UK broadcaster Channel 4 targets overlooked start-ups for investment

By Paul Sandle

LONDON, March 20 (Reuters) – British broadcaster Channel 4 will target start-ups often overlooked by venture capital funds, including those founded by female or Black entrepreneurs, for an investment scheme to provide advertising opportunities in exchange for equity.

The “Untapped” initiative uses criteria like gender, ethnicity, education and household income to find founders who have traditionally struggled to access capital, Channel 4 said on Wednesday.

Once identified, their business plans would be subject to the same scrutiny as Channel 4 Ventures’ previous investments.

Channel 4’s Chief Revenue Officer Verica Djurdjevic said Channel 4 Ventures, which has a 45 million pound ($57 million) portfolio of consumer-based investments, was part of the broadcaster’s push to diversify its revenue beyond advertising.

She said Untapped would unearth opportunities to invest in promising companies.

“We want to make sure that a significant proportion of the deals being brought forward for approval come from a broader range of founders,” she said in an interview.

It also aligns with Channel 4’s remit to reflect the diversity of modern Britain, she said, and it would stimulate the fund’s co-investors in the ecosystem to broaden their outlook.

Channel 4 Ventures examined the profiles of hundreds of founders of companies valued at 100 million pounds or more since 2013 using data from LinkedIn and Pitchbook to identify the factors that could made it harder to access funding.

It found that 94% of founders were men, while white university graduates were ten times more likely to have founded a successful consumer company than a Black graduate, and nearly twice as likely as an Asian graduate.

Graduates from Oxford or Cambridge Universities or their U.S. equivalents also had significant advantages, the data showed, and were 51 times more likely to receive funding than a graduate from university not ranked in the top 100 worldwide.

($1 = 0.7878 pounds)

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)

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