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- 🌎 Chicago's Founder Diversity
Welcome to the Driver’s Seat #44 🚙
Thanks to everyone who stopped by the Drive Chicago office this week for our AI in Life Sciences seminar. 👇🏽
The seminar was a great opportunity to bring together the biotech community in Chicago and explore ways for builders and investors to join forces to find new pathways for advancement.
📍 Today’s Lineup:
🌎 Chicago's Founder Diversity
🌊 Windy City Water Innovation
📊 Chart of the Week
🗺 Events Around the City
🔙 Previous Issues of the Driver’s Seat
🌎 Chicago's Founder Diversity
Chicago Blend unveiled their 2023 Founder Diversity Report, continuing their annual tradition of showcasing how Chicago distinguishes itself from other tech hubs.
The collected data was pulled from 307 startups, which were founded between 2018 and 2023. The startups collectively raised over $2.9B in VC funding during these years.
Here are two of my biggest takeaways:
Chicago is the #1 city for women founders
36.5% of venture-backed companies in Chicago (112 out of 307) started between 2018 and 2023 have at least one woman founder.
This surpasses the gender representation rates in cities like Boston, SF, NYC, and Miami.
In the US, women made up only 13.2% of all startup founders in 2023.
Chicago is the second top city for startups founded by people of color.
Chicago ranks second with 24.4% of venture-backed companies founded by people of color.
Surpassing cities like LA, NYC, and Austin.
44% of VC funding in the past five years went to minority-founded companies in Chicago.
Why This Matters
There's still much work to be done to further democratize access to funding, yet it's encouraging to see that Chicago remains committed to seeking out the best founders wherever they may be.
🌊 Windy City Water Innovation
The Water Investment
Great Lakes ReNew, part of a six-state collaboration, was chosen as one of 10 teams (out of 700 submissions) for a nationwide $1.6B water innovation investment.
Each of the awarded 10 teams will receive up to $15M in the first two years. And ReNew can receive up to $160M.
This funding is part of the NSF's Regional Innovation Engines program.
The Impact
This coalition is supported by Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, with Illinois providing an additional $2M.
The funding aims to eliminate harmful "forever chemicals" like PFAS and recover valuable minerals like lithium from wastewater.
The vision is to enable US manufacturers to repurpose these minerals for domestic battery and fertilizer production, reducing reliance on imports.
📊 Chart of the Week
Four months ago, we launched the Chicago branch of AI Tinkerers out of the Drive office.
Our initial thesis was that Chicago needed less happy hours and more hackathons. The aim was to create a hub for the AI technical community to create connect and collaboration, while sharing excitement for the potential of language models.
By emphasizing a curated community — targeting builders actively engaged with LLMs and eager to present their projects to a live audience — we've expanded the Chicago AI Tinkerers community from zero to 267 members in just four months.
Registration for our next AI Tinkerers Chicago meetup just went live. Learn more.
🗺️ Events Around The City
mPOWER Black Founders Program Graduation
Hosted by mHUB
Monday
Chicago Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup
Hosted by COSDIM
Wednesday
The Next Evolution of Architecture & Construction
Hosted by 1871
Wednesday
Tech Talks
Hosted by 1871
Thursday
👋 See you next week!
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram for even more Chicago startup news and photos of my favorite restaurants in the city.
Came across this recently: A new accelerator only in Chicago for young builders.
“1 Year + up to $200k to build. If you fail, we find you a job.”
Things are cookin !
— Landon (@landon20s)
8:32 PM • Jan 27, 2024
