Insight’s New Fund & VC’s Worsening Diversity Problem

New efforts to back minority entrepreneurs and fund managers are relatively few and far between these days, especially compared to 2020, when heavyweights such as SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz and Google launched specialized funds to support underrepresented founders. 

One outlier is Insight Partners, which is planning to raise over $100 million to back venture capital funds led by diverse managers, according to two people familiar with the matter. Insight’s target fund would expand on the New York investment firm’s earlier effort in 2020, when its employees pledged $15 million of their personal capital to diverse early-stage fund managers, which it has previously described as managers identifying as Black, Latinx, women or LGBTQ+ who are raising a first or second fund. 

The fund—named Vision Capital 2020, after the year police killed George Floyd, setting off a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests—is a sign that some investors haven’t quietly abandoned the diversity pledges they made over the last two years. Still, Silicon Valley is looking less hospitable to minority founders than it was just a few years ago. And Insight itself could do a lot more when it comes to its own hiring practices.