JusticeText awarded $100K in non-dilutive funding from Google's Black Founders Fund
Summary
In an interview with Black Enterprise Magazine, the head of Google for Startups said, Our team is solely focused on helping underrepresented founders grow their businesses and succeed in a space where the odds are often stacked against them.A study from the Minority Business Development Agency found that Black entrepreneurs are three times as likely as white entrepreneurs to say that a lack of access to capital negatively affects their businesses profitability. Even within the venture capital sector, only 4% of the workforce is Black, and an even smaller fraction of those employees are in leadership roles.When asked about how his identity as a Black founder has come into play at JusticeText, CTO Leslie Jones-Dove said, "there are people who look like me - black and brown folks - who are interacting with the criminal justice system regularly, and I especially empathize with their desire for greater accountability and transparency in policing today. CEO and co-founder Devshi Mehrotra previously interned at Google Brain and DeepMind in 2017 and 2018, respectively. When asked about this full-circle moment, Devshi said, "its an honor to be recognized by the company that gave me my start in tech industry. "JusticeText will be utilizing the Google funding to hire another talented engineer to join the team and invest more in digital marketing campaigns.