October 27, 2022 — Sevetri Wilson is not your average tech company founder. She’s a Black woman, she has no coding experience, no cofounders and she’s primarily based in Louisiana, a state that venture capitalists evidently have a hard time finding on a map.
Most folks with such a profile have very long odds of raising meaningful venture capital money as VC investors have long struggled to invest in diverse leaders. Black founders raised $187 million in venture capital in the third quarter, which is just 0.43% of the total $43 billion deployed in the three months that ended in September, according to TechCrunch. The annual trend is down. Year to date, funding is slightly more than $2 billion for Black founders, compared with the $4.72 billion they raised in the record-setting year of 2021.
Even so, Wilson’s software startup, Resilia, has raised $35 million in a Series B venture funding round, the company told Forbes. Wilson, 35, not only defied the odds, she became one of the top-funded Black woman founders in tech.