14 startups the Metro Chamber says are set to grow - Atlanta Business Chronicle bizjournals.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bizjournals.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
UpdatedThu, May 27, 2021 at 12:51 pm ET
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The forum will allow Atlanta mayoral, city council president and council candidates to introduce themselves and speak on critical issues. (Shutterstock)
ATLANTA Atlanta s 2021 mayoral candidates will have their first combined platform to share their vision for the city at a candidate forum scheduled for June 8.
The four publicly announced candidates vying for the top City Hall job City Council President Felecia Moore, Councilmembers Andre Dickens and Antonio Brown, and former City Hall deputy chief of staff Sharon Gay have confirmed that they will participate and respond to questions related to the Committee for a Better Atlanta s platform including critical issues of public safety, affordable housing, transportation, economic development and recovery, and sustainability, according to organizers.
How did Atlanta become a top breeding ground for billion-dollar startups in the Southeast?
Over the past five years, the Southeastern region, led by Atlanta, has gone from being “one of the best kept secrets” in tech, to a vibrant ecosystem teeming with a herd of the billion dollar tech businesses that are referred to in the investment world as “unicorns” (thanks to their supposed rarity).
In those five years venture capital investments surged to $2.1 billion in the region, with $1 billion invested in the last year alone, according to Lisa Calhoun, a partner with the Atlanta based investment firm, Valor Ventures.
For six years, Horace Williams has been waiting for this moment.
Williams is the founder and CEO of Atlanta-based Empowrd, a social impact startup with a free app that helps users stay up-to-date on local voting information and ways to contact elected officials. Launched in 2015, Empowrd has only recently gained traction with investors, landing one of 10 spots in Techstars s Social Impact Accelerator program earlier this year. The reason, Williams says: Rampant voter disinformation and suppression efforts over the past year have caused investors to search for startups with ideas to heal the nation s political divide.
Georgia is currently at the center of that divide. The state s new voting law, signed by Republican Governor Brian Kemp in late March, has been referred to as Jim Crow 2.0 for making voting significantly harder, particularly in predominantly Black districts. Proponents of the law say it will cut down on voter fraud, despite Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger
The Local Take: ABL Annual Congress On The State Of Black Business Starts April 13 wclk.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wclk.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.