A new initiative from the Greater Augusta Black Chamber of Commerce Foundation hopes to help Black start-up owners navigate starting a small firm, with a new program providing training and grants of $3,000 for 25 Augusta area entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurship training program already has several business owners hoping to participate. The 25 initial participants will go through four weeks of training and six weeks of coaching, learning everything from record-keeping and insurance to marketing and risk management. According to Yahoo, it’s funded with $125,000 from Bank of America, partnering with the Greater Augusta
A 17-year-old student at Iowa City West High School has invented color-changing sutures to detect infection and is now set on getting it patented. Working with an eye on equity in global health, Daisy Taylor hopes that the color-changing sutures will someday help patients detect surgical site infections as early as possible so that they can seek medical care when it has the most impact. Daisy began working on the project back in October 2019, after her chemistry teacher shared information about state-wide science fairs including the Science Talent Search
Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Opal Tometi has urged the tech sector to take robust action against perpetuating racism in systems such as facial recognition. “A lot of the algorithms, a lot of the data is racist,” U.S. activist Tometi, who co-founded BLM in 2013, told Reuters on the sidelines of Lisbon’s Web Summit. “We need tech to truly understand every way it (racism) shows up in the technologies they are developing,” she said. Her comments come just a day after Facebook announced it was shutting down its facial recognition
The technology industry’s academic and professional spaces have a long reputation of exclusivity and discrimination that has led to an industry that is predominantly all white and male – but some people are working hard to change this picture. POCIT sat down with Rose Robinson, Executive Director of Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT), for an in-depth conversation on the barriers facing people of color with disabilities in tech. Robinson has more than 25 years under her belt. Her role at CMD-IT means she can use
Black-Owned Chicago AI Startup Lands $100K In Latest ‘Northwestern Mutual Black Founder’ Accelerator
A Chicago startup that uses AI to help people better leverage their professional network is part of the newest cohort of startups selected as part of the Northwestern Mutual’s Black Founder Accelerator program. 4Degrees, led by CEO Ablorde Ashigbi and CTO David Vandegrift, will receive a $100,000 investment as part of the 12-week program. It will also work alongside Northwestern Mutual and its accelerator partner gener8tor to help grow its business. The company, launched by Ashigbi and Vandegrift, two former investors at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, back in 2017 was
An African cross-border payments company has raised $150 million in a Series C extension round led by Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX. Chipper Cash, founded in 2018 by Ham Serunjogi and Maijid Moujaled, is a no-fee peer-to-peer cross-border payment service in Africa. Users can accept payments in Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, and Kenya through their app. Chipper Cash‘s investment comes barely six months after it closed its first Series C round of $100 million, led by SVB Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of SVB Financial Group. Deciens Capital, Ribbit Capital, Bezos
Vendease, a digital marketplace that allows food businesses to buy supplies straight from manufacturers and farms, has successfully raised a seed round of $3.2 million. When a restaurant places an order, the firm’s system generates all the possible suppliers that can fulfill it. It then looks at the best pricing versus quality and assigns that order to the supplier. According to the company, founded by Tunde Kara, delivery is made within 24 hours, either by itself or by a third-party logistics provider. This is a huge milestone for the company.
A Black veteran has developed an app, Anjel Tech, that could help track racial incidents and contribute to helping find missing people of color using live stream video and location sharing capabilities. Anjel Tech, founded by James Samuel, Jr, sends information to loved ones in real-time – providing them with the exact location the video was taken from. The app, which claims to share the data “discretely”, has been described as having the potential to decrease the number of dangerous incidents young Black people often face and give their families
B. Pagels-Minor was a program manager at Netflix before she was fired and accused of leaking internal numbers about Dave Chappelle’s show ‘The Closer’ to the media. Chappelle’s latest stand-up comedy special, which was released on Oct. 5, has been widely criticized for including anti-trans jokes and for “attacking” the LGBTQ community. But Pagels-Minor took it upon herself to help organize a protest to provoke change against attacks on the community. She claimed that by 4 pm on Oct. 14th a walkout protest was announced and around 7 p.m –
Cash App has launched Cash App Studios, which allows the mobile payment service to invest in creators’ projects. Creatives include artists, designers, directors, and musicians. In an official statement, Brian Grassadonia, lead at Cash App, said: “We’ve long upheld the importance of artistic expression at Cash App. With the introduction of Cash App Studios, we’ll continue to support the artist’s freedom, both financially and creatively. “In keeping with our guiding principle of economic empowerment, we are excited to support emerging artists who are limitless in their vision with this new program.” Artists
