Aster has announced its $2.4 million pre-seed round to build a platform to enable women’s health providers to deliver materially better care. Aster The United States is the most dangerous and expensive high-income country for childbirth, especially for Black and Indigenous women. Black women face a nine times higher risk of maternal death than their white counterparts, regardless of wealth. The Aster app was created to help women keep track of their pregnancy, communicate with a care team on the app, and book appointments and remote monitoring. FiFi Kara co-founded the app after witnessing her
Nigerian-born Richard Nonso is among the recipients of the Tomorrow’s Leaders Starting Out (ToLSO) program, a micro-grant for young Canadians. Tomorrow’s Leaders Starting Out ToLSO is a project delivered by Nigerian Canadians for Cultural, Educational, and Economic Progress (NCCEEP). Launched in December, ToLSO is a micro-grant for young Canadians aged 15-30, funded by the Canada Service Corps. Offering a $5,000 micro-grant, it aims to empower young Canadians to create action-based projects that make a lasting difference in their communities. Although the program is available to grant candidates of any background, NCCEEP member and program
Echo360 has announced its annual grants program that now features new award opportunities for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Echo360 is the most comprehensive, global, SaaS-based video platform for creating, delivering, and measuring learning engagement outcomes in any learning environment. The 2024 Echo360 e3 Tech Grants Program The 2024 program will award 20 recipients cash or software grants ranging from $2,000 to $5,000 in two grant categories: EchoImpact Grants and EchoInnovation Grants. EchoImpact Grants support instructors and researchers using Echo360 solutions to improve learner outcomes empirically. Conversely, the EchoInnovation Grants
Heex Technologies has completed a seed round of €6 million ($6.5M) to support those in tech to exploit AI’s formidable capabilities while reducing its carbon footprint. Heex Technologies Heex Technologies is a startup that accelerates AI development by enabling engineering teams to extract the most value from their data. Heex provides customers with a platform that allows them to target relevant data and share it with the right users for purposes such as supervision, system monitoring, or continuous software improvement. Founded in 2019, the startup initially focused on autonomous vehicles. However, new
Nigerian fintech startup Cleva has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by San Francisco-based 1984 Ventures. Founded by Tolu Alabi and Phillip Abel, alumni of Stripe and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cleva’s product provides a way for Africans to navigate hyperinflation challenges. Africans face persistent challenges in receiving international payments for their skills and products. According to the startup, it is estimated that the market for facilitating payments for remote workers and freelancers in Africa will be an $18 billion opportunity. Nigerian Startup Cleva Cleva is a USD banking platform for emerging
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is currently funding several programs to address racism in environmental and civil engineering to make the field more diverse. According to the Daily Caller, the NSF also aims to train engineers representing Black and Latinx communities. The grants are part of a broader effort by the NSF to push racial equity in STEM. In 2021, nearly a quarter (24%) of the US workforce was employed in STEM. However, Hispanic workers represented 15%, and Black workers only represented 9%. NSF’s funds aim to change that as they are
Seedstars Africa Ventures fund has received a $30 million capital commitment from EIB Global, an arm of the European Investment Bank. To launch the fund, the VC firm’s partners Maxime Bouan, Tamim El Zein, and Bruce Nsereko Lule teamed up with the Seedstars Group, tapping its infrastructure and market access in Africa. Seedstars Africa Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund investing in high-growth companies active across Sub-Saharan Africa. Through initial funding of $8 million from the fund’s anchor investor, French private equity firm LBO France, the VC firm has already invested in four
Black-owned startup Robin AI has raised $26 million in new funding for its next growth and global expansion phase. RobinAI The AI-driven contract editor is the brainchild of former Clifford Chance lawyer Richard Robinson and former machine learning research scientist James Clough. Founded in 2019, Robin AI uses generative AI to automate and speed up the process of drafting and negotiating contracts and extracting information from across entire contract repositories through simple search. The startup trained its machine learning model on data from 4.5 million legal documents with input from in-house lawyers to create
Breakr, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) alumni-founded music platform, has raised an additional $1.9 million. Breakr is reshaping influencer collaboration through its SaaS platform designed explicitly for record labels, artists, and brands. By enabling creator-to-creator relationships at scale, labels and brands can move at the speed of culture, and creators can get paid fairly for making it happen. The Three-Sided Marketplace Breakr’s unique selling point is that it effectively treats the basic concept of connecting creators to build influencer campaigns as a programmatic opportunity. The company recently came
Black-owned fintech startup Conduiit has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to save entertainment companies time and money by centralizing their production finance operations. Disrupting the production finance space Conduiit is the brainchild of former Amazon and Netflix employees Shawn Hamilton, CEO, and Jason Thurman. The New York and New Jersey-based tech company provides users with digital workflows, SaaS, and DaaS solutions. It also offers budgeting, scheduling, cost tracking, and cash flow management guidance at project and corporate levels. Hamilton worked as a production accountant at Amazon from 2015 to 2017 when
