real-economy
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Bizmark
Bizmark is a Y Combinator (S26) startup building an operating system for companies that make, move, or sell physical goods. It connects to the systems, inboxes, spreadsheets, documents, and know-how already inside a business and turns that context into automated quoting, dynamic scheduling, and inventory forecasting - shipping a working product in weeks rather than years.
Jason Kong
Jason Kong is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based Black-led venture capital firm that backs founders automating the 'real economy' - the large, often overlooked industries that make the world run. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2021 while at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Kong backed breakout companies including Attentive, Brex, Datadog, Discord, Figma, and UiPath. A Summa Cum Laude graduate of Penn's elite M&T program who qualified twice for USAMO and won the We the People national civics competition, he joined Base10 in 2023 to lead Series B+ investments, bringing a singular blend of investment banking, late-stage VC, and hedge fund analysis discipline to growth-stage bets on vertical SaaS, cybersecurity, and fintech.
Rexhep Dollaku
Rexhep 'Rexhi' Dollaku is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that has become the first Black-led VC to cross $1 billion in assets under management. Born in Ulcinj on the Montenegro-Albania border and raised in Pittsburgh, Dollaku studied economics, global health, and health policy at Harvard before building his career in venture. He joined Base10 as an early team member, architecting the firm's thematic research methodology that now drives 90% of its investments and growing it from a seed-stage firm to a $1.3B AUM powerhouse. His focus: backing founders who automate the 'real economy' - food, logistics, retail, fintech - solving problems for the 99% while donating half of the firm's profits to HBCU scholarships.
Adeyemi Ajao
Adeyemi 'Ade' Ajao is a Nigerian-Spanish serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who co-founded Base10 Partners, the first Black-led VC firm to surpass $1 billion in AUM. Before building Base10, he sold Tuenti (Spain's dominant social network) to Telefónica for ~$100M and co-founded Identified, acquired by Workday. In 2023, he became the first Black investor ever named to the Forbes Midas List, and his fund's portfolio includes Nubank, Figma, Instacart, and Rappi. His contrarian bet on automating the 'Real Economy' — logistics, food, healthcare, retail — has generated over $3 billion in portfolio returns.