Vice President Kamala Harris announced Friday the Biden administration has awarded $32 million to support women- and minority-owned small businesses in North Carolina.

The funding will spur an additional $60 million in private investment, bringing the total to $92 million, Harris said.

The vice president made the announcement on Durham’s Black Wall Street. In the early 1900s, the city was known for its African American entrepreneurship, with businesses such as N.C. Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Mechanics and Farmers Bank lining Parrish Street.

The funding announced Friday, part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan, will go to 10 minority- and women-led venture capital firms on Black Wall Street. They will invest the more than $90 million in early-stage small businesses in the state.

The businesses that will benefit include clean-energy companies, artificial intelligence firms and other technology companies. 

“This is just further testament to the capacity that is here that is calling for this kind of attention and these resources,” Harris said. “It is testament to the innovation that is occurring right here and the need then for us from Washington, D.C., to understand how the nation benefits when we show the capacity of communities, when they receive this kind of support and investment.”

According to the World Economic Forum, businesses founded by women received only 2% of all venture capital investment in 2022. And Black-founded companies receive just 1% of all VC funding, according to data from Crunchbase.

The Biden administration is hoping to raise those numbers by injecting more money into minority- and women-led VC firms that will in turn invest in minority- and women-owned small businesses.

It is also focused on spreading the money to areas outside of California, New York and Massachusetts, which have received 70% of venture capital investment over the past decade.

“Not everyone has access to opportunity, but when provided with access, the talent is there, the capacity is there, the drive’s there, the ambition is there, and … economic growth results,” Harris said.

“The president and I have been very intentional about the work that we are doing to invest in communities in many ways, including through small businesses,” the vice president added.

To date, the Biden administration has invested more than $3 billion in entrepreneurs and small businesses in North Carolina.

And throughout the country, nearly $3 billion in American Rescue Plan funding and another $1.4 billion through partnerships with private VC firms is yielding another $30 billion in private investment across 46 states and territories.

The latest North Carolina VC firms receiving funding include:

• Nex Cubed, which help launch and scale businesses started by alumni, students and faculty from historically Black colleges and universities. 
• RevTech Labs, a majority female and Latina-owned center that supports underrepresented founders in financial, health, and insurance technologies.
• LaVert Ventures, a woman-owned fund focused on investing in precision agriculture, crop protection, and indoor agriculture.
• Latimer Ventures, which supports Black and Hispanic enterprise software companies.

Also in attendance at Friday’s announcement were North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo.

In his brief remarks, Cooper said, “Think of all the innovation that's being left on the sidelines due to artificial barriers.”

Adeyemo said he meets a lot of venture capitalists in his job, “but they don't look like the venture capitalists I saw today.”

“Today I saw venture capitalists that look like America and look like Black Wall Street,” he said. “People of color, women who are more likely to lend to the type of businesses that we visited today.”