Founder and CEO at Seidea CIC, a career development platform with a social mission to diversify the cybersecurity industry, Stephanie Itimit sat down with us to discuss building a thriving organization, finding the right co-founder, initially balancing her mission with a 9 to 5, and more. The goal for Seidea is to break down barriers for Black and Minority Ethnic women and help them start their cybersecurity careers through cyber career programs and industry events. Itimit and her team also work with employers to develop virtual internships, strengthen their employee
Today the Kapor Center, a nonprofit addressing racial inequities in STEM education and the tech industry, in partnership with the NAACP, released their 2022 report titled State of Tech Diversity: The Black Tech Ecosystem. The report analyzes and synthesizes the latest data, demonstrating the continual exclusion of Black talent across the tech ecosystem, which represents a great loss of talent and innovation for one of the major drivers of our nation’s economy. The report findings reveal that progress towards racial equity is not only stalled but in many respects, regressing, throughout
In 2020 none of the $4.4 billion in venture funding raised in the region went to female founder-led startups. The lack of support in the early stages of entrepreneurship, poor access to capital, and the lack of women investors in venture capital funds are among the main reasons. Of the more than 800 companies recently surveyed by Endeavor and Mastercard for a whitepaper on bridging the gender gap within tech companies in Latin America, only 23% had at least one woman on their founding team, and only 9% had one or more all-female founders. Racial and
More than half the country’s workforce identifies as Black or mixed race in Brazil, yet less than 30% of these workers occupy managerial roles. Beyond the scarcity of Black professionals in IT departments in Brazil, a study by diversity initiative Preta Lab in partnership with consulting firm ThoughtWorks in 2020 found that 50.4% of teams do not have “non-heterosexual” staff. The inclusion of indigenous people and people with disabilities is also nearly absent in Brazil: 85.4% of the participants reported no disabled people in their team, and in 95.9%, there were no
Y Combinator’s latest batch — W22 — features 414 startups from 42 countries, representing more than 80 sectors. America reportedly has the most representation while India comes in second with 32 startups and Nigeria sits in third, having delivered 18 startups. This is the first time an African country is appearing in the top three. The W22 batch of the Y Combinator programme, which played a role in the early days of companies like Airbnb, Coinbase and Dropbox among others, is currently taking place, and concludes with a demo day end of
Microsoft said this week that it had fired some employees and terminated partnerships in relation to allegations made public Friday of bribery in its sales efforts in the Middle East in recent years. The disclosure came regarding allegations of bribery and corruption in Microsoft operations in the region made public by a former manager for the company named Yasser Elabd, who worked for the tech giant throughout the Middle East and Africa from 1998 to 2018, when he says he was fired. In an essay published Friday on Lioness, an outlet that documents
Back in 2020, Black Founders Matter made its first investment in a company called A Kids Book About, founded by Jelani Memory but since then it has invested in one of the most-decorated track star in US history and many others. Here’s the back story. Despite his best effort, Marceau Michel could not secure venture funding, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. What started off as a small T-shirt line that hosted the slogan, Black Founders Matter, to generate revenue for his own company has now turned into an ambitious
alGROWithm, a Nigeria-based growth agency is building Africa’s first growth talent accelerator. While most digital schools and programmes like Decagon, and AltSchool focus on solving the engineering and product talent gaps, growth is largely unattended to but alGROWithm’s GTAP aims to bridge that gap. The Growth Talent Accelerator Programme (GTAP) is a two-phase training programme in partnership with Digital Africa’s Talent 4 Startups Initiative which will help develop world-class growth engineers on the continent. Founded by Bili Sule in 2018, the agency uses growth engineering to design and implement sustainable growth models and strategies for African startups
Black Tech Nation Ventures operates as a venture capital firm. The Company invests in start-up and seed stage technology companies based in the United States. Last year the firm was able to close in on $25 million for its national technology venture fund — Black Tech Nation Ventures (BTN.vc) — in under a year since launching. David Boone, founder of BlendED, became BTN.vc’s first portfolio investment. Along with Boone are the Pittsburgh Pirates and First National Bank as fellow investors in the fund. BTNV’s partners emphasized that while the fund has a social
Since the start of the pandemic, the School District of Philadelphia has worked on getting students connected to broadband internet at home and making sure they have the right devices that will help them learn. Back in April 2020, it rolled out a program to get Chromebooks into the hands of more than 117,000 students via the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia and more than $7 million in donations. But with the distribution of thousands of devices comes the need for routine repairs and troubleshooting and that’s where one West Philadelphia High School class
