black-founders
(5)
Tanya Van Court
Tanya Van Court is the founder and CEO of Goalsetter, a New York-based fintech that teaches American families to save, spend, invest, and build wealth through debit cards with parental controls and culturally fluent, gamified financial-literacy quizzes. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer who ran digital products at ESPN, Nickelodeon, and Discovery Education, she launched Goalsetter in 2016 after her nine-year-old daughter asked for an investment account for her birthday. The company has raised tens of millions of dollars and drawn investors including Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, and Robert F. Smith, while pursuing Van Court's stated mission of closing the racial wealth gap.
Jareau Wadé
Jareau Wadé is a payments entrepreneur, operator, and writer who has spent roughly 15 years building commerce and payments infrastructure. He co-founded Balanced (acquired by Stripe in 2015) and helped scale Finix as its Chief Growth Officer, and now leads product partnerships at Ramp. He writes Batch Processing, a widely-read newsletter dissecting the people, companies, and ideas driving fintech. A Tucson native and UPenn-trained electrical engineer who taught in Ghana before the Bay Area, he relocated to Atlanta and invests in and advises early-stage founders, with a focus on Black entrepreneurship.
Brandon Hill
Brandon Hill is the co-founder and CEO of Vori, a San Francisco-based B2B operating system for the grocery industry. A Stanford graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Hill grew up surrounded by grocery — his grandparents ran a small store in Oklahoma and his parents spent 40+ years in the industry. He channeled that heritage into Vori, which he co-founded in 2019 with Tre Kirkman and Robert Pinkerton to modernize the technology stack powering America's independent and regional supermarkets. Vori's AI-powered platform, VoriOS, handles point-of-sale, inventory, pricing, supplier integration, and back-office operations for 140+ stores across 55+ cities, having processed over $500 million in payments. The company raised a $22M Series B in May 2026, bringing total funding to over $32M.
Chris Lyons
Chris Lyons is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, where he spent over a decade reshaping how culture and capital intersect. Starting as Chief of Staff to co-founder Ben Horowitz in 2013, he rose to General Partner by 2021 and founded the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) in 2018 - Silicon Valley's first VC fund composed entirely of Black Limited Partners, uniting athletes, musicians, and entertainers as investors in frontier technology. A former sound engineer trained under Grammy-winning producer Jermaine Dupri, Lyons brings a rare cross-industry fluency to tech investing, bridging entertainment, sports, Web3, and enterprise software. As of early 2026, he announced his departure from a16z to launch his own fund, citing the AI revolution as the defining moment to build independently.
Megan Holston-Alexander
Megan Holston-Alexander is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the Head of the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) - Silicon Valley's first venture capital fund composed exclusively of Black cultural leaders and organizations committed to Black wealth generation. A Montgomery, Alabama native who grew up in the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, she studied sociology at Clark Atlanta University, earned an MA from University of Houston, and an MBA from Stanford (where she relaunched the Black Business Conference after a decade-long absence). Before joining a16z in 2020, she was a founding team member at Unusual Ventures. At CLF, she has helped deploy capital into 300+ startups across consumer, crypto, fintech, healthcare, and enterprise while connecting athletes, entertainers, and executives to technology's early cap tables - all while donating 100% of CLF's management fees and carry to nonprofits that build the next generation of Black technologists.