ICYMI: The Recap of /dev/color’s Entrepreneur Accelerator Pitch Contest
After months of hard work, 12 inaugural founders of /dev/color’s entrepreneur accelerator participated in a pitch competition held virtually on January 27, 2022, followed by a Founders’ Reception.
Founders competed for over $75,000 of cash prizes, as well as in-kind resources, follow on opportunities, and wrap-around support. Founders were given four minutes to pitch, followed by four minutes of juror Q&A. Both founders and ventures were evaluated on the following criteria:
- A well-defined and validated problem and opportunity
- Competitive advantage and compelling solution
- Deep understanding of market
- Financial viability and plan to grow
- Clarity & persuasive impact of the pitch
Winners were selected by an expert panel of jurors including Aneesha Raines (O(1) Labs), Arlan Hamilton (Backstage Capital), Carolina Huaranca (First Close Partners), Dr. Chad Womack (United Negro College Fund; Black Tech Ventures), and Justin Kang (Visible Hands). Learn more about our jurors: https://bit.ly/meetourjurors.
Without further ado… congratulations to the entire cohort and selected winners:
Pitch Contest Winner of $50,000 and Visible Hands Fellowship — congratulations to Eyoel Asfaw of ShipShap!
“Dev/color is one of the best organizations I’ve joined and the accelerator is another example of how dev/color continues to listen and provide for its community. The participants are un-paralleled in the excellence and motivation of everyone who showed up committed to helping the community advance was inspiring!” — Eyoel Asfaw, founder of ShipShap
Impactful Female Founder award of $25,000 — congratulations to Asha Owens of BestFit!
“It’s such an honor to be part of /dev/color’s inaugural accelerator and to win the Impactful Female Founder Award. BestFit was just an idea when I joined /dev/color in 2019, so this award means even more when I think about how much we’ve grown since then. This community has been a key part of my journey and I’m so thankful for the additional funding, support, and education that I gained from the accelerator and participating partners.” — Asha Owens, co-founder of BestFit
You voted! Meet the Community Choice Award winners — congratulations to Duran Rose and Priscilla Alfaro of Actio!
“The program was a great experience overall. We were given access to resources that we would not have immediately thought of and the result was a net benefit for our venture, whether or not we won an award. I would personally recommend the program to anyone who would be interested in getting a better understanding of not only their business, but of their approach to growing that business over time.” — Duran Rose, Priscilla Alfaro, co-founders of Actio
We are thrilled to share that 60% of ventures were invited to investor meetings following the pitch contest. All 12 founders will receive individualized wrap-around support to continue pursuing venture goals through a partnership with United Negro College Fund and Black Tech Ventures.
/dev/color’s entrepreneur accelerator pilot program offered four months of expert-led learning sessions, best-in-biz coaching, and a rich community to increase access to opportunities and exposure. This program was made possible through the generous support and amplification of our accelerator partners: Concrete Rose, 4th & King, Gusto, and Basis Set Ventures, in addition to pitch contest sponsors: Visible Hands, United Negro College Fund, and Black Tech Ventures.
Our founders are from a wide variety of industries, with businesses across the beauty, fitness & wellness, healthcare, technology, financial services, security, and shipping sectors. All of our founders are Black entrepreneurs (and /dev/color members!), and 42% of the ventures are women-led.
Learn more about the cohort below!
Actio (IG, FB) * WINNER
Actio is a social fitness network, bringing people together through shared common interest in physical activities.
Priscilla Alfaro
Priscilla is a Software Quality Engineer with 15+ years of experience in different startups and mid size companies. She enjoys trying new things like food, places and activities. She self identifies as a fitness enthusiast and has dedicated time to different fitness types like dancing, running, yoga, hiking and even won a bodybuilding competition, but her biggest reward has been the friendships created by sharing those experiences. 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. Her goal is that Actio becomes a platform for people to connect through fitness providing physical and mental benefits while building community.
Duran Rose
Duran is a dedicated software engineer with a design background and broad interests in many areas. He has successfully worked in numerous fields while attaining accolades and standing out in each, everything from design to photography and software at scale. He has an ever-present and ongoing interest in building systems and products that are easy to use and uncomplicated.
BeautySlot (IG, FB, Twitter)
BeautySlot is 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.
Kimberly McIver
Kim McIver is an engineer, active angel investor, and avid gamer from Oakland, California. After studying Computer Science and Business in undergrad, Kim went on to spend the last few years helping build network effects into the product at Slack. Her passion for building from zero led her to co-found BeautySlot, a beauty marketplace focused on serving last-minute consumers. Kim is a proud Code2040 alumna and OnDeck Angels fellow and believes in the urgency of advancing the next generation of technologists.
Ariana M. Davis
Ariana M. Davis is an entrepreneur & product designer who has spent the last five years building and breathing life into digital products. Her passions lie at the intersection of creative development and emerging technologies, while her goal is to inspire users and engage them throughout her work. Davis is also the co-founder and product designer for BeautySlot, a beauty tech platform that books last minute appointments with ease. She was recently awarded 2020 Adobe XD’s Designers To Watch. When her eyes aren’t glued to a computer screen you can find her advocating for diversity in the tech industry. Ariana takes pride in encouraging women of color in tech to continue striving for their dreams.
BestFit (IG, FB, Twitter) *WINNER
BestFit makes it easy for students to access the benefits and social services they need to thrive while pursuing their post-secondary education. Our platform allows colleges, workforce development programs, and social service providers to serve these students more efficiently while saving time and money.
Asha Owens
Asha is an award-winning product designer and software engineer that has been named a Roddenberry Fellow, selected for Google for Startups’ Black Founders Fund, and served as a Civic Innovation Fellow. She is a former Columbia University Design Leader, 4.0 Schools Fellow, and recipient of Palantir’s Women in Engineering Scholarship. Neuroscience (B.S., Brown University) + Instructional Technology & Media (M.A., Columbia University).
dopl
dopl’s mission is equal access to care. They are developing a data streaming platform for telesurgery that connects medical devices to the cloud, enabling safe remote operation by a surgeon using a mixed reality headset. Their vision is a connected ecosystem, where medical devices, distributed clinical teams, applications and AI communicate through community-driven standards that foster innovation to close the gap in access to care.
Ryan James
Ryan James, PhD, currently serves as 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. He received his PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics from the University of Washington and a BS in Computer Science Engineering from University of Michigan.
Kodou
kodou.io is a fast and secure low-code software creation platform for building software with live code from open source or proprietary repositories. Rather than text editing, use our API to compose software using Lego-like code. Enjoy true network security since nothing is downloaded, so no supply-chain risk.
Yves Jean
Yves Jean is an engineer, scientist, and inventor with a history of creating novel technology and systems. kodou.io is his second startup. His expertise is in Computer Vision, computational imaging and live sports capture systems. He is a former Bell-labs scientist and a hacker at heart. Yves has a BS from Columbia University in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.
Medial Health (IG)
Medial Health builds technology solutions to address the inaccessibility, lack of security, and inefficiencies of paper-based healthcare systems worldwide, starting in the Caribbean. Its vision is to create a decentralized digital health ecosystem where patient records follow them to any medical center.
Stephen Felix
Stephen is an experienced Software Engineer and has built a career in the Financial Services industry, having worked at Goldman Sachs for nearly a decade. He graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Information Technology and Computer Science. Stephen has led initiatives around data access and privacy, system interoperability, and human and computer interaction. Stephen is also passionate about diversity, equity, and his favorite sport, soccer.
PactFi
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.
Alexa Halcomb
Alexa Halcomb, CTO of PactFi (formerly Linkit), has ten years of experience working in technology, including seven years of experience in the fintech space. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Valparaiso University.
ShipShap (IG, FB, TikTok) *WINNER
ShipShap is bringing Venmo-like convenience to global shipping. Through our easy to use mobile app and API solutions, customers access discounted shipping rates from multiple US and International carriers, helping businesses reduce their operational expenses.
Eyoel Asfaw
Eyoel Asfaw is an experienced software engineer with over five years of experience building software and leading large scale projects at Amazon. He has a Master of Science focused in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology. Eyoel’s entrepenuer journey started when he founded AddisScarves in 2014 sourcing handmade products from Ethiopia, teaching him the challenges of global logistics. He and his friends started ShipShap with the goal to make shipping more accessible for everyone across the globe.
Small World (IG, Twitter)
Small World is a social tech solution that empowers dot connectors to deploy the power of their social capital on demand with minimal effort.
Uzo Amuzie
Uzo is a seasoned operator, angel investor, and recovering “intrapreneur.” A software engineer by training, he spent more than half a decade at Goldman Sachs in & around internal startups — including Symphony.com and Marquee — in software engineering, sales, product, and CRM. He is a proud member of the On Deck and BLCK VC communities. He graduated from Columbia University with a B.S. in Computer Science. Outside of traversing the early-stage startup ecosystem, Uzo moonlights as a spoken word poet and STEM education advocate.
Tensor9 (Twitter)
Tensor9 is a data security company. It enables businesses to use sensitive health, financial, and identity data without ever seeing it. This eliminates their need to secure servers against data leaks, and makes it easy to achieve SOC2 and HIPAA compliance.
Michael Ten-Pow
Michael has a computer science degree from Princeton University, where he studied compilers. He spent 13 years as an engineer at Amazon. As an early AWS engineer, he helped build core parts of the world’s largest cloud storage service: Amazon S3. He also spent time as a principal engineer in Amazon’s automated marketing group — working at the intersection of privacy and advertising. After Amazon, Michael joined a small YCombinator-backed gig-economy startup. There he learned first-hand how difficult and expensive it is for startups to tackle data security. So he decided to found Tensor9 to make it easy for businesses to secure their users’ sensitive data.
