With $36 million venture funding commitments, the Artemis Fund, which supports underrepresented founders, closed on its second fund.
In 2019, Leslie Goldman Tepper, Stephanie Campbell, and Diana Murakhovskaya established Artemis, calling the company after the Greek goddess of the hunt, wild animals, and women’s rights.

With offices in Houston and New York, Artemis conducts seed rounds for diverse founders in the fintech, commerce, and care industries. To date, the company has built a portfolio of over 20 firms, all of which are led by female entrepreneurs, with more than 60% of those CEOs being Black, Latinx, or immigrants.

Bank of America, Bank of Montreal, TIAA Nuveen’s Churchill Asset Management, Amazon, The Rockwell Fund, Texas Capital Bank, and Ballentine Partners are among the investors supporting the second fund.

“We really wanted to make sure that our LPs aligned with our long-term goal of backing diverse founders,” Murakhovskaya told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of pressure on that. We also want to grow with them.”

“Leading their rounds, advocating for them, providing access to national co-investors and instituting discipline early to hit real revenue growth” is the firm’s stated approach to “help move the funding needle for female and diverse founders.”

“It’s good business to have diverse perspectives, and we felt that there was money being left on the table, and we’re there to be the best at it,” she said. “We’re staying the course so we align the impact that we’re making with financial returns, not only for our LPs, but also for the communities that these entrepreneurs come from.”

It’s a wonderful thing that Artemis and other investors—like Amplifica Capital and Black Tech Nation Ventures, which recently established a $50 million fund—are investing more money in female and underrepresented founders. My colleague Dominic-Madori Davis, who analyzed the figures on venture capital funding to these demographics earlier this month, says that VC investment itself is still very static in these areas.

Black founders in the U.S. raised 0.48% of all venture dollars given last year, or roughly $661 million out of $136 billion, marking a drop in funding since 2021. For the previous two years, 2% of the financing total went to women.

Read More: https://chiefwomenleaders.com/