Award-winning tech diversity champion Ezechi Britton has been appointed an MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours list for his services to Diversity and Young People. It comes years after Britton was named Venture Capitalist of the Year at the Inclusive Tech Alliance (ITA) Awards for his commitment to underrepresented founders and his “impressive transition from software development to venture capital”. Britton is the co-founder of Code Untapped, a social enterprise set up to increase the number of people in tech from ethnic minority backgrounds. The firm provides crucial training
Timnit Gebru, a former leading artificial intelligence computer scientist that worked at Google before the firm fired her, has just set up her own firm, the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Google had fired Gebru when she published academic papers denouncing the tech giant’s AI’s work on large language models that help retrieve answers to controversial search inquiries. The firm, an independent artificial intelligence research institute, was awarded $3.7 million in funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Kapor Center, Open Society Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Her company is
You should probably know what NFTs are by now since these three-letter words have been floating around our headlines, Twitter timelines, and TV screens for the past few weeks now. But for those of you who are behind on this latest trend – we’ll let you off and give you a little reminder. What is an NFT? NFT means a Non-fungible token. The best explanation I’ve seen for it is “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is
Nigerian mobility tech startup Metro Africa Xpress Inc. (MAX)has secured $31 million in Series B funding. The latest funding round was led by the global private equity platform, Lightrock, making its first investment in the African mobility space. Through their Digital Africa initiative, the UAE-based international venture capital firm Global Ventures also took part in the round, as did existing investors Novastar Ventures and Proparco, the French development finance institution. MAX currently designs and assembles its line of electric motorcycles. The firm says, “beyond solving the mobility challenges in Africa, we
Adventr — an interactive streaming platform — is set to take over the tech sector with its patented voice-control technology. The Black owned startup firm, owned by Devo Harris, a Grammy-award-winning producer, just secured a $5M round. It was led by Paladin Capital, a leading global investor that has an extensive portfolio of revolutionary cyber companies. Fellow investors included Reinventure Capital, In/Visible Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Harris’ longtime business collaborator and Grammy-award-winning artist John Legend and Karen Jaw-Madsen. The funding will go toward Adventr’s technology team and marketing to
Pop duo Chloe and Halle Bailey are speaking out against the lack of diversity in the tech sector and advocating the importance of Black girls being on the forefront of the coding sector.
The BECA Playbook aims to challenge the corporate diversity gap and transform the future of business by building the next generation of C-suite marketing executives.
A Black teenager from Prince George’s County, Maryland, has officially become the youngest glider pilot in the nation’s history.
Cambridge-based post-seed accelerator Deeptech Labs has announced its autumn deeptech startup cohort.
Black-owned startups will soon have access to billions of dollars, thanks to this latest move by Vice President Kamala Harris.
