Five to Nine, which makes event management software, has closed a $4.25 million seed round led by Black Ops Ventures. Other investors in the round include Slack Fund and Cleveland Avenue, with Mike Gamson, Sterling Road, and Concrete Rose Capital as repeat investors. The company’s software lets enterprises plan programs for their employee resource groups, which enable employees who share characteristics or experiences to come together, share resources, and connect. Jasmine Shells and Denise Umubyeyi launched the company in 2018 to help organizations manage, structure, and track employee events, meeting development programs, and Employee Resource Group (ERG) initiatives. “Five to
International calling app Talk360, which enables people to make reliable and affordable calls to any landline or mobile phone worldwide, has secured $4 million in funding as it prepares to launch a new pan-African payment platform in mid-2022. The seed round of funding was led by leading African venture capital investor HAVAÍC, 4Di Capital, and several prominent fintech angel investors. Talk360, a leading Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) player in Africa, enables people to make international calls through its app for a fee. It is built so that only the
Religion of Sports, the media production company founded by Gotham Chopra, Michael Strahan and Tom Brady, has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Shamrock Capital and joined by Elysian Park Ventures and Cerro Capital. The Series B funding round brings the company’s total to $66 million raised over three rounds. Chopra told The Hollywood Reporter that the raise will be used to help “grow the company from the production company model, which is what we have operated in for a long time, to really controlling our own destiny. To really bet
Access to credit is a big problem in Africa. Indicina is building the infrastructure to unlock it. Indicina, the digital lending platform providing analytics-driven credit decisions for lenders based in Lagos, Nigeria, has announced its seed round of $3 million. Berlin-headquartered and pan-European venture capital firm Target Global led the round with participation from Kuda, Kippa, and Edukoya. The firm’s partner Ricardo Schäefer will join Indicina’s board. Greycroft also participated in this round, and so did RV Ventures. What does Indicina do? It builds products using Open Banking so credit providers can approve more people,
A Black marketing specialist has taken to Linkedin to complain about his experience applying for a job at Monzo Bank and has questioned whether the firm’s job application process is racist. Before explaining what happened, Charles Oben wrote ‘Does Monzo Bank have an application process that is intentionally racist?’. Sharing his experience, he said: “I applied to Monzo late last week, for their Growth Marketing Manager position. I spent a lot of time on my application (one of my responses is over 5 pages long), so I was rather dismayed
Google and Visible Hands, a two-year-old venture capital (VC) firm dedicated to helping underrepresented founders, announced on Tuesday they would jointly conduct a program to help Latino entrepreneurs build new businesses. The program will make a considerable impact given that Latino founders accounted for only 3.9 percent of the venture capital invested in Boston between 2015 and August of 2020, according to a report by Crunchbase. While this percentage is higher than in California (1.2 percent) and New York (2.2 percent), it is still a long way from being representative. Yasmin Cruz
Deborah Gladney and Angela Muhwezi-Hall are the sister duo and creators behind QuickHire, a hiring platform that connects workers to service and skilled-trade jobs. In November, QuickHire raised $1.41 million in an oversubscribed round of funding, making Gladney and Muhwezi-Hall the first Black women in Kansas to raise over $1 million for a startup, according to AfroTech. The round is a pretty big deal because Black female startup founders received just 0.34% of the total $147 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. startups through the first half of 2021, according to Crunchbase. QuickHire,
Tiffany James, 27, started Modern BLK Girl after turning an initial $10,000 investment into $2 million. But her success is partly down to one colleague who decided to pass on the baton of knowledge. James had left school with a degree and student loan debt which had her struggling, and for a while, she wasn’t sure how she was going to get out of it. The turning point came in 2019 when a co-worker suggested that she buy stock in a company named Tesla when shares were between $60 and $70.
Cayaba Care, a maternity health startup, has announced the closing of a $12 million Series A round that will work to expand the company’s footprint within underserved populations. The funding will be used to increase staff, launch in additional markets, and further invest in technology solutions that will increase access to much-needed holistic maternity services. Seae Ventures and Kapor Capital led the Series A round and new investors include Wellington Partners, Citi Impact Fund and Rhia Ventures. Founded in 2020 with a mission to improve community outcomes by reimagining how maternity and pediatric care is delivered, Cayaba
First National Bank has announced that it’s making a $2.5 million equity commitment to Black Tech Nation Ventures, a majority Black-owned VC fund based in Pittsburgh, which provides funding and resources for Black-led technology startups and firms with diverse founders. The investment is part of FNB’s broader commitment to promoting economic equality. Launched in 2021, the BTN venture fund is more than halfway to its initial $50 million fundraising goal. The VC intends to build a portfolio of 20 to 30 early-stage tech companies that have diverse founding teams and focus on
