Amid the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, proptech startup Sugar Living emerged to help enhance the at-home quarantine experience for everyone stuck indoors. Now, over a year later, the Los Angeles-born company is expanding that mission to further connect people in their residential communities through technology. This week, Sugar announced the raise of a $2.5 million seed funding round as it strives to transform apartment buildings into interactive communities with its visionary technology. The round gathered funds from strategic investors across property tech, community and innovation — including MetaProp, Agya Ventures, Concrete Rose, Debut Capital, The Community Fund, Consonance Capital, Lightspeed Scout Fund, and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH syndicate. PropTech angels investors who participated in the round also include Wasserstrum and Diran Otegbade, Oleksiy Ignatyev, and Zillow board member Claire Cormier Thielke. According to Sugar founder Fatima Dicko, the new...

Stories of online harassment have made news headlines for years during the increased age of social media. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, last year it found that 41 percent of U.S. adults have personally experienced some form of online harassment in at least one of six ways. This is why Black-owned tech company, Yappa was formed to intervene and create a more humane way for users to communicate online. Forbes reports that this week, the tech startup has raised a $3.5 million Series A funding round to double down on its exemplary efforts to restore positive virtual interactions online. Funding from the round — which was led by Future Media Limited — will reportedly go toward expanding the company’s existing features and launching new ones to further enhance its capabilities. Yappa — which was founded by Jennifer Dyer and Kiaran Sim back in 2015 — is a development-stage company that offers audio and video commenting services for Internet websites, its...

Tech startup Bevy — the only enterprise virtual, hybrid, and in-person event community platform on the market — announced that the company has just secured a $40 million Series C funding round in an effort to continue helping companies expand their global customer communities and drive radical change for diversity and inclusion in tech. The funding round was led by Accel Partners — for the second time in the past year — with participation from other investors such as LinkedIn, Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith, Upfront Ventures, as well as over 25 top Black leaders in the tech industry. Bevy — currently operating with a completely remote workforce located in 10 different countries on four continents — plans to use the new funding to expand its team from 100 employees to 250 later this year. Not only does this new funding round mark a major milestone for Bevy, it also outlines the company’s intentions to establish more diversity in tech so it deliberately carved out more space to allow...

Almost this time last year, tech expert Justin McLeod — founder of his socially-driven marketing consultancy Surthrive — was busy launching the Square One Startup School to bring more diversity into the tech industry and generate more wealth for Black communities. Now, the program is entering the commencement of its third cohort searching for passionate startup founders hoping to transform their ideas into the next biggest profitable tech company. Following the pandemic’s massive impact on the structure of working from home, the tech world has found itself in a unique position to break geographical boundaries and allow more access to opportunities that would’ve been impossible to attain without occupying major tech hubs in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. The Square One Startup School is contributing to this new infrastructure by offering individuals equal access to information and resources to help them build successful tech startup companies, regardless of their geographical...