For Black, Latino and women entrepreneurs, it can be hard to find co-working space. It's often expensive, and minority founders are disproportionately underfunded. Praveen Ghanta, a serial entrepreneur with multiple company exits, has a solution.
In January, through his company Fraction.work, Ghanta self-funded a new venture called Emerging Founders. It operates in a roughly 1,200-square-foot space in Atlanta Tech Village that Ghanta rents. The startup founders get a free desk for a year. It also provides access to pitch mentoring and connections with potential investors and customers.
Each week, the founders within the space will pitch their ideas and provide feedback to one another. Throughout the year, the founders will participate in demo day to pitch their ideas to potential investors. As opposed to most accelerator programs which last a few months, Ghanta says it's important to provide founders with a whole year for longer development.
“People don't have to be thinking about their company’s status or access to the Tech Village or space,” said Ghanta. “We've heard those concerns that with programs that end after three or four months, and all of a sudden, you're back to working from home again and not having that access.”
Providing as much free office space as the program does could equate to $7,000 in savings over a year, said Ghanta. That makes a meaningful difference for founders bootstrapping their company. Especially for diverse founders who have disproportionately been left out of big venture deals.
In August 2022, Atlanta Inno reviewed the 25 largest venture deals for startups so far that year, which ranged from $20 million to $150 million. We found that three of those deals went to Black founders.
The yielded benefit in investing in diverse talent is part of what inspired Ghanta to make Emerging Founders focus on underrepresented founders. Hiring minority developers for his company he says created an opportunity to attain talent that other people looked over.
“This is basic textbook economics. When there's discrimination, to the extent that that exists, that means people who have talent either aren't getting paid as much as they should or are not getting the opportunity at all,” said Ghanta.
And Ghanta knows how to grow a business. In 1999, he founded SmartWorkgroups which was acquired by Intralinks in July 2000. In 2021, his risk analysis platform HiddenLevers was acquired by Orion Advisor Solutions. Ghanta had moved Hidden Levers’ headquarters from New York City to Decatur in 2018.
Coming off a recent company exit and running a company that is generating revenue, Ghanta is funding the program out of his own pocket - no string attached. The only requirement is that founders come in and use the space a few times a week at minimum.
The inaugural cohort of 13 founders came from an applicant pool of 35, said Ghanta. The companies include Happy Talks, Arcum.ai, Fr8Bukyn, HirePulse.io, Jax Rideshare, Destined.ai, Optimal Tech, Ask Me Your MD, Landrift, Strapt Vending, Cookonnect, VibesChk and Travelsist.
