Executives from Google LLC hosted Black entrepreneurs and startup founders at the company's Bakery Square offices on Thursday to celebrate the growing partnership between the tech giant and Pittsburgh-based Black Tech Nation (BTN), a global community group focused on elevating Black tech entrepreneurs.
As part of this collaboration, Google's Pittsburgh offices will team up with BTN to spotlight and support Black technologists and entrepreneurs in a more intentional way starting in the new year. More exact details on how the two entities will do this are expected in the coming weeks but it builds on Google's prior commitments made to the region's Black tech scene, which also received recognition from Black entrepreneurs during the event.
"Google is proud to be a community partner; it's why we're all here today and we really appreciate the support and we really appreciate you all welcoming us," Winton Steward, head of government affairs and public policy for the Midwest region at Google, said. "We really consider Pittsburgh a home and Pennsylvania a home. We have over 800 employees here in the state and we want to continue to grow and we want to continue to support organizations like Black Tech Nation."
The celebratory event also highlighted two recent local investments made by Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), which are looking spread capital across Black-led VC firms, Black-owned startups and nonprofit organizations that support Black entrepreneurship and business through initiatives overseeing these types of investments.
One of these recipients was Black Tech Nation Ventures (BTNV), a Pittsburgh-based venture capital group focused on offering seed and Series A levels of funding to Black and diverse tech startups in Pittsburgh and around the world. Alphabet enlisted CapitalG, its independent growth fund of nearly a decade, to allocate these funding commitments, though specific details on how much investment BTNV received from the fund haven't been disclosed. However, BTNV was one of six VC firms selected that now share the $60 million that's been allocated to these entities from the CapitalG growth fund.
The other related investments observed during the evening included those made by the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund, which provides nonequity cash awards of $100,000 to Black-led organizations to help them grow their business as well as $100,000 in Google Cloud credits. Nashid Ali, founder of Pittsburgh-based fintech startup Gainvest Inc., received this funding last September, and Jim Gibbs, co-founder and CEO of Pittsburgh-based mobile parking platform Meter Feeder, received the award in September 2021. The event celebrated both men for being named among the nationally prestigious group.
For Kelauni Jasmyn, founder & CEO of BTN and a general partner at BTNV, Google's efforts to aid Black founders are significant. She shared figures from a joint study conducted by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association in 2018 that found only 3% of VC partners in the U.S. identify as Black as well as a 2016 study from HBS that found less than 1% of investors in the VC industry are Black.
Partnerships forged between Black-led organizations and Google will improve these figures, Jasmyn said.
"Honestly, to me, it speaks volumes to the commitment to the Black community," Jasmyn said. "If we're keeping it honest, there can be certain feelings when we have conversations around tech and gentrification or tech and displacement or people not having access to certain jobs; those are all real conversations, and I know that Google, especially through us, is where we're having these conversations about how do we continue to support the community."
Jasmyn also shared that BTNV expects to reach its total $50 million fund goal early next year and that it has invested in five startups — four of which are women- and Black-led — since it reached its first close in December 2021.
"I'm thrilled to be here. I love Black Tech Nation," Austin Davis, lieutenant governor-elect of Pennsylvania, said. "I know we have a lot of work ahead of us over the next four years, but I'm confident that we together can make Pennsylvania a leader for Black businesses."
