What "Black and African American-Founded" Means Here
This filter describes the companies an investor wants to fund, not the investor's own background. An investor tagged this way on AngelMatch has said, directly or through their portfolio, that they prioritize backing startups founded or co-founded by Black or African American entrepreneurs. The investor pool itself is mixed: some are Black-led funds, many are not, and what they share is a stated interest in this founder population rather than a shared identity.
That distinction matters if you're a Chicago founder searching this list. You're not looking for investors who look like you. You're looking for investors who have already told the market, with their checks, that funding someone like you is part of their thesis. That's a much better filter for fundraising than demographics alone, because it points you toward people who've actually written the checks before.
It's also worth saying plainly: this list is a starting point, not the whole map. Plenty of investors who'd genuinely be excited about a Black-founded company in Chicago haven't tagged themselves this way, either because they don't sort their thesis by founder demographics at all or because their profile simply hasn't caught up with how they actually invest. If this narrower list runs dry, the broader Chicago investors roster is worth working through too, especially once you've got a warm intro or two from the names on this page.
Who's in the Database for This Market in Chicago
Venture capitalists make up the largest share of Chicago's Black and African American-founded focused investors, followed by private equity investors and micro VCs. A smaller group of individual angels and angel groups rounds out the list. If you're early and pre-revenue, the angels and micro VCs on this list are usually a faster, more accessible first conversation than the larger venture funds.
Stage-wise, early stage venture and seed are the most common focus among this group, with pre-seed and Series A also well represented. That skew toward early stages is good news if you're raising your first outside round: most of the Chicago investors on this list are set up to write that check, not to wait for you to prove traction at scale first. You can browse the full roster, filter by venture capitalists or by stage, and pull contact details straight from the investor database.
Nationally, AngelMatch's database includes 950+ investors who share this same focus on Black and African American-founded companies, concentrated heavily in California and New York. Chicago's 40+ is a real but modest slice of that national pool, which tells you something useful: this isn't a niche list with three names on it, but it's also not a market where you can afford to skip the local players in favor of only chasing the big coastal names.
Look past the Black and African American-founded tag on this Chicago group, and one secondary focus shows up more than any other: health care. It's the single most common additional interest across the sample, by a wide margin. E-commerce, advertising, talent management, payments, and cybersecurity all come up regularly too, and a noticeable slice of the group also carries a Women Founded tag alongside this one, which suggests some of these investors are backing more than one underrepresented-founder thesis at once, not just this one. If you're building in health care or e-commerce specifically, that overlap is worth knowing before you write your outreach list, since it means your sector and your founder story are both already inside several of these investors' stated interests.
Chicago's Own Push to Fund Black Founders
The clearest example of Chicago building its own infrastructure for this is Fifth Star Funds, a nonprofit based in River North that bills itself as the first friends-and-family fund in the United States built specifically for tech founders of color. Founded in 2021, it has raised $1.4 million to date and writes early checks to help Black founders clear the friends-and-family round, which is often the hardest money to raise because it depends on your personal network having capital to give in the first place.
Fifth Star set a 2026 goal of raising $450,000 to back at least six startups, and by the end of 2025 it was already halfway there. In 2025 it also partnered with LongJump, a founder-led venture fund in Chicago, to add coaching, coworking space, and vendor discounts for the companies it invests in, and it landed a $125,000 grant from the Richard L. Duchossois Foundation to help formalize how it evaluates pre-seed founders. About half the companies it backed last year were AI-driven, including an online vintage marketplace and an EV charging startup, which gives you a sense of the range it's willing to fund.
If you're a Black founder in Chicago and you haven't closed your friends-and-family round yet, a group like Fifth Star is worth reaching out to before you start knocking on venture doors. It exists precisely because that early money is the hardest to get, and it's built to help you clear it.
Fifth Star isn't the only piece of that infrastructure, either. The Duchossois Foundation grant it landed in early 2026 was earmarked specifically to help it understand how overlooked founders validate an idea and get ready for pre-seed investment, which is exactly the gap between "I have an idea" and "I'm ready to raise" that trips up a lot of first-time founders regardless of who's funding them. And the LongJump partnership matters for a practical reason beyond the coaching and coworking space: it puts Fifth Star's portfolio companies in front of a working Chicago venture fund before they're formally raising from one, which shortens the distance between a friends-and-family check and a first institutional one.
The Bigger Funding Picture, and Why Chicago Doesn't Escape It
It's worth being honest about the national backdrop here, because it shapes how hard you'll need to work regardless of city. U.S. startups with a Black founder or co-founder raised $942 million in venture funding in 2025, or about 0.32% of all U.S. venture funding, according to Crunchbase. That's a sharp drop from the $5.2 billion raised in 2021, itself only 1.5% of the total that year. Funding for Black founders has picked up a little in 2026, but it's still a small fraction of the overall market, and most of the recent gains have come from a handful of large, AI-heavy rounds rather than a broad recovery.
None of that is Chicago-specific, and it doesn't mean the picture here is bleaker or brighter than anywhere else. What it does mean is that the seed-to-Series A gap this data points to is real and worth planning around: a lot of Black-founded startups close a partial seed round and then struggle to hit the growth metrics Series A investors expect before running out of runway. That's exactly the gap groups like Fifth Star are trying to plug at the earliest stage, and it's why sequencing your raise (friends-and-family, then local pre-seed and seed checks, then broader venture capital) tends to work better than trying to skip straight to a big institutional round.
It's also worth watching where the 2026 recovery money is actually going. Most of the national gain so far has come from a small number of outsized AI rounds rather than a broad increase in deal count, which means the average early-stage Black founder isn't feeling much of that recovery yet. Don't read a headline number like $643 million and assume the market has loosened up across the board. Assume it hasn't, plan your raise as if the seed-to-Series A gap is still there, and treat any sign that it's gotten easier as a pleasant surprise rather than something to bank on.
How to Approach Chicago's Black-Founder-Focused Investors
Start closer to home than you might expect. A local, early-stage-focused fund or angel that already backs founders like you is usually a warmer conversation than a coastal firm that's never met you, and Chicago's investor pool here skews early enough that a first-time founder has a real shot. Lead with what you're building and why it matters, not with your fundraising history.
Since seed is the second most common stage on this list behind early stage venture, don't wait until you have a full seed deck polished to start these conversations. A number of these investors are comfortable meeting founders early and watching how they build before a formal round even opens, so treat the first meeting as a relationship, not a pitch you either win or lose on the spot.
Angel checks on this list, like angel checks generally, mostly run $25,000 to $500,000, while the venture capitalists and private equity investors in the group write larger checks, typically $2 million to $100 million or more depending on the round. Expect to give up somewhere around 15% to 25% of the company in an early round, and build your ask around what you actually need for the next 12 to 18 months rather than a round number that sounds impressive.
Because this Chicago group skews early stage, don't be afraid to raise in stages instead of one big round. A friends-and-family check from a group like Fifth Star, followed by a few angel checks in the $25,000 to $50,000 range, followed by a lead investor at seed, is a normal and often smarter path than trying to close $500,000 from a single source. It also gives you more chances to bring in investors whose other interests, like health care or e-commerce, line up with what you're building, instead of betting everything on one relationship.
Once you've got a short list, personalize every outreach message. A generic pitch email to a Black-founder-focused investor undercuts the whole point of targeting them in the first place, since the entire reason they're on this list is that they've said this founder population matters to them specifically. Reference why their stated focus and your company actually fit before you ask for anything, and keep the message short enough that it actually gets read.
A list of 40 names sounds small next to the thousands of investors on some of AngelMatch's bigger filters, but that's exactly why it rewards a more careful process than a mass email blast. Tools like email outreach software can help you send a personalized version of your pitch to each name instead of one generic template to all of them, which matters more here than on a list ten times the size.
Staying Organized With a Short, High-Value List
Keep track of who you've contacted, what they said, and when to follow up. Fundraising drags on when founders lose the thread on their own conversations, not when investors are slow to respond. A simple fundraising CRM beats a spreadsheet you forget to update, especially once you're juggling Fifth Star, a few local angels, and a couple of venture funds at the same time.
Chicago's Black and African American-founded-focused investor list is small enough to work through by hand, which is actually an advantage: you can afford to research each one, not just spray a template at all 40. Start with the local, early-stage names, use Fifth Star and similar groups to build momentum before you approach larger checks, and let the stage mix of this list guide how you sequence your raise.
Black and African American-Founded investors
