Black Tech Nation Ventures is a new fund for Black entrepreneurs
Kelauni Jasmyn, general partner at the new Black Tech Nation Ventures, can explain her aims for the new firm quite succinctly: “The goal is to get more Black people funded.”
That’s something Jasmyn has been working on already with Black Tech Nation, a Pittsburgh-based organization that supports Black entrepreneurs with education, content, community and more. Now she’s tackling the funding size of the equation more directly by raising a $50 million first fund with her fellow GPs Sean Sebastian and David Motley.
“We’re really at the beginning of something brand new, that I think will be historic and offer a literal economic shift for the Black community in building generational wealth,” Jasmyn said. “We get to be the ones who mold the foundation of that.”
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The shock of the killing of George Floyd and other Black people in 2020 got Americans talking again about racial disparities and companies talking again about improving diversity and inclusion. With Black History Month now winding down, there’s even more talk.
But there’s been talk off and on for decades, with little result.
By some measures, the proportion of Black people in engineering professions has actually dropped since the 1980s, despite all the awareness. More recently, while there have been improvements in Black representation in IT positions across industries, Black representation in the US tech sector as a whole is still just half of what the Black population overall is. Black representation remains even lower in the tech vendor community.