada’s future economy.”
