Black Operator Ventures (Black Ops VC) is working to close the Series A funding gap for Black tech founders.<\/p>\n
Black Ops VC is a venture capital firm led by a Black team of co-founders<\/a> with a shared mission to \u201cinvest in extraordinary founders solving complex problems with software,\u201d its CEO, James Norman,<\/a> said in conversation with AFROTECH\u2122.<\/p>\n Norman and Black Ops General Partner Sean Green<\/a>\u00a0sat down with AFROTECH\u2122 to discuss the firm\u2019s vision, leading oversubscribed Series A rounds, opportunities in today\u2019s investment landscape, and more.<\/p>\n The duo met nearly a decade ago in Los Angeles. Green was among the early cohorts of Transparent Collective, which supports Black, Latinx, and womxn entrepreneurs with raising early-stage funding, and Norman serves as its chairman.<\/p>\n Call To Action Realized<\/p>\n Before their paths formally aligned, the pair charted unique territory. Norman launched his first company at age 16, an online retailer for car and home audio. He had always been interested in building businesses<\/a> despite not coming from a family of entrepreneurs.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cYou couldn\u2019t get a job at 12 years old. So my only option was to create my own revenue<\/a> stream,\u201d Norman explained.<\/p>\n Building businesses became a lifestyle for him, and he says it became evident to employers that his mindset didn\u2019t align with maintaining a 9-to-5. This only motivated him further to get creative in how he supported himself. Today, he leads Stealth AI, which is \u201cbuilding the predictive consumer intelligence model for creative content,\u201d and Pilotly, a market research platform for creative content.<\/p>\n While generating revenue has always been a priority, he is equally concerned about closing the wealth gap and creating opportunities where disparities often exist.<\/p>\n This is also how Green feels. He shares that his hustle was inspired by his Jamaican mother. She had little education and had lost her parents at a young age but carried a great sense of responsibility and understood the importance of generating capital as she moved to Toronto and started a maid service business.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s how she put us through school,\u201d Green recalled.<\/p>\n Observing his mother\u2019s determination led Green to understand how to build a business<\/a> from the ground up. He started his own newspaper route business in Toronto early on and established a hedge fund after completing his higher learning. He is the founder of ARTERNAL, which is a vertical SaaS platform that brings everything in the art world together, transforming relationships, artwork inventory, and sales for art dealers, art gallery owners, advisories, and their staff, according to<\/a> its website.<\/p>\n Reflecting on the pair\u2019s experience, Green acknowledged, \u201cIn order to get there and raise millions of dollars, it took a whole process, and I realized that we\u2019re connected to the godfathers of venture capital, not through any sort of relationship that came passed down from a friend or family, but was through sheer brute force like, \u2018We\u2019re gonna make it or not.\u2019 It\u2019s that 50 Cent quote of \u2018Get Rich or Die Tryin.’\u201d<\/p>\n He continued, \u201cThe pathway to raise funds comes through this warm intro, which is almost impossible\u2026 So, I knew the plight of raising capital, looking like how we look like. And I was like, \u2018This is virtually impossible for the next Sean or James to be able to come through and check the boxes that we\u2019ve had to check off to get here.’\u201d<\/p>\n Norman says he recognized that some goal posts set in funding were imaginary. When he was looking to raise funds for his former venture, GroupFlix, an a la carte TV service, he was promised by investors that he would be given money for a pre-seed round if he had the content contracts. The money never came.<\/p>\n \u201cI built the product. I got a crazy team from MIT<\/a> (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Stanford. I got a thousand people\u2019s sample credit cards, and now I got these content contracts, so surely they\u2019re going to give me the money,\u201d Norman recalled. \u201cAnd the money never showed up. So I realized, one, these goal posts that get set aren\u2019t real, and two, there\u2019s a massive gap here for access to capital for people who are like me.\u201d<\/p>\n Black Ops VC\u2019s Portfolio<\/p>\n Black Ops VC has 15 companies within its portfolio supported through $20 million in Fund I. The venture capital firm has made investments in companies like Athlytic, a company that connects college athletes<\/a> to brands so they can profit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL); WhoseYourLandlord (WYL), which offers AI-generated insight reports from residents to real estate<\/a> owners and managers so they can gauge their property\u2019s performance; and ChurchSpace, which was founded as a marketplace for churches to generate revenue by renting out their property when not in use, according to<\/a> information on its website.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were the Airbnb for churches. Now they are what you call kind of micro fulfillment, last-mile delivery for DoorDash and hopefully soon like Amazon and Walmart,\u201d Norman said of ChurchSpace, founded by Emmanuel Brown and Day Edwards Antwi. \u201cActually leveraging churches, the most underutilized real estate in the country\u2026 and actually allowing those facilities to be used for transfer of products into the local communities they exist in.\u201d<\/p>\n He added, \u201cThese are like ideas that you come to because you\u2019re in communities where you\u2019re experiencing a problem or seeing an opportunity that you close in on. It\u2019s like real lived experiences that lead to people leading these types of companies.\u201d<\/p>\n Closing Series A Gap For Black Tech Founders<\/p>\n