Startups

Meet the Black Female Founders from TC Include at TC Sessions: Justice 2021

Comment

On March 3, we’re hosting TC Sessions: Justice 2021, a day-long virtual conference dedicated to examining diversity and inclusion in tech. Tune in to presentations, panel discussions, breakout sessions and interactive Q&As with key tech leaders. Topics range from accessible product design and fighting algorithmic bias to the justice system, workplace organizing and support for underrepresented founders — and that’s just for starters.

Don’t miss your chance to meet some founders currently participating in TechCrunch’s Include program. We partnered with various founder organizations — who in turn nominated promising early-stage startup founders — and collectively provide educational resources and mentorship to help these young founders develop and succeed over the course of the year. This collaborative program also includes prominent VC organizations like Kleiner Perkins, Salesforce Ventures and Initialized Capital to develop lasting mentorships with the TC Include founder cohort.

We joined forces with Black Female Founders, and they nominated an impressive posse of early-stage startup founders. Register for TC Sessions: Justice to meet some of the visionary female founders who are part of the Black Female Founders organization and watch them take part in a live pitch feedback session with TechCrunch during the event.

We’ll be highlighting many more TC Include startups and founder organizations over the coming weeks, so keep checking back. And now, without further ado, behold the TC Include program startups sponsored by Black Female Founders:

  • Five to Nine: Five to Nine is a Black and women-owned software company that enables organizers to track, manage and evaluate their events and programs for impact. Founded by Denise Umubyeyi.
  • MYAVANA: Myavana is a virtual hair care company that provides product recommendations and personalized guidance using AI technology and professional experts. Founded by Candace Mitchell Harris.
  • Go Together, Inc.: Go Together’s Carpool to School is a B2B SaaS platform that’s equitable, makes organizing school transportation convenient for parents and reduces per-student transportation cost for schools/districts. Founded by Kimberly Moore.
  • kweliTV: KweliTV allows you to discover and celebrate critically acclaimed and award-winning Black stories across the globe through curated indie films, documentaries, web series and live experiences. Founded by DeShuna Spencer.
  • Viledge: Viledge connects Black businesses to new fans by curating gift boxes full of dope finds. Friends, co-workers and families can discover and share together in live unboxing experiences. Founded by Zuley Clarke.
  • Civic Eagle: Civic Eagle is a SaaS company that helps organizations gain a strategic edge in advocacy and lobbying by using AI to unlock legislative data insights. Founded by Shawntera Hardy.
  • Unpacking: Unpacking is the No. 1 online learning platform for social impact. We’re disrupting boring, inefficient and outdated diversity training through real talk and interactive gaming. Founded by Kristina Williams.
  • Official Black Wall Street: Official Black Wall Street is a digital platform and app connecting consumers to Black-owned businesses, while giving Black entrepreneurs the resources and exposure needed to thrive. Founded by Mandy Bowman.
  • Go See The City: We drive foot traffic to local restaurants, brands and events by connecting customers to deep-discounted coupons. We then provide consumer analytics to small businesses and municipalities. Founded by Aneshai Smith.

TC Sessions: Justice 2021 takes place virtually on March 3. Register today and join us as we explore diversity, equity and inclusion in tech.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Justice 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

More TechCrunch

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s longtime chief scientist and one of its co-founders, has left the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the news in a post on X Tuesday evening. “This…

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard launches on May 19

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google’s Gemini updates: How Project Astra is powering some of I/O’s big reveals

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade