Doing More With Less?
Founder Diversity and Capital Efficiency in Regulation Crowdfunding, 2016-2025
Jack Jesaitis. Research advisor: Sherwood Neiss.
Published by Crowdfund Capital Advisors, October 2026
Data source: CCLEAR
Abstract
Regulation Crowdfunding has been a fully disclosed, open capital market since May 2016, which makes it possible to test a question venture capital's own data cannot answer on its own: do underrepresented founders convert capital into results more efficiently than their peers? Drawing on the complete population of 11,140 Reg CF offerings filed between 2016 and 2025, this report finds that the answer is intersectional. Female-only and minority-only founders each show real capital efficiency advantages that survive controls for deal size, industry, geography and security type. Founders who are both female and minority do not receive the combined benefit of those two effects, a shortfall that appears independently across three separate outcome measures.
Key findings
- Representation rose faster than capital. The share of offerings with a female founder, and separately with a minority founder, each roughly doubled from 2016 to 2023, from about 15 percent to roughly 30 to 32 percent. The share of dollars raised by those groups stayed in the high teens to low twenties throughout.
- Female-only founders are funded at twice the odds of comparable offerings with neither identity, and raise approximately 46 percent more.
- Minority-only founders show the same advantage once separated from founders who are also female: 1.36 times the odds of being funded, and 13.6 percent more raised.
- Founders who are both female and minority do not get the combined benefit. Their amount-raised advantage disappears entirely and their follow-on raise rate, 11.8 percent, is the lowest of all four groups.
- What founders build predicts outcomes far more than where they live. Security type and industry sector both outweigh geography, which was not a significant predictor at all.
Download the full report
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License the underlying data
The findings in this report are drawn from CCLEAR, Crowdfund Capital Advisors' proprietary database of the Regulation Crowdfunding market, tracked continuously since the market's first filings in May 2016. CCLEAR is not a public dataset. Researchers and institutions who want to replicate, extend, or build on this analysis can license access to the underlying offering-level data.
Contact: data@cclear.ai