Collide Capital managing partner Aaron Samuels, a Providence native, is capping off a big year as the black-owned VC-firm was simultaneously supported by Amazon, Alphabet, and Twitter, as well as having recently announced the close of a $66M fund.
As of last month, Collide has backed over 40 companies, of which more than 80% are led by Black, Latino, or female founders.
Prior to the New York-based Collide Capital, Samuels co-founded Blavity, the largest global Black media company for millennials and Gen-Z, and AfroTech, the largest Black tech conference in the world. He's also a Forbes Under 30 list member, a Cave Canem fellow, and a nationally-acclaimed spoken word artist.
Meanwhile, Samuels' co-managing partner, Brian Hollins, spent six years working at Goldman Sachs, where he helped launch the Emerging Entrepreneurs Coverage group to extend resources and capital to early-stage founders. Hollins is also a founding board member of BLCK VC, the largest Black investor community in the US providing access, education, and community to Black investors.
"Collide Capital believes that great founders are intersectional in nature and will demand that their investors will be equivalently so," Samuels said. "We invest in founders with the lived experiences, courage, and grit to create solutions for the next generation. Given the amount of capital in the market, investors can no longer afford to just 'show up' in founder ecosystems and expect to build genuine connections with entrepreneurs."
Samuels said he believes the next generation of great investors will be strongly rooted in the communities they sourced deals from, and Collide Capital is building leading systems of change within four of the most compelling founder ecosystems across academia, industry, venture, and culture.Over the past few years, Samuels said he and Hollins have been working behind the scenes to build a massive ecosystem of under-networked innovators.
"The relationships we’ve built have transformed into the founders we back today, including the innovators behind Rheaply, Slang.ai, and EMTECH. We’re proud to invest in companies across a variety of verticals including enterprise SaaS, supply chain infrastructure, Gen-Z consumer technology, and more," he said.
In a release, Jeremiah Gordon, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at CapitalG, Alphabet's growth equity fund said the company was excited to bring the resources of Alphabet to their diverse portfolio of founders.
"At Alphabet, we invest in companies and people who are passionate about using technology to change how we live for a better future," he said. "Aaron and Brian are building a powerful ecosystem that connects us to the founders who are working to solve the next generation of global challenges. This Fund I is just the beginning for Collide Capital, and we're excited to see what the future holds for them."
Following their Fund I raise, Samuels said Collide remains focused on ushering in a new era of venture capital where resources and opportunities are directed toward the most deserving founders. Heading into 2023, he said the company will seek out more innovative companies that are "shaping the future of emerging technology."
"We’ll continue to guide founders on their institutional capital journey and equip them with resources, knowledge networks, and hands-on operational support for a successful exit," he said. "We’re excited to further disrupt the traditional VC ecosystem with our boots-on-the-ground approach and our core belief that great companies are built at the intersection of communities led by diverse, fearless change agents."
Currently, Samuels said the company doesn't have any full-time employees but they will be looking to hire one or two in the coming year.
"Venture firms at our stage are typically pretty small and we don’t anticipate the full time team to exceed five people in the coming year," he said. "That being said, we run internship and fellowship programs every semester and would love for people to check out our careers page to learn more about how to plug into the Collide ecosystem."
