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10 Black Tech Companies You Can Invest in Now
We have all heard the underwhelming statistics about the success of Black technology founders (men and women) raising money from venture capital investor. A recent article in the Baltimore Business Journal states that ‘despite gains, most Black female founders still get no funding”, and the last ProjectDiane ‘State of Black Women Founders’ report in 2016, found that since 2009, black women have collectively raised 0.0006 percent of all tech venture funding (yes 0%).
These numbers do not mean that Black founders are not starting innovative, game changing and potentially billion dollar companies, it just means that we are not securing funding proportionately to our ‘non-Black’ peers by institutional investors. Because of this, now more than ever, start-up founders are looking at non-traditional ways to raise capital for their companies, including me.
I am a Black woman who has raised close to $1.5M in seed funding from VCs and angels collectively for my companies Flat Out of Heels and PopCom. I have some great investors on my cap table and a large network of investors across the country, however, when it was time to raise our next round I wanted to take a different approach, and thanks to our ‘forever President’ Barak Obama, yes, I can.
In 2012, President Obama signed into law the JOBS Act that required the SEC to…