Скачать или смотреть How I Scaled digitalundivided After the Pandemic to Accelerate Black & Latina Women Founders

I’m Lauren. I’m a 3x founder, early-stage investor, and global brand builder who has helped over 1500 women, 200 companies, and 100+ CEOs scale with purpose — and power.

This conversation was held on Reuters Momentum platform.

Becoming CEO of digitalundivided on June 1, 2020, meant stepping into the fire. With demand exploding overnight, we had to make a choice: stay localized or go all-in on virtual. We chose virtual, and it changed everything.

We went from serving founders in Atlanta and Newark to reaching them nationwide—multiplying our impact by 10x in a single year.

By leveraging Zoom and digital tools, we watched founders achieve five years of growth in just 24 months. They weren't just building businesses; they were breaking into healthcare and FinTech, learning to fail fast, and pivoting harder than ever.

We didn't just chase funding. We went after strategic capital—partnerships with tech leaders and institutions designed to pry open doors and smash bias. The result? A massive influx of data that forced us to evolve. We migrated a decade of info into Salesforce, built new baselines, and mixed hard data with real founder stories to make our impact undeniable.

We set our sights on doubling the valuations of 25% of U.S. companies led by Black and Latina women. But my team reminded me: you can't fix what you can't see. We needed to survey all women to truly benchmark the disparity.

When we dropped the December 2020 DIANE report, the media came calling—including CNN, wanting to feature 183 founders who'd raised over $1M since 2016. But we also uncovered a hard truth: some of the most successful founders had stayed in stealth mode, convinced their identity would limit their chances.

We're fighting a system where Black and Latina women get less than 0.5% of venture capital. All women? Under 2%. The remaining 98% goes to men. These aren't just bad numbers; they're symptoms of clunky systems failing to keep up—from broken telehealth rules to the nightmare of finding insurance for a remote, multi-state team.

This is the work. This is the fight.

#InclusiveInnovation #WomenInTech #BlackAndLatinaFounders #VentureCapital #Digitalundivided #FounderStories #PostPandemicPivot