Coke Florida is celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Black History Month by making a long-lasting commitment to invest in Black communities across the state. The brand will celebrate the contributions of Black Americans by investing in initiatives that support Black communities, according to a press release. Coke Florida’s donation Coke Florida will donate 300 new laptops, making its total contribution to nearly 2,100 devices distributed to schools, nonprofits, and community organizations in Florida. In 2018, the brand invested more than $1 million to support programs that increase digital access for Floridians.
Makeup artist label Pat McGrath Labs has secured a $30 million financing package from the financial firm GDA Luma, according to Business of Fashion. The company filed for bankruptcy in a Miami court earlier this year to restructure its debts. The debt came from a loan obtained in April 2025 from GDA, according to the filings. The package was approved by a Miami, Florida bankruptcy court, which approved $10 million in new debtor-in-possession financing for the makeup brand, plus an additional $20 million in post-emergence working capital, according to a
Black-owned investment firm Fearless Fund is launching a microfinance fund in Ghana. This, after, comes the American Alliance (AAER), which sued Fearless Fund, claiming that the Strivers Grant, sponsored by Mastercard, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by excluding white founders. The Fearless Fund launched a new initiative one year after settling a lawsuit with the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER). Now the venture capital firm has set its sights on Africa. It’s launching a microfinance fund in Ghana on March 21 and awarding GHS 100,000 to female entrepreneurs, according to
Sarah Bond, the first Black female president of Xbox, has stepped down. Bond was promoted to Xbos president in October 2023, shortly after Microsoft closed its $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard, according to The Verge. “Over the past four years, we’ve navigated that moment together and positioned the business for what comes next. We took on some of the biggest challenges this organization has ever faced and did it as one team,” Bond wrote in a LinkedIn post. About Sarah Bond Bond became the first Black woman to serve
Reload launched its flagship product, Epic, this week, following a $2.275 million funding round to provide a management system for autonomous AI agents within software engineering teams. Reporting from TechCrunch indicates that Reload aims to transform ad hoc developer AI usage into a governed corporate system with specific permissions and persistent oversight. This shift is significant because the entity controlling the system of record for AI agents dictates how automated labor is tracked, audited, and integrated across disparate vendor models. Organizations currently face fragmentation as different agents perform isolated tasks
NBCUniversal filed a $35.8 million lawsuit against Group Black in late 2025, alleging the media collective failed to remit guaranteed payments and advertising revenue from their Peacock streaming partnership. The litigation marks a critical fracture in the institutional effort to redirect $500 million in corporate ad spend toward Black-owned media entities. Reporting from Business Insider and AFROTECH indicates that while Group Black secured $30 million in advertising sales, the firm allegedly withheld contractually obligated splits from NBCUniversal. This fiscal dispute follows a pattern of internal instability characterized by leadership exits
Fortune 500 companies cut public disclosure of diversity and inclusion efforts by 65% in 2026, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s latest Corporate Equality Index data. A press release from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRCF), attributes the pullback to a political and regulatory environment that leaves corporate leaders unsure how to communicate DEI while meeting expectations from employees, shareholders, and consumers. The shift matters because disclosure operates as a market signal and a governance artifact. When firms reduce public reporting, workers and investors lose a standardized way to
Luke Bailey announced the permanent relaunch of Score, a dating application requiring Equifax-verified credit data for premium access, following a 50,000-user pilot phase that concluded in 2024. Reporting from TechCrunch indicates the platform will now operate as a permanent iOS application with planned expansion into the Canadian market. This move signifies a structural shift where credit bureaus, historically used for lending and housing, function as gatekeepers for social capital. By integrating soft-pull credit inquiries into the onboarding process, the platform formalizes financial health as a primary metric for interpersonal compatibility.
Africa could capture up to $136 billion in AI productivity gains, but only if governments allow secure cross-border data flows, a Microsoft Africa executive told TechCabal. Reporting from TechCabal quotes Akua Gyekye, Microsoft Africa’s government affairs director, tying the estimate to two constraints that sit below most AI headlines. Africa holds about 1% to 2% of global compute, and it also sits inside a tightening, country-by-country compliance perimeter that can block regional scale. Compute scarcity shifts bargaining power to hyperscalers Africa has 223 data centres across 38 countries as of
Talksign, a Nigeria and UK-based AI company, launched Talksign-1 on Monday, a model it says translates American Sign Language into speech and text in under 100 milliseconds. Reporting from the company says the release targets a structural bottleneck in digital infrastructure: most mainstream interfaces assume spoken audio input and output. World Health Organisation figures put the addressable need at scale, with over 430 million people worldwide who are deaf and 70 million people who use sign language as their primary communication method, yet core tools like video conferencing and service
