When it comes to shaping the future, one must first take a close look at the present. These days, many verticals such as healthcare and education may still represent people of color inequitably. This has inspired founders from underrepresented groups to build solutions that better reflect the communities they serve.
However, getting those solutions off the ground is often a difficult task. While many avenues exist for securing startup capital, from large firms to angel investors, only a small percentage of venture funding goes to Black founders. Nex Cubed, a Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator, hopes to rewrite this narrative for diverse founders across the country with the launch of its new fund.
Nex Cubed consists of a funding vehicle and accelerator components geared toward fueling tech innovation from diverse founders. One spinoff of the company, the HBCU Founders Initiative, is a nonprofit pre-accelerator that helps founders from historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, build out their minimum viable product. To date, more than 600 entrepreneurs have participated in the eight-week program.
Building upon this initiative, Nex Cubed launched its $40 million HBCU Founders Fund with a $5 million investment from Costco Wholesale. The fund will provide capital and accelerator programming to startups where at least one founder is a student, alum or faculty member of a HBCU.
“We decided to open source our programming to support HBCU students and recent alums,” Nex Cubed’s CEO Marlon Evans told Built In. “In doing our research, we recognize that while there were a lot of great point-in-time activities happening on these campuses — like pitch competitions and hackathons and demo days — there really wasn’t that infrastructure needed to support those opportunities and help sustain them.”
Through its new fund, Nex Cubed will provide about 80 startups with $120,000. In addition to the capital, recipients will also undergo Nex Cubed’s four-month accelerator program and get support from advisors who have areas of expertise that match their growing business. HBCU Founders Fund will also provide follow-on checks of $250,000.
While its announcement happens to coincide with Black History Month, Nex Cubed’s efforts toward nurturing Black founder’s success are part of what it strives to do every day. The company helps grow businesses that strive to close the racial wealth gap. Creating this change is twofold, according to Evans. The first segment is supporting Black entrepreneurship while the next is helping build companies targeting areas of inequity.
“[Our country] was built around the fact that we have a lot of different people who are contributing to that overarching success from all over the globe that are here now, and our ability to maximize that diversity is what made us successful,” Evans said. “The fact that we have access to this diverse talent really should be our secret weapon to really make an impact in the world through some of the innovation that’s coming out of the U.S.”
Nex Cubed’s role is to ensure founders have the resources they need to progress the world toward a better future. The company will continue to build out its new fund throughout the year with the help of investors that have made commitments toward diversity, equity and inclusion, Evans said. It also plans on donating a percentage of the fund’s proceeds back to its nonprofit initiative.
