10 Female Black Founders You Need to Know

A vast majority of venture funding still goes towards white men. In an analysis of 9,987 founders by RateMyInvestor and Diversity VC , “only 9% of startup founders were female, 17% identified as Asian-American, 2.4% as Middle Eastern, 1.9% as Latin American and just 1% identified as black.”

Black female entrepreneurs are the least likely to get VC funding. So few raise venture money that the percentage is, statistically speaking, nearly zero, according to USA Today.

In this era of change, awareness is everything. Here are ten female black founders championing hard work and innovation, especially in tech. These are the leaders shifting trends and moving stereotypes.

1. Jasmine Crowe, founder of Goodr

Jasmine Crowe is a HBCU alumna working to make the world a better place by reducing food waste and ending hunger. She founded Goodr, a sustainable food waste management company leveraging technology to combat hunger. Goodr provides a secure chain of custody for all transactions, allowing companies to account for and manage surplus food and organic waste. This enables businesses to view real-time analytics, measure waste and tax savings, and share this impact with the world. Under Crowe’s direction, Goodr has diverted nearly two million pounds of food from landfill. Crowe has hosted events in more than 20 US cities and in the UK, South Africa and Haiti. She has collected and donated more than two million food items to causes worldwide and fed more than 80,000 people through the Sunday Soul Homeless feeding initiative. Her work is also featured in Forbes, CNBC, Fast Company, Reuters, Inc, and more.

2. Dawn Dickson, founder and CEO of PopCom

Dawn Dickson is the founder and CEO of PopCom, an automated retail company that uses facial recognition, AI, and blockchain technology to enhance the customer insights a retailer collects. PopCom is the first CRM, data, and analytics software provider for unattended retail, and makes kiosks and vending machines intelligent through data and analytics at the point of purchase. Dickson is a serial entrepreneur with over 16 years of experience in marketing and business development. Dickson has also been featured in Forbes, Black Enterprise, Fortune, Venture Beat, Huffington Post, Essence Magazine, The Miami Herald, CNBC/Yahoo series ‘The Biz Fix’ with Marcus Lemonis, and MSNBC ‘Your Biz’ Elevator Pitch.

3. Iman Abuzeid, MD, co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health

Iman Abuzeid, MD is the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health, a new way hospitals hire permanent nurses more affordably. With Incredible Health, hospitals can hire nurses in less than 30 days, at scale. Abuzeid leverages proprietary technology and data to connect hospitals with nurses and dramatically speeding up the hiring process. Incredible Health is backed by top tier venture capital funds (Andreessen Horowitz, Obvious Ventures, NFX, Precursor Ventures), and led by top technology, healthcare, and sales executives. Abuzeid draws experience from product management at VC-backed startups, healthcare management consulting at McKinsey and Booz, and an MD and MBA from The Wharton School.

4. Morgan Debaun, founder of Blavity Inc

Morgan Debaun is the CEO and founder of Blavity Inc, the leading news company and media brand for Black millennials and Gen Z in the U.S. reaching over 30M millennials a month, surpassing the digital traffic of many legacy black media brands. Blavity has raised $6.7M in a Series A round led by GV (Google Ventures), and previously as well with Kapor Capital, Harlem Capital, and more. Starting her career in silicon valley, Debaun graduated with an B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. Debaun has been widely quoted as an innovator and media entrepreneur in top tier consumer and business publications like Forbes, Huffington Post, NPR, TechCrunch and many more.

5. Jean Brownhill Lauer, founder of Sweeten Home

Jean Brownhilll Lauer is founder and CEO of Sweeten Home, an award-winning website that matches home and small business owners with renovation needs to the best architects, designers and general contractors for their projects. The site hosts over $35 million in construction projects in the New York City area and was named “Best Contractor Locator” by New York Magazine’s Best of 2012. Before founding Sweeten, Lauer oversaw store design for Coach Inc. as the Senior Manager of Global Architecture. Lauer earned a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union, and in 2011 was one of nine winners of the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

6. Jessica Matthews, founder of Uncharted Power

Jessica Matthews founded renewable energy startup Uncharted Power in 2011. The smart tech company addresses the generation, transmission and storage of power in underserved communities. In March 2020, Los Angeles Lakers legend and business magnate Magic Johnson joined Uncharted Powers’ board of directors to help expand its partnerships and programs in U.S. communities. Over the years, Matthews has raised $12.5 million, including investments from Disney, according to CNBC.

7. Ashlee Ammons, co-founder of Mixtroz

Ashlee Ammons is the co-founder and COO of Mixtroz (which stands for “mixer” + “intro”), a company born from the realization that people had a hard time making meaningful connections at events. Mixtroz services events, meetings, trainings, orientations, weddings where 25 or more are gathered. Ammons uses technology to make human connection simpler and increase engagement. Ammons holds a BA in Mass Communications and Public Relations from Baldwin Wallace University. Notably, Ammons was hired as the 1st intern to NBA Star LeBron James.

8. Felecia Hatcher, co-founder of Code Fever

Felecia Hatcher is the co-founder of Code Fever, BlackTech Week, Tribe Cowork and Urban Innovation Lab. Hatcher has raised over 3 million dollars to support Code Fever’s work which sits at the intersection of economic development and inclusive innovation. As an Author, Social Entrepreneur and the former Chief Popsicle of Feverish Ice Cream, Hatcher was named one of the Empact 100 Top 100 Entrepreneurs under the age of 30 by the White House and Kauffman Foundation in 2011, a 2014 White House Champion of Change for STEM Access and Diversity, Ruth Shack Honoree, 2017 Comcast/Nationswell Tech Impact Allstar, a Black Enterprise 2017 TechConnext Game Changer and 2016 Innovator of the Week, Essence Magazine Tech Master, and featured on the NBC Today Show, MSNBC, FORBES, INC, The Cooking Channel, & Grio’s 100 African American’s Making History.

9. Patrice Darby, founder and CEO of GoNanny

Patrice Darby is the founder and CEO of GoNanny, a modern-day service for busy parents with active kids. As a former child care professional, Darby founded GoNanny to connect parents to people who could help with kids from 8 months to 16 years old through booking rides, homework help, meal preparation, and other services. GoNanny says it has brought 40 families and 14 independent child care providers on the platform, and about 110 families in Chicago and nearby suburbs are currently on its waitlist. Darby was selected as a 2016 Invest Chicago funding recipient through Goodcity, and was also winner of the UPS Store Elevator Pitch Competition with Marcus Lemonis.

10. Jewel Burks Solomon, co-founder of Partpic and Head of Google Startups

Jewel Burks Solomon co-founded Partpic, a startup that makes it easier to find industrial parts in Atlanta away from Silicon Valley. At her job at McMaster-Carr, an industrial-parts distributor, she realized there had to be a better way to organize all the products sold so they could be searched easily. Partpic is a way for customers to search for and order parts using computer-vision technology on their smartphone. Solomon sold Partpic off to Amazon in 2016 and returned to Google as Head of Startups to help level the playing field for under-resourced founders in emerging US markets.

If you know of an amazing female founder not included in this article, feel free to refer them to loopnetwork.org!