By CultureBanx Team
- Michele Jawando, Allison Scott and Katy Knight unpack the idea that real AI agency means moving beyond access and representation toward ownership, capital and power
- Black-founded U.S. startups received just $942M of U.S. venture funding last year, even as AI captured 65.4% of all U.S. venture deal value
Artificial intelligence may be Silicon Valley’s hottest technology race, but for diverse communities, the stakes go well beyond which chatbot wins. The bigger questions are who owns the technology, who finances its growth and who gets a meaningful voice in deciding how it reshapes work, creativity, education and everyday life. With that in mind we reimagined out tech agency on Martha’s Vineyard with Michele Jawando, CEO of Omidyar Network, Allison Scott, CEO of Kapor Foundation and Katy Knight, President of Siegel Family Endowment. Their discussion reframed “tech agency” as something bigger than simply gaining access to AI tools. It is about having the economic and civic power to influence the systems behind them.
Why This Matters: Jawando distilled the idea into one line: “The thing that I like to lead with around agency is that it’s just a conversation about power and ownership,” she said. That distinction becomes especially important when following the money.
The U.S. venture market deployed $320 billion across 15,352 deals in 2025, according to the National Venture Capital Association’s 2026 Yearbook, with data from PitchBook. That represented a 51% increase in deal value and the second-highest annual total on record. Artificial intelligence alone captured 65.4% of total venture deal value, up from 50.9% in 2024.
Diverse founders barely participated in that capital boom. Crunchbase found that startups with a Black founder or co-founder received approximately $942 million in 2025, only 0.32% of total U.S. venture funding. That was one of the lowest shares in years and represented a decline of more than two-thirds compared with three years earlier.
Scott zeroed in on precisely that imbalance during the discussion by asking: “Who owns technologies? Who’s investing in technologies? Who is creating wealth from those technologies? Who are those technologies helping or hurting?”
The academic evidence makes those questions even harder to ignore. A 2026 Journal of Finance study analyzing the race of more than 160,000 U.S. founders and investors found that just 3.1% of VC-funded startups were Black-owned. Those companies raised approximately half as much venture capital as other startups. The researchers also found that Black VC partners invested more frequently in Black founders and that those investments produced higher successful exit rates.
For Scott, building diverse controlled investment infrastructure is therefore more than a diversity initiative, it is an economic strategy. She envisioned “six or seven big funds led by Black fund managers” managing roughly $150 million to $200 million each and backing companies with racial equity and responsible AI investment theses.
From Inclusion To Infrastructure: During these times it is imperative that we challenge an old tech industry formula around the idea that if we increase diverse representation inside existing institutions, we can assume equity will follow. However, AI presents an opportunity to rethink who builds technology, who funds it and which communities’ problems receive serious investment.
Education is another piece of that infrastructure. Access to technical education determines who has an opportunity to become an AI builder rather than simply an AI consumer. That makes computer science, AI literacy and exposure to technology careers economic development issues for communities, not simply education policy debates.
The goal cannot be just putting AI tools into historically excluded communities. It has to include giving those communities the knowledge, infrastructure and leverage to decide what AI should do.
Capital Is Power: For a creator, agency might mean having control over how original work trains AI models. For an educator, it could mean determining when algorithms belong in classrooms. For consumers, it means understanding what rights are surrendered when clicking “accept.”
Knight extended the ownership conversation to philanthropy, arguing that foundations need to recognize the economic power sitting inside their endowments. “We are not just philanthropy players,” she said. “We are private sector players in that way. And we can be really powerful because we sit on a lot of capital and that matters in this context.”
That thinking is already showing up in the sector. Kapor Foundation reported that Humanity AI was launched as a $500 million, five-year collaborative initiative focused on ensuring AI delivers broader social benefits. Its priorities include expanding computing education, strengthening worker power, supporting new AI solutions, developing safeguards and protecting civil rights and democracy.
AI capital is becoming extraordinarily concentrated. NVCA reports that AI companies captured approximately $222 billion in venture deal value during 2025, while AI represented 39.4% of venture deal count. In other words, the sector captured nearly two-thirds of investment dollars without accounting for two-thirds of deals.
Owning Our Agency: AI’s next chapter cannot be measured simply by how many people use generative AI, land technology jobs or gain access to new digital tools. The bigger scoreboard is ownership.
Current numbers illustrate the size of that challenge. Against a $320 billion U.S. venture market, Black-founded startups captured less than $1 billion in 2025. At the same time, AI companies secured $222 billion.
Jawando offered a telling measure of success, “when we have not just one or two of us that make it, but when you see entire ecosystems shifting because we’re there,” the balance of power changes.
That may be the real dividing line of the AI era. Access gets you through the door. Representation gets you into the room. Agency means having enough ownership, capital and power to help decide what gets built once you arrive.
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