Luke Cooper spent years growing a Baltimore startup before selling it to a Fortune 500 company, with a $6.5 million round of fundraising along the way — possibly one of the biggest single rounds ever raised by a Black-led startup in Maryland.
Now, he wants to find a Black founder who can top that.
Cooper said he and a business partner are planning to bring a hybrid venture capital fund to West Baltimore with the aim of raising $250 million. If successful, it would likely be one of the biggest venture capital funds in the country devoted solely to Black founders — if not the biggest. SoftBank Group created a $100 million fund in 2020 for entrepreneurs of color, emphasizing Black and Hispanic founders, which the Wall Street Journal described as the largest known fund for that purpose.
Raising $250 million is a big lift, but Cooper said they're off to a hot start. They have already raised a few million dollars and have a soft commitment from a major insurance company for $50 million. He said the fund plans to have another round of closings before the end of the second quarter.
They're calling the new fund Latimer Ventures, after the 19th-century Black inventor Lewis Howard Latimer, whose work was central to the early development of the light bulb — but later ignored.
“The market historically has rejected [genius] because it doesn’t look like those who came before it,” Cooper told the Baltimore Business Journal.
Cooper couldn’t disclose his partner yet because he has not left his current role, but Cooper said he has more than two decades of experience at Intel Capital where he invested nearly $100 million as a managing director.
Cooper has plenty of experience in the VC and startup space as well. He was the CEO of Fixt, a Baltimore-based tech repair company that was backed by $11 million in venture capital before Fortune 500 insurance firm Assurant Inc. purchased it in 2020 for an undisclosed price.
Cooper said the $6.5 million round he raised with Fixt is still the biggest single round of venture capital raised by a Black-led startup in Maryland. He made a nice return for his investors, but he said it could have been even bigger if Fixt had more financial support in its growth stages.
Following national trends, Maryland and the Greater Baltimore area have seen explosive growth in VC funding over the past few years. Maryland firms raised more than $2.2 billion in 2021.
However, Black founders receive a disproportionately low amount of venture capital investment.
Crunchbase reported in July that American companies raised $147 billion of venture capital in the first half of 2021, but just 1.2% went to Black startups. (More than 13% of the U.S. population is Black).
Cooper said the same problems facing Black startups throughout the country are present in Baltimore.
“It’s notoriously clubby and homogenous with few people of color making investment decisions,” he said. “Silicon Valley, like Baltimore doesn’t create space for enough kinds of geniuses. There’s absolutely genius in places like Division Street and Greenmount Avenue.”
Investors tend to follow “pattern matching,” Cooper said. They see successful startups with ties to schools like Harvard University, Stanford University or UCLA. So when they look to invest, they don’t look at historically Black colleges and universities like Bowie State University or Coppin State University.
Cooper said he wants to break that pattern. He said he recently wrote a check to a Black founder he’s helping and encouraged a white investor from a white-led firm to invest, too. According to Cooper, the investor scrutinized the startup with “M&A-level due diligence,” grilling them over several weeks, dozens of emails and repeated phone calls — all over a $25,000 investment.
In the end, the investor backed out, Cooper said.
“It’s exhausting,” Cooper said of the skepticism facing Black-led startups. “And it should not be that way.”
Instead, his venture capital firm will take inspiration from its namesake: Lewis Latimer.
While Thomas Edison was struggling to make a lightbulb that wouldn't rapidly burn out, Latimer, whose parents had escaped slavery, filed a patent for an improved lightbulb that would be crucial to its development and widespread use.
To Cooper, the name Latimer means “tinkering in the dark when no one sees you.”
Latimer spent part of his adult life in Bridgeport, Connecticut, “literally one block from the project housing that I grew up in,” Cooper said. But Latimer never received much acclaim as Edison. And Cooper grew up not realizing the connection he had to a Black genius.
Cooper doesn’t want that happening to Black kids in West Baltimore. That’s why he said Latimer Ventures will be based there (though no exact location has been selected yet). Cooper said he wants kids to see Black founders going in and out of a multimillion-dollar venture capital firm in their own neighborhood.
“How does seeing that affect your decision-making and what you think is possible?”
A previous version of this article misidentified the name of the fund as Latimer Venture Capital. The name is Latimer Ventures.
