New York City is making a bold move by introducing a new law to combat race and gender bias in hiring processes when businesses use artificial intelligence tools to screen out job candidates. Under the new law – employers in the city will be banned from using automated employment decision tools to screen job candidates unless the technology has been subject to a “bias audit” conducted a year before using the tool. The new act passed the measure on November 10 and it takes effect on January 2, 2023. A PricewaterhouseCoopers 2017 study found
CarpeDM — an online dating app exclusive to Black women — has partnered with KarmaCheck to incorporate full background checks for its members on the dating platform. Howard Law School alumni Naza Shelley and Sali Hama launched the app to ensure Black women could be equally as successful while exploring the world of dating. “We’re excited to partner with CarpeDM to help make the online dating experience safer and more trustworthy for singles. While quickly and accurately verifying user data, KarmaCheck goes to great lengths to ensure that user data is protected
A tech company that provides human resource training to large corporations has just been revealed to be using white actors to portray people of color within sessions about diversity, equity, and inclusion. During the training sessions, there were reportedly scenarios where Child Protective Services removed a child from a Black family and in each case, white actors played the roles of the Black characters. In other VR simulations, white actors played characters of Asian descent, and neurotypical adults played autistic children. Mursion, a corporate education company that has clients including Coco cola and Starbucks, has
Zindi is the first data science competition platform in Africa. It hosts an entire data science ecosystem of scientists, engineers, academics, companies, NGOs, governments, and institutions to solve Africa’s most pressing problems. The company recently raised a $1 million seed round, led by San-Francisco-based VC firm Shakti, with Launch Africa, Founders Factory Africa, and five35. How does the startup work? The firm announces challenges and invites its community of data scientists to take part in solution-finding competitions. Participating data scientists submit their solutions, and the winner gets a cash prize. The competition was
According to Inc, Black founders reportedly raised nearly $1.8 billion in the first half of 2021, more than four times the capital raised the same time last year. And stats released by Crunbase showed that Black startup owners raised $400 million in the first six months of 2020 and are already exceeding full-year funding totals for 2020 and 2019 when they raised $1 billion and $1.4 billion. Founders from the community are said to have raised “record amounts of venture capital” in 2021. Still, if we dig a bit deeper, the
The Kenyan startup has secured $2 million in pre-seed funding and is headed for its next phase of growth, which will involve extending loans to traders offering more relief to those that are often left out and regarded as high risk by the traditional banking sector. Fredrik Jung Abbou; a two-time unicorn founder and Norrsken Impact Accelerator were among the investors that funded the firm while the debt round had the participation of French Public Investment Bank (Bpifrance) and GreenTec Capital Partners. The funds include $1 million equity and $1
A few days ago, I got an email regarding a Black-led, Gen Z fintech startup providing income-constrained individuals with investment opportunities. The release said the company, run by a 22-year-old and 25-year-old duo, had just announced their Series A investment round. This – of course – immediately caught my attention because I’m eager to highlight the achievements of young people in tech, but I was even more ecstatic when I saw the figure – Sheridan Clayborne and Mitchell Jones had managed to raise a whopping $18million in their fundraising round.
A Black-led, Gen Z fintech startup providing income-constrained individuals investment opportunities has announced an $18M Series A investment round. The group of diverse investors rallying up to fund Lendtable’s future included SoftBank’s SB Opportunity Fund, Valor Equity Partners, and CEOs of Complex Networks and Social Finance, Inc. The fintech firm, run by founders under 30-years-old, has already disbursed over $2.4 million in match benefits to hundreds of employees in just a year, running the gamut from those employed by small consumer brand companies to Fortune 500 companies like Google, Microsoft,
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
Facebook is planning to shut down its face-recognition system and delete faceprints of more than 1 billion people. At the present moment – more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. That’s about 640 million people. But according to AP – it recently began scaling back its use of facial recognition after introducing it more than a decade ago. The move comes years after organizations and people of color complained about how problematic AI and facial recognition
