Founders Valentine Osakwe and Zerryn Gines took advantage of free resources made available through the tech company coalition, Tech For Black Founders (T4BF) initiative. Now, they’re paying it forward to save small businesses.

According to Forbes, Osakwe, 26, and Gines, 21, recently launched a mobile version of Peep Connect, a customer insight and analytics platform for small businesses that they founded in January.

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To overcome the financial setbacks they faced after the pandemic hit, the duo sought free technology and services by T4BF, whom they credit for the launch of their new business venture.

“Just for an analytics feature, we were looking at paying a couple thousand dollars a month,” Gines said. “Now Foursquare is providing us tools, free for a year. It put us in a position to be six to eight months ahead of where we would have been without them.”

Executives and founders of Amplitude, Branch, Braze, mParticle, Radar, and other tech companies started T4BF to help fix systemic racism within the industry.

“This is about doing our small part in terms of fixing systemic racism and a big part of that is correcting a structural disadvantage that Black people have, from that standpoint there’s no cap,” said Mike Katz, CEO of mParticle, according to Forbes. ”It’s about doing the right thing completely disassociated from any type of business outcome or financial objective.”

Valentine Osakwe

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