Posted by Jason Scott, Head of Startup Developer Ecosystem, USA
Last year, 12 inspiring entrepreneurs kicked off the inaugural Google for Startups Accelerator for Black Founders. Throughout the three month program, founders met weekly to work on growing their startups and solving tough technical challenges. “There’s so much happening every single day as a startup,” says Ashley Edwards, founder of MindRight Health, whose startup is making mental healthcare accessible to people of color and low-income families. “The program helped us navigate everything from protecting our team from distractions to building out our machine learning and data science models.”
This August, we’ll launch the second Google for Startups Accelerator for Black Founders with 11 more incredible Black-led startups from across North America. This class features startups using technology to solve challenges in medicine, education, water sustainability, real estate, and more:
Acclinate (Birmingham, Alabama, USA): A digital health startup using culture and tech to source diverse participants for clinical trials.
Adapdix (Pleasanton, California, USA): An AI/ML startup that works with large industrial semiconductor, electronic and assembly companies.
AllHere Education (Boston, Massachusetts, USA): Fosters student attendance and supports families and students with mobile messaging powered by AI.
Chatdesk (New York, New York, USA): Uses machine learning to scale support teams with the click of a button.
DOSS (Houston, Texas, USA): A digital, voice-activated real estate marketplace that empowers consumers to speak, text or type questions about properties nationwide and receive accurate, easy answers instantly.
Fêtefully (Dallas, Texas, USA): Digitizes wedding planning experiences, allowing planners to generate greater revenue and improve their offerings to customers.
Mommy Monitor (Toronto Ontario, Canada): A maternal care services platform that provides an easily accessible and culturally safe range of services that gives parents extra support customized to their particular needs and wants.
Optimal Technical Corporation (Atlanta, Georgia, USA): Intelligently eliminates electricity waste, lowers operational expenses, and helps to save the planet.
Sugar (Los Angeles, California, USA): Provides software to building owners and managers to transform the residential experience.
Varuna (Chicago, Illinois, USA): The leading water distribution system monitoring company providing real-time visibility, awareness and insights to water systems enabling optimal operations and consumer safety.
Zirtue (Dallas, Texas, USA): The world's first relationship-based lending application that simplifies loans between friends, family and trusted relationships while giving borrowers the option to pay creditors directly using their borrowed funds.
We are incredibly excited to support this group of founders over the next three months and beyond, connecting them with the best of our people, products, and programming to advance their companies and solutions.
Be sure to join us as we showcase their accomplishments on Thursday, October 21 from 12:30pm - 2:00pm EST at our Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders Demo Day 2021.
