UK Black Tech Founders To Watch
A long overdue article on the immense black entrepreneurial talent in the UK tech scene. Here we feature founders across sectors as diverse as beauty, event discovery, medicine, artificial intelligence, and IOT. Some have raised money, others are bootstrapping, some are running large agencies, others lean teams.
Celebrate their stories.
Sharmadean Reid
What more can be said about Sharmadean Reid? The founder of WAH nails an amazing salon in West London that integrates technology across the customer experience, she also is the co-founder of futuregirlcorp.com an events organization to support young female entrepreneurs. She’s now building Beauty Stack an online platform to book beauty services and has recently raised 1 million dollars.
Darren Tenkorang
Darrent [left] with the team promoting his app.
Hailing from Brixton and a recent graduate, Darren is the founder of Trim-it, a mobile app bringing software to provide some much-needed disruption to the barber shop user experience [as anyone who has spent a whole day queuing in their local barbers can attest]. Originally a marketplace connecting users to barbers, Trim-it has pivoted to providing a full stack experience by providing their own ‘trims’ via their iconic mobile vans. Download the mobile app!
Alex Fefegha
Technologist and product designer, Alex wears many hats. The founder and lead of experimental tech research film Comuzi, he also somehow managed to find the time to complete a masters degree, with a thesis looking at the implication of bias in artificial intelligence. Definitely, one to watch.
Ivan Beckley
If you feel like you wasted your time during your younger days, look away now. Ivan Beckly is the co-founder of Suvera a mobile application to help people easily manage their medication. Did I also mention Ivan is a 23-year-old medical student, who is taking a quick detour to pursue a masters degree in Data Science?
I’d implore you to read his medium post about how he got DeepMind [yes, that DeepMind] to sponsor his Master’s degree.
Louise Broni-Mensah
Louise in NYC Time Square with a billboard of her startup Shoobs in the background.
After a stint as an investment banker after university Louise went down the road less traveled. Prompted by a terrible experience waiting in the rain attempting to buy tickets to a club night in London, she realized the need for an events discovery and ticketing platform for small regular events. Founding Shoobs.com, she left London to join YC in 2014.
Yodit Stanton
A software and data engineer by trade Yodit Stanton is the co-founder of https://opensensors.com a startup working in the IOT space. OpenSensors provides public and private data infrastructure for the Internet of Things enabling anyone to publish real-time open data from sensor networks. Since raising an undisclosed seed round from Concrete Venture Capital in 2014, Open Sensors has scaled up to a team of 10.
She also somehow makes time to organize the meetup group ‘Women in Data’.
Steven Bartlett
Taking the world by storm these last few years, award-winning entrepreneur/speaker/vlogger/anything else we’ve forgotten to add, Steven Bartlett is a force to be reckoned with. CEO of Social Chain, a social first marketing agency, with offices in Manchester, London, Berlin, New York, one to watch is an understatement.
