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,
Grammy award-winning artist, Miguel, has just been announced as the newest Global Creative Director for T3MP0, a digital studio that creates web3 communities for A-List talent and brands. He is reportedly the first musical artist of “his stature” to be involved in creating a web3 studio from the ground up, according to the company’s press release. As T3MP0’s creative director, Miguel will extend his extensive collaboration history into partnering with the world’s biggest talent and brands in the web3 space. “We are very excited to support Miguel’s creative vision for the
Investment and advisory firm Pendulum, which funds and consults with businesses founded by people of color and has high-profile clients, including former President Barack Obama, is getting a new infusion of capital from Merchant bank BDT & Co. BDT specializes in providing advice and long-term capital through its affiliated funds to help the family- and founder-led businesses pursue their strategic and financial objectives. Husband and wife duo Robbie and D’Rita Robinson serve as chief executive and chief operating officer of the firm, which is reported to be staffed by people
South African educational technology (edtech) startup FoondaMate has secured $2 million seed funding in a round led by LocalGlobe, a UK-based venture capital firm, to drive uptake of its WhatsApp and Facebook-based learning chatbot across the globe. How does it work? Foondamate helps students with their revision by giving them immediate answers to questions and access to revision papers, while also guiding them in responses to questions. It aims to level the playing field in education by empowering the 345 million+ students who currently have limited access to internet-enabled education
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
Honeycomb is hiring on pocitjobs.com Alayshia Knighten is a seasoned DevOps Engineer with a love of infrastructure and a focus on breaking down technical learning barriers for customers. She recently spoke to POCIT about navigating life in the tech sector as a woman of color and her role at Honeycomb, an observability tool that lets developers quickly make sense of the billions of rows of data needed to fully represent the user experience in your complex and unpredictable systems. Since joining Honeycomb as a Senior Implementation Engineer in October 2020,
Failing to credit Black creators will cost platforms and TikTok is one firm that’s not trying to be a part of that mess – again. The Bytedance-owned app is introducing the first iteration of creator-crediting tools that will enable — and encourage — users to link back to the videos of TikTok creators and trend originators. The new TikTok tools, rolling out over the next few weeks, will let creators directly tag and credit others through a new button in the app. Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s U.S. director of the creator
You may have stumbled upon memes on Twitter where users are snubbing the American streaming platform – Netflix. Well – it’s because it’s just been announced that the tech giant is laying off approximately 150 employees across the company, according to an internal memo sent Tuesday. The layoffs represent 2 percent of the streamer’s total workforce, with most of the cuts happening in the United States. Netflix is also making changes to its animation division, resulting in 70 roles being cut off in that unit and reducing contractor roles in
Labor leader and fired Amazon worker Chris Smalls, who recently revealed that workers at dozens of Amazon facilities have contacted him because they need support, said he was disheartened by Jeff Bezos’s inaction. On The Breakfast Club this morning, Smalls, who has garnered widespread support from celebrities and workers after he was let go by the firm, spoke about the conditions Amazon workers worked in during the Covid pandemic. He claimed that when he worked as a supervisor for the firm – his team didn’t have any PPE or cleaning
Nzambi Matee, a 30-year-old who quit her job in oil and gas to work on her passion full-time, has created a lightweight and low-cost building material that is made of recycled plastic with sand to make bricks that are stronger than concrete material. Every day her enterprise, Gjenge Makers, churns out 1,500 bricks made from industrial and household plastic that otherwise would be dumped in the city’s overflowing garbage heaps. In 2021, the team recycled 50 tonnes of plastic but Matee has ambitions to double that amount this year as
