Three Bay Area startups led by Black founders were selected for the inaugural cohort of an accelerator program for underrepresented founders run by Amazon's cloud division, AWS.
AWS announced the Impact Accelerator program in April, committing to providing $30 million in cash and services to underrepresented founders. It's an eight week program for pre-seed startups around the U.S., and founders will also get access to trainings about Amazon's cloud tools and business strategy.
Each startup will receive $125,000 cash as well as credits for AWS that are worth up to $100,000, the company said in an April announcement.
The Bay Area startups selected are working across health care, data analysis and productivity software. They are:
- Oben Health (San Francisco), which provides culturally competent care for managing heart health and hypertension.
- CModel (Vallejo), an SaaS revenue analysis and insights company.
- HubbleIQ (Orinda), which offers productivity and IT support for remote workers.
Two Southern California startups were also selected:
- Seed at the Table (Compton), crowdfunding platform for nonaccredited investors to connect with BIPOC-led companies.
- SevenStar (Irvine), which is developing a consumer app to facilitate real-time communication between police officers and citizens during incidents like traffic stops.
Twenty other startups were also selected from around the country in states including Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Texas.
