This Former High School Teacher Fell In Love With Coding And Now She Owns A VC Firm That Funds Black Owned 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 mission, they’re also focused on financial returns.

The fund will make seed and Series A investments, and they’re focused on software startups — which could be software as a service, B2B or B2B2C. These ideas can be pre-revenue and even pre-product, but they need to be “scalable and lend themselves to significant value creation.”

But what do we know about its founder and general partner – Kelauni Jasmyn?

The former high school teacher fell in love with coding and dove into the city’s tech scene and built a reputation as a Jasmyn as a ‘Front End Software Developer’ for The Washington Post and a ‘Full Stack Web Developer’ for Academy Pittsburgh.

She also spent time working as an instructor at Academy Pittsburgh Beta Builders, a high school coding boot camp for girls and minority students.

Before becoming a founding partner of BTN.vc, Jasmyn created Black Tech Nation (BTN), a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping provide Black technologists and entrepreneurs with education, digital media, employment, and funding.

Eventually in 2021 – the organization merged with Birchmere Ventures, a seed-stage venture fund, to birth BTN.vc with co-founders and general partners David Motley and Sean Sebastian.

BTN.vc’s mission is to invest in Black and diverse-led startups across the nation.  

“I’ve done every single part of building a company [with BTN], so now to be able to take that and apply my personal knowledge to our future portfolio company is probably what I’m most excited about,” Jasmyn told AfroTech. “To be able to use all of the literal blood, sweat, and tears to then hopefully make it a little easier for the next entrepreneur who looks like me.”