Fantastic Beasts TV, one of UKBAA’s most recent members, has published a two-part showcase of 40 BAME-founded businesses seeking angel and VC investment, which members can sign up for here. Covering a wide range of sectors and funding stages, these two special editions of the Fantastic Beasts TV Global Deal Monitor allow investors to jump straight into each company’s pitch video.
Fantastic Beasts TV’s three co-founders are all, themselves, first-time BAME founders.
Co-founder and CEO Jiahui Li explains: “You can think of us as Netflix for pitch videos. Early-stage businesses are nothing without a great founding team and the best, fastest way to form an initial view on the investment opportunity is to watch the founders’ pitch. That’s obviously been harder to do in person, recently. Our task is to organise all the on-line pitch material that has blossomed during the lock-down and make it easily discoverable by investors according to their mandate or criteria. Relying upon serendipity to discover opportunities isn’t efficient – our search engine makes discovery systematic.
“Certainly now, there’s no issue for any investor who genuinely seeks out diverse founder talent… and there is an abundant supply of it. Globally, around a million companies seek VC funding each year but more than 99% of deals are rejected by any given VC, so founders have to reach a lot of investors before funding is secured. The devil in the detail is that the 1% that make it through are, for the most part, male, white and with a university education.
“This means that the other 99% is positively brimming with other-thinkers, drop-outs, minority ethnicities, women, and other diverse communities. We’ve been working with our fantastic VC partners around the world who have committed to pool their 99% with us so that they become discoverable by you”.
