A VC Firm For Black Founders Is Coming To West Baltimore
Luke Cooper, an established founder who spent years growing a Baltimore startup before selling it to a Fortune 500 company, is now starting a venture capital fund to support underserved Black founders.
He aims to address the legacy of divestment from Black communities in the city of West Baltimore.
The fund will invest in startups working within the insurance, cybersecurity, fintech, frontier enterprise, and healthcare-related technology industries.
“As one of the only VC-backed Black founders here, it made me unique but it also made it super difficult,” Cooper told Technical.ly. “Even after a prior exit, I struggled to raise money and it wasn’t always clear why. It’s frustrating to constantly get grilled 3x as much as the next person.”
He’s looking to raise $250 million for Latimer Ventures and is expecting its first close by the end of Q2.
Cooper said he is seeking to be the change he wanted to see as a founder when he was building on-demand device support startup Fixt, before it was acquired by Fortune 500 insurer Assurant in 2020.
Asked about how he go into VC, tech, and his backstory, he said: “I started my career as an M&A lawyer in Baltimore, but after a couple of years and a couple of petty bosses, I knew that the only path for me was tech entrepreneurship. I didn’t want to waste my time worrying about whether I was wearing the right tie or carefully placing the quotations outside of the punctuation marks. So I scrappily put together a deal for my first company which was a $20M retail turnaround in Boston and failed horribly.
“My turnaround plan was predicated on acquisition of cheap debt to fix long standing problems but the world turned upside down in October of 2008, which happened to be 3 months after my acquisition. After staying home with my newborn son for nearly a year, in 2013 I revisited a problem I observed during my time as a lawyer for a Fortune 40 insurance company.
“I found that the claims process for smaller technology items like smartphones and watches was abysmal and that people often didn’t know how to submit a claim or even how to get them replaced on their own.
“Also, the price of smart devices was escalating while carrier subsidies were going away. I thought there had to be a better way to determine what broke and quickly align technical resources to repair or replace their devices easily. That led me to found Fixt and eventually pivot the business toward enterprise where the problem expressed itself as $18B in corporate IT waste.
“I knew there had to be a way for employees to get their mission-critical devices back up and running quickly. Turns out we were able to build an enterprise Saas platform that accomplished this inside of 4 hours for our F500 clients like AT&T, Honeywell, and Home Depot.”
