- Founders’ Pool financial intelligence model combining AI, financial analysis and nontraditional signals including community and behavioral data is rethinking how entrepreneurs are evaluated for capital
- U.S. startups with a Black founder or co-founder received only $942M in venture funding, representing just 0.32% of total U.S. venture investment
For diverse entrepreneurs navigating a venture market where access to capital remains deeply uneven, raising money can be both a milestone and a trade-off. Founders’ Pool CEO Marvin Francois, believes the answer isn’t simply pushing more entrepreneurs toward traditional venture capital. He’s challenging a more fundamental part of the startup playbook including when founders should raise, how investors measure their potential and whether AI can help build a financial system that recognizes forms of value conventional underwriting often misses.
Why This Matters: U.S. startups with a Black founder or co-founder received only $942 million in venture funding in 2025, representing just 0.32% of total U.S. venture investment, according to Crunchbase. That funding total was down more than two-thirds compared with three years earlier.
Capital is also becoming increasingly concentrated at the top. In 2025, 70% of U.S. venture funding, more than $200 billion, went to just 389 companies raising rounds of $100 million or more, Crunchbase found. Translation, the startup economy isn’t simply determining which businesses receive money. It’s helping determine which founders get enough runway to turn an idea into something durable.
Francois, a former Wall Street banker is challenging one of startup culture’s most persistent assumptions that raising institutional capital early, automatically means a company is winning. Instead, he believes founders need greater control over when they raise, how their businesses are evaluated and what technology is allowed to influence their financial futures.
“I think one of the things that I’ve observed pretty consistently is that founders raise way too early,” Francois told CultureBanx during its Reimagining Our Tech Agency series.
His concern goes beyond dilution. Venture investors have obligations to generate returns for their limited partners, while founders may be pursuing missions requiring different timelines and definitions of success.
“When those two value systems are in conflict, the VC will always win,” Francois said.
A Different Credit Scorecard: AI is only as fair as the incentive structure it’s serving. Rather than making AI the entire proposition, Founders’ Pool combines large language models with internal financial models, analysis and expertise geared toward founders and operators. The potentially disruptive piece is what Founders’ Pool considers financially meaningful data.
Traditional underwriting tends to focus on familiar inputs. Francois stated additional signals could help reveal entrepreneurial resilience. Considering things like does a founder have peers who can help solve problems? Is there a support network when cash gets tight? What does spending behavior reveal? How connected is the entrepreneur to a broader business community? Founders’ Pool views those relationships as infrastructure, “almost as capital.”
That’s significant in an economy built heavily on small businesses. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, America has 36.2 million small businesses, representing 99.9% of all U.S. businesses. Those businesses employ 62.3 million people and account for 43.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.
Yet financing remains far from guaranteed. The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2026 Small Business Credit Survey found that among employer firms applying for loans, lines of credit or merchant cash advances, 42% received all of the financing they sought, 36% received some or most, and 22% received none.
Situational Awareness: Founders’ Pool isn’t asking entrepreneurs to reject capital, data or AI. The platform is asking something more fundamental. Who controls them and whose definition of value gets coded into the infrastructure?
For diverse founders, that conversation carries additional weight. When Black-founded startups captured just 0.32% of U.S. venture dollars in 2025, questions about who gets recognized as investable aren’t theoretical, they’re embedded in where billions of dollars ultimately flow.
If capital allocation continues rewarding familiar networks, conventional data and access to existing resources, innovation risks becoming a reflection of who the financial system already recognizes, rather than who has the strongest ideas or businesses. Founders’ Pool is betting technology can help write a different equation that gives founders more agency over the financial systems assessing them.
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