While more women and founders of color are starting startups, investment in startups led by women, Black and Latinx founders continues to stay persistently low.

Startup accelerators are often the first step on a founder's investment journey, so it's critical to see which startup accelerators are most likely to invest in underrepresented founders.

We rank those accelerators with the highest proportion of diversity investments at the top, using this measure as a proxy for their propensity to invest in women and multicultural founders.

Our dataset includes U.S.-based startup accelerators via Crunchbase. I do want to point out, however, that Crunchbase only recently started tracking diversity investment metrics, so this data set might be a bit off.

In case you're curious to know what Crunchbase defines as “diversity investments,” it is my understanding that this number includes any investment in a startup that has been founded or is led by a founder that identifies with any of the following groups: Woman, Black or African American, Native America, Middle Eastern/North African, South Asia, East Asian, Southeast Asian, or Pacific Islander.

Here are the rankings for the best accelerators for underrepresented founders:

Google Launchpad Accelerator (43rd out of 44) and Microsoft Accelerator (41st) had among the lowest diversity investment rates in our research.

The most popular accelerators like 500 Startups (22nd), SOSV (26th), Y Combinator (28th), MassChallenge (29th), and Plug and Play (36th) rank toward the bottom of this list as well. Out of the biggest accelerators, only Techstars ranked toward the top at 17th place.

Smaller programs definitely seem to invest in underrepresented founders at higher rates. Accelerators such as FoodX (1st) and Starve Ups (5th) as well as university-affiliated programs such as MIT delta v (2nd) and Stanford's StartX (3rd) have the highest diversity investment rate, according to our research.

Those accelerators that seem most promising have both a high diversity investment rate and exit rate (rate at which portfolio companies are acquired or reach an IPO), such as StartX, Starve Ups, and Elemental Excelerator.

Best Small Accelerators for Women and Underrepresented Founders

Bigger isn't better when it comes to startup accelerators, as we have indicated before. In the case of women and ethnic minority founders, the same is true.

For accelerators that have between 10 and 100 investments, top programs have diversity investment rates of fifty or more percent!

What does this mean for female or underrepresented founders?

Key Take-away

It's important to look beyond the usual suspects. The best accelerators for women and underrepresented founders are often smaller programs, such as co.lab, that have both a high exit rate and diversity investment rate.

About Beta Boom

Beta Boom is a pre-seed fund investing $150-350K in software startups building the future for women and multicultural consumers. Plus, we help our startups succeed with daily support from our growth team.