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Jewel Burks Solomon recalled the uphill climb she had when building her tech company. The biggest challenge was getting investors to believe that she and her majority Black team had the ability to win in a competitive marketplace to make a profit. Unlike scores of other Black-owned enterprises, Solomon succeeded despite the obstacles.
“I faced a lot of challenges. That’s why I’m an investor today,” Solomon told BET.com. “ I really wanted to become the investor that I never had.”
In 2019, Solomon partnered with two other Black entrepreneurs – Barry Givens and Justin Dawkins – who also started building their companies around 2012 in the Atlanta entrepreneurship ecosystem. After beating the odds to create thriving companies, they all decided to transition from business ownership to investing in Black-led companies.
“We were thinking about what is the next problem that we want to solve. And for all of us, the answer was around access to capital for Black entrepreneurs,” Solomon said. “Since we were friends and talking about these issues, and talking about the battle scars that we had from our journeys, we all came to the conclusion that we should start something together to solve the problem of accessing capital for Black entrepreneurs.”
They went to work, throwing ideas about the solutions on a whiteboard, and launched Collab Capital.
For many years, Black entrepreneurs have not been able to attract more than 1.1 percent of venture capital (VC) funding in an industry dominated by well-connected white men, according to data from Crunchbase. Collab Capital is one of a relative handful of Black-led VCs raising money from corporate backers to then invest in Black entrepreneurs.
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