Announcing /dev/color’s Entrepreneur Accelerator Pilot for 2021–2022

We are excited to launch the /dev/color Entrepreneur Accelerator featuring an inaugural cohort of 13 phenomenal Black founders. The /dev/color Entrepreneur Accelerator is designed to foster deep community, sharpen business strategies, and increase access to opportunity within and beyond the cohort. Download our Meet the Cohort one-pager to learn more and share widely within your networks!

The /dev/color Entrepreneur Accelerator is made possible by the support of the /dev/color team and partners: Concrete Rose, Gusto, 4th and King, and Basis Set Ventures.

/dev/color and accelerator partners are aligned in our commitment to support underrepresented leaders, Black founders specifically, to launch and lead new ventures. And, we are dually committed to developing founders and their ventures through expert-led learning sessions, real-time feedback, targeted introductions, and ongoing support. Our partners play pivotal roles as coaches, sponsors, and champions for founders and their ventures.

Accelerator founders are also committed to each others’ success and shared values including abundance, reciprocity, and intentional community building.

Together, through shared learning experiences, increased access to capital and resources, and deep connection over time, founders, accelerator partners, and the /dev/color team will create a more inclusive tech community, support Black founders and emerging ventures, and ultimately, change tech for good.

The /dev/color Entrepreneur Accelerator is a four-month program which culminates with a pitch competition in early 2022.

We are proud to welcome, support, and amplify the following founders and their ventures:

Aaron Clark | Justice Reskill: Aaron Clark, the Founder & CEO of Justice Reskill, is a multi-faceted technologist working at the intersections of equity, tech and criminal justice reform. His company, Justice Reskill, is a Black-led, diverse, startup social enterprise that is ending recidivism and advancing racial equity through creating career pathways in tech for the justice involved community.

Alexa Halcomb | PactFi (formerly Linkit Technologies): Alexa Halcomb, CTO of PactFi (formerly Linkit), has 10 years of experience working in technology, with 7 years of experience in the fintech space. PactFi is focused on the lack of digitization in the private credit market today. PactFi aims to build an application to manage the deal lifecycle and digitize real data to solve the issues with the lack of centralized infrastructure in terms of registries, trading, clearing, and settlements.

Ari (Ariana) M. Davis | BeautySlot: Ariana Davis is a Designer Engineer & Product Designer who has spent the last few years mastering her craft who co-founded BeautySlot, an online platform that aims to be the go-to destination for booking last-minute beauty appointments and reducing the hassle of same-day cancellations.

Asha Owens | BestFit, Inc.: Asha Owens is Co-Founder & CEO of BestFit, a startup that addresses basic needs like housing & food insecurity for students who cannot afford to stay in college, even with financial aid. She is an award-winning product designer and software engineer with a background in Neuroscience (Brown, ’16) + Technology & Media (Columbia, ‘18).

Duran Rose | Actio: Duran Rose is a co-founder of Actio, a software engineer, and creative. Actio aims to fill a gap between maintaining the motivation to keep active, and how to keep ourselves and those close to us accountable in a fun way.

Eyoel Asfaw | ShipShap: Eyoel Asfaw is an experienced software engineer with over 5 years of building software and leading large scale projects at Amazon. He and his friends started ShipShap with the goal to make shipping as easy as Venmo has made payments.

Kim McIver | BeautySlot: Kim McIver is a co-founder of BeautySlot, an online platform that aims to be the go-to destination for booking last-minute beauty appointments and reducing the hassle of same-day cancellations. Originally from Oakland, Kim is also a Software Engineer and Computer Science and Business Administration graduate from San Francisco State University, class of 2018.

Michael Ten-Pow | Tensor9: Michael Ten-Pow joined AWS in its early days, where he helped build its storage services over a 7 year period. He spent another 6 years in Amazon retail — working in privacy and advertising. His company, Tensor9, is on a mission to solve the privacy problem. It is building no-code end-to-end encryption tools for startups.

Priscilla Alfaro | Actio: Priscilla Alfaro is a QA Engineer with 15+ years of experience. Her passion for technology, fitness and community led her to create Actio, a social fitness platform that encourages people to try different fitness activities with friends.

Ryan James | DOPL Technologies: Ryan James, PhD, is Vice President of engineering at Pluto VR. Prior to that, he worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and NVIDIA. His company, DOPL Technologies, is developing a platform for telerobotic surgery. Its mission is to increase access to specialty surgical care worldwide, starting with rural America.

Stephen Felix | Medial Health: Stephen Felix worked as a Software Engineer at Goldman Sachs for about a decade. He founded Medial Health to address the inaccessibility, lack of security and inefficiencies of the paper-based healthcare systems in the Caribbean. Its vision is to provide access to quality healthcare to Caribbean nationals through the use of their EHR System.

Uzo Amuzie | Small World: Uzo Amuzie spent 5 years at Goldman Sachs in & around internal startups — including Symphony.com and Marquee — as a software engineer and in stretch roles in sales, product, and CRM. He is currently building Small World, a social tech solution that empowers dot connectors to deploy the power of their social capital on demand with minimal effort.

Yves Jean | Kodou: Yves Jean is an engineer and scientist with a history of creating novel technology and systems. His expertise is in Computer Vision, from computational imaging techniques to live sports capture. Kodou is his second startup and addresses some core software development problems, including productivity and security. Kodou is a cloud-based platform for fast and secure software creation, from coding to deployment to infrastructure, all via API.