BHM 2023: Celebrating Leaders in our Ecosystem featuring Lise Birikundavyi
February marks Black History Month in Canada, celebrating the many stories, journeys, hardships and accomplishments made by Black communities and individuals across the country. At entrepreneurship@UBC, we seek to highlight and celebrate leaders in our ecosystem doing fantastic, impact-based work, sharing their stories and learning from their insights about the effect their work has on our communities.
This year's nationwide theme for Black History Month is "Ours to Tell", learning more about the stories of Black communities/individuals and hearing their histories, successes, sacrifices and triumphs. From this prompt, we connected with champions in our wider innovation ecosystem to learn about their work and goals, and share what they have to say - widely! - with our own community. Learn more about Lise Birikundavyi below and check out our other interviewees here!
Meet Lise Birikundavyi, Managing Partner at BKR Capital:
About Lise:
Lise Birikundavyi is the Co-founder and Managing Partner for BKR Capital, the first institutional, black-led VC fund in Canada. Lise is an innovative finance specialist who has worked with several international institutions and acts as guest lecturer for prestigious organization, including Oxford University and the International Olympic Committee Accelerator managed by the Yunus Sports Hub.
She began her career in the hedge fund industry in Montreal and her interest in mixing attractive financial returns with long term societal impact is what inspired her to transition to the impact finance sector. She has experience across the investment spectrum: from funds of funds and VCs, to being the transition CEO of a tech start-up.
Lise is a CFA charterholder; she also holds an MBA from the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance/ Shanghai JiaoTong University, where she wrote her thesis on impact investing, and a trilingual BBA from HEC Montreal. Lise is fluent in French, English and Spanish, and has a conversational level of Mandarin.
She is a firm believer in using the forces of capital markets as a basis for more inclusive wealth creation and sustainable poverty alleviation.
Tell us about your work: what are you doing that is making an impact?
BKR Capital is Venture Capital firm investing in Black-led technology startups. Because we value diversity, black-led means that at least 25% of ownership or executive management identifies as part of the Black community. By funding talented and resilient underrepresented founders, we are showing that talent is distributed equally and that there is an important benefit for Venture Capitalists to go outside of their inner circles to find that talent. Through our work we want to make diversity a norm in the investment space so that the need for separate funds focused on diverse founders eventually ceases to exist.
What’s been your greatest lesson - and accomplishment - through your work?
The narrative which you build around someone has the power to weaken them or to empower them. Our aim is the latter.
One of the biggest hurdles that Black founders face is the lack of role models; seeing people who look like them, succeed in the investment ecosystem. In that context, the fact that we @BKR can enable the creation of such role models to change the perspective of an entire generation of young founders, giving them the confidence to raise funds and to set up their own businesses, is probably the most fulfilling part of the job, and our biggest accomplishment.
What communities are you supporting in the work you do?
As recipients of only 1% of all VC funding in 2022, Black Founders are one of the most underfunded and underrepresented groups in the North American venture capital and private equity markets. We see in this a missed opportunity for everyone as innovation is beneficial to all, and allowing great minds to participate to any conversion moves us all further in our thinking and in our abilities. As such, we do believe we are supporting the Canadian system as a whole by contributing to closing this funding gap.
What message are you wanting to share - widely! - with our community?
I want to highlight that diversity is not a “nice to have” of a “feel good” parameter but a “must have” for competitive businesses to thrive. Diversity is proven to have improved innovation and financial returns in companies.
"I want to highlight that diversity is not a “nice to have” of a “feel good” parameter but a “must have” for competitive businesses to thrive."
- Lise Birikundavyi
Apart from funding Black Entrepreneurs, what other support are you providing to the ecosystem?
At BKR Capital, we feel that orientating the next generation of investors, founders and stakeholders towards diversity is equally important. With this is mind we have launched our BKR VC Fellowship program; a 9-months immersion program designed to make the participating fellows learn through practical application. The training they receive during the course of this program will polish them and prepare them for challenges they will face as investors. We believe that by having a more diverse pool of decision-makers in the VC space, we will naturally start seeing more diverse founders that are VC-backed as the pipeline will expand and opportunities will be better understood.
Thank you Lise for sharing your story!