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african americans in tech
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For years Black women have fought for a seat at the table in their respective industries. People of color are often excluded and neglected in the tech industry thus proving it difficult to find safe spaces to convene together. The disparity for Black women in tech has made it a struggle to level the playing field across the board, but these three founders created a platform to disrupt the lack of diversity in tech and empower Black women looking to grow billion-dollar enterprises. Esosa Ighodaro, Lauren Washington, and Regina Gwynn all recognized the challenges that many Black women face trying to launch and maintain businesses when they first met. They then banded together to create Black Women Talk Tech (BWTT), an organization founded to connect Black women in the tech industry and provide them with the tools they need to be successful business owners. Established in 2017, the organization has grown to expand into 10 local chapters in cities across the country with one overseas in...
Nigerian startup Kobo360 is now expanding to three more African countries after raising $6 million in funding. The company will reach Ghana, Togo, and Cote D’Ivoire by 2019 to link freight truck drivers with businesses that need them. Kobo360 is also expanding to offer supply chain management tools, more programs and services for drivers. There will also be more warehousing capabilities and an increased presence in its home country. TLcom Capital and Y Combinator have contributed to Kobo360’s funding. The startup’s founder Obi Ozor told TechCrunch his plan to grow the company into a global logistics operating system. Kobo offers insurance on shipped goods and real-time status updates on deliveries. The company also offers KoboWin which allows individuals and groups to invest in trucks with the goal to inject at least 20,000 fairly used, roadworthy trucks into the logistics space. Kobo has an incentivized education plan to help drivers pay for education, which the company sets on...
While Detroit’s tech ecosystem is booming, the venture-backed startup teams raising a record amount of funding fail to reflect the diversity of the Motor City, according to a new report. EntryPoint—a startup entrepreneurial community dedicated to fostering inclusion—released the 2018 Detroit Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Report showing a 54 percent increase in the number of Detroit venture-backed startups in the last four years. The report found that 18 of the 37 active startups raised $41 million in venture capital investment. In a city where the Black population is nearly 80 percent, the tech community is 85 percent white men. Despite the growth, only three out of the 37 active startups are led by a diverse founder. “We’re really seeing that Detroit has a flourishing high-tech entrepreneur ecosystem and it’s really not hard to see why, whether it’s robust engineering talent, a lower cost of living, proximity to (research institutions),” said Emily Heintz, founder and managing director...
When the Andreessen Horowitz firm launched in 2009, they put a focus on hiring black people and backing black entrepreneurs like Tristan Walker of Walker & Company Brands, Donnel Baird of BlocPower and Chris Bennett of Wonderschool. And although those bets paid off, their newest venture makes sure that diversity in tech is prioritized on a wider scale. The newly created Cultural Leadership Fund has two basic goals: Connect the greatest cultural leaders in the world to the best new tech companies and enable more young African Americans to enter the tech industry. In an announcement on the firm’s website, firm co-founder Ben Horowitz explained that while backing black founders and hiring black people within their own firm was a step in the right direction, it didn’t address diversity widely enough: “Still, we felt that we were leaving opportunity on the table in two important dimensions. First, we had not systematically partnered with the established cultural leaders and second, we...