Measuring Diversity in Baltimore’s Startup Ecosystem

By Lindsay Thompson, Mac McComas, and Kelli Tubman-White | Commissioned and sponsored by UpSurge Baltimore.

In 2022, UpSurge Baltimore partnered with the 21st Century Cities Initiative at Johns Hopkins University to field a survey measuring diversity at the employee, leadership, and board level in Baltimore’s startup ecosystem. The goal was to create baseline data on diversity to benchmark future progress toward UpSurge’s mission of making Baltimore the first Equitech city. This report builds on and complements existing work to quantify and explore diversity in Baltimore’s startup ecosystem, most notably by Baltimore Tracks. In this report, we begin by highlighting Baltimore City’s comparative advantages for becoming an Equitech city, address the business case for diversity in tech, and conclude by sharing the results of our survey, including comparisons of diversity in Baltimore startups to Baltimore City as a whole, and comparisons of diversity in Baltimore startups to national estimates of diversity.