Florida A&M University has received a $100,000 grant from Wells Fargo to launch a small business incubator to assist women and minority-owned businesses. The grant will advance hiring initiatives for a program manager to oversee operations of the incubator and modernize an existing location for entrepreneurs to call home. Funding will also enable the incubator’s staff to support program participants in exploring the feasibility of their business concepts, launching, expanding, and scaling their businesses. The remaining funds will support future marketing and promotions throughout the development of the project. The
Vendease, a digital marketplace that allows food businesses to buy supplies straight from manufacturers and farms, has successfully raised a seed round of $3.2 million. When a restaurant places an order, the firm’s system generates all the possible suppliers that can fulfill it. It then looks at the best pricing versus quality and assigns that order to the supplier. According to the company, founded by Tunde Kara, delivery is made within 24 hours, either by itself or by a third-party logistics provider. This is a huge milestone for the company.
A Black veteran has developed an app, Anjel Tech, that could help track racial incidents and contribute to helping find missing people of color using live stream video and location sharing capabilities. Anjel Tech, founded by James Samuel, Jr, sends information to loved ones in real-time – providing them with the exact location the video was taken from. The app, which claims to share the data “discretely”, has been described as having the potential to decrease the number of dangerous incidents young Black people often face and give their families
PNC Financial Services Group Inc.’s charitable foundation has announced a five-year $16.8 million grant to Howard University to build The Howard University and PNC National Center for Entrepreneurship. The center will support expanded opportunities for Black entrepreneurship with enhanced educational, leadership, and capacity-building resources and programs nationwide. As a part of PNC’s wider commitment to providing over $1.5 billion in funds to create “economic empowerment” for Black Americans, this donation is just one of the financial institution’s countless plans to support the community. It plans to provide $88 billion worth of investments,
Beyonce has expanded her partnership with Peloton and is releasing another series today in the hope of inspiring HBCU students on their fitness journey. Peloton will also be donating their bikes to HBCU fitness facilities this fall as part of the collaboration. The 72-hour fitness session with Beyonce will include 17 classes spanning three days with content streaming globally from Peloton Studios in London and New York. For the first time, Peloton will include classes in three languages — English, German and Spanish — to be more inclusive. According to a press release
OneTen — a group of industry executives with a mission to hire more Black individuals — has just launched its inaugural scholarship program to spearhead 3,500 underserved students toward the tech industry. As a contribution toward OneTen’s commitment, Udacity and Blacks In Technology will lend a hand to support the initiative. Udacity, an American for-profit educational organization, will offer recipients the opportunity to partake in a flexible online program to allow them to pursue a full-time position or continue their educational pursuits. While Blacks In Technology will amplify students’ efforts by providing them
Nzingah Oniwosan first created her 365zing App, which centralizes features found on individual apps into one location to help Black women get on track with their health goals, when she realized she struggled with her own self-care. Ms. Oniwason, the daughter of parents who immigrated from Haiti, found difficulty with staying on track with her self-care for 19 years, trying anything and everything to keep on track when it came to her mental, physical, and spiritual health. She found things that helped in one area but not overall, and that’s
MPharma, a Ghanaian health tech startup is set to open 100 virtual centers across seven markets in Africa over the next six months. The company, founded by CEO Gregory Rockson, has the goal to deliver quality primary care in the communities they serve by providing medical examinations. MPharma already provides about 10,000 physician consultations to patients at the startup’s network of pharmacies. Its also managed to raise over $50 million since inception; this includes a Series C round of $17 million, led by U.K.’s development arm CDC Group last year. Other existing investors include
In the US, accelerators like Techstars and Y Combinator are the most active investors in Black founders, followed by early-stage investors like Backstage Capital and Kapor Capital that focus on diverse founders. As we already know, Black founders often get a small portion of the pie when it comes to investment – which is why it’s essential to highlight the VCs dedicated to investing in minority communities and those who have a history of supporting under-appreciated groups. We’ve sifted through a list created by the Black Founders list of VC firms across the US that
Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners is adding spatial LABS, a metaverse and blockchain-based tech incubator, to its growing list of crypto investments, according to a report from Billboard. Founded by 24-year-old entrepreneur Iddris Sandu, next year, sLABS will launch its first product, “LNQ,” a blockchain-enabled hardware platform that helps onboard young creators to the metaverse, according to widely shared reports. “Iddris has a conscious world view and a youth-centric vision that is innovative and refreshing to witness,” Jay-Z said in a statement. “We share similar parallels in how we imagine impacting
