Identitypass today announced that it has raised $2.8 million in seed funding, months after graduating from Y Combinator. The round also comes a few months after the startup raised $360,000 in pre-seed investment last November, bringing its total funding to $3.1 million. The startup, launched in 2021, is focused on making it possible for digital businesses in Africa to easily verify their customers within seconds. It’s a simple compliance and data security platform that allows online businesses to easily verify and confirm a transacting party’s identity using existing forms of identification. Identitypass
This Black Blockchain Engineer Just Raised $3.3M Seed Round For Mueshi, Her Fine Art NFT Marketplace
Ariana Waller — known as Ariana The Techie — is a Miami-based blockchain engineer and the owner and founder of Mueshi, Inc. The company launched to be a marketplace where users will be able to buy, sell, and fractionally invest in fine art NFTs. The 26-year-old has just raised a $3.3 million seed round for Mueshi led by Harlem Capital to establish its place in the industry. Presight VC, CapitalT VC, music luminary and investor, Ted Lucas, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Black Venture Capital Consortium, and a cohort of additional strategic angel investors also participated. “I was
Founder and CEO Aisha “Pinky” Cole has raised $25m through a Series A funding round that values her four-year old brand at $100m. Cole intends to open 10 Slutty Vegan venues by the end of this year and another 10 in 2023. Her intention is to hire a Chief Operating Officer and Chief Marketing Officer to help manage the company’s growth. She has long believed that Slutty Vegan will be a billion-dollar brand — “bigger than McDonald’s and Burger King and Chick-fil-A,” she says — and wants to make it a household
Thinking of getting angel investors, but not sure where to start? Where should you look? What questions should you ask them? Firstly – let’s address the elephant in the room. What is an angel investor? Angel investors are individuals who invest in entrepreneurial ventures like startups using their own capital in exchange for equity. They often provide the startup founders with capital for their business, but they do not have any operational voting rights in the company. Angels can come from different backgrounds, such as venture capitalists, corporate investors, wealthy
Akash Mehta is a 28-year-old entrepreneur and influencer who recently made it onto Forbes’ ’30 under 30’ list in media and marketing. A digital expert, he has harnessed the power of social media to quickly build Fable & Mane, the haircare and wellness business of which he is the founder and CEO. Mehta left his job as a global digital manager at Dior to start his own haircare brand and now Fable and Mane have sold six figures’ worth of products in a week following viral TikTok posts. Mehta, who
Zaire Allen founded Love Circular, a digital academy for aspiring user experience and user interface designers, who build the visual and interactive components for apps and websites. The 25-year-old launched it in July 2020, two months after he was let go as a UX designer at a mortgage company during the pandemic. During the covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of thousands of people were either furloughed or fired – leaving some in limbo on how to make ends meet. But coronavirus, albeit an awful two years, was a life-changing period for some who
Oregon-based ‘A Kids Company About’ secured 93% of the funds from Black investors. He managed to raise a $1 million seed round, where the smallest check was $1,000. A fund headed by Barack Obama’s financial advisor led the Series A round. Backstage Capital and Emerson Collective, both of which invest in underrepresented founders, also participated in the round alongside several Black angels. Jelani Memory, who launched the business in 2019 when it was known as A Kids Book About, also accepted a range of investments as small as $5,000 from
Black tech entrepreneur Bill Spruill reportedly turned his employees into millionaires when he sold his startup Global Data Consortium for an undisclosed amount. Global Data, which he launched make in 2012, makes software that verifies the identity of people behind online transactions, an important step in eliminating potential fraud. Though financial details have not yet been revealed, Spruill described the deal to Axios as a “Bronto-level transaction,” which was acquired by NetSuite for $200 million in 2015. When Spruill started the Global Data Consortium he only raised $5 million from investors – this is rather
Influencer marketing agency Fanbytes has been acquired by digital media agency Brainlabs for an undisclosed fee. The UK-based 65-strong business was launched by its chief executive Timothy Armoo, chief operating officer Ambrose Cooke and chief technology officer Mitchell Fasanya in 2017. Fanbytes now works with a client list that spans Samsung, Nike, Ubisoft, Mattel, Estée Lauder and H&M. The agency also formed a talent management business dubbed Bytesized Talent. Now, it represents some of the biggest creators in the UK like EmandLoz (fashion and entertainment), and Mr Tov (comedy, lifestyle
Norebase, the trade technology company building a single platform for businesses to start, scale and operate in any African country, has secured a $1M pre-seed funding round. The company is laser-focused on building two-pronged platforms that offer African and non-African businesses access to the African continent as one big market while creating a channel where African founders can access the international markets (such as the USA). Using Norebase, established companies can expand to new locations while new businesses can be incorporated in any African country of their choice in just a
