Participated · Seed · Aug 2024

WealthMore is a consumer investment platform built to broaden access to wealth advisers through adviser-led portfolios, licensed advisers, and financial planning. The product requires a $5,000 minimum and offers three pricing tiers starting at $25 per month. The company partnered with Apex Clearing Corporation for brokerage services and has built community features such as #firstgenwealth and #blkwomenwealth to engage users. WealthMore launched a beta in June and plans to exit beta around the end of the year. The founder, Mical Jeanlys-White, drew on prior product experience at American Express and JPMorgan Chase and has focused on diverse advisers and grassroots brand-building including lifestyle products and community events. The team currently numbers 10 people and conducted surveys of over 300 potential users while designing pricing and features.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2023

MDisrupt is an Austin, TX–based marketplace serving the health tech and life sciences industries. Its AI-powered Health Expert Marketplace connects companies with over 2,500 professionals, including clinicians, health system executives, and payor leaders. The platform streamlines access to essential expertise to enable rapid product development and validation. The company raised $1M in funding led by American Heart Association Ventures, and Lisa Suennen joined the MDisrupt board. MDisrupt says it will use the funds to support expanded adoption of its AI-powered marketplace and to add new features through a strategic collaboration with the Association to meet members' needs. The company is led by CEO and founder Ruby Gadelrab. MDisrupt is a marketplace that connects healthtech and life science companies with health experts to help build, commercialize and scale health products. Led by founder and CEO Ruby Gadelrab and based in Austin, TX, the company reports a network of over 1,500 experts from organizations including Blue Cross Blue Shield, CVS, Willis Towers Watson, the U.S. FDA, Optum, and Cleveland Clinic. MDisrupt serves both startups and enterprise customers across healthtech and life science sectors. The company raised $3M in Seed funding and intends to use the capital to launch its platform and expand its client roster. In conjunction with the round, Cat Middleton of The Venture Collective is joining the MDisrupt board of directors. MDisrupt is transforming into a digital health intelligence company that organizes the world's digital health products by performance through clinically crowdsourced data generation. Founded in 2019 and based in Austin, Texas, it connects digital health companies with health industry experts and has helped more than 55 companies build and scale products. The company's platform combines three elements—people, platform, and data—to digitize solutions for access to experts on demand, clinical early adopters, and real-world performance data. MDisrupt plans to expand the platform to enable innovators to rapidly generate the real-world performance data needed to commercialize and scale their products and to serve as a marketplace and benchmark for the industry. The platform's objective dataset, built on real-world clinical performance from every digital health product on the platform, will feed its digital health intelligence engine. The company says the output will influence key decision-makers and provide standards and benchmarks for the growing digital health sector.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2021

HUED began as a digital directory connecting patients seeking racially concordant care with Black and Latinx physicians, and expanded its product to include anti-racism and implicit-bias training for clinicians and teams. The company’s mission is to dismantle structural barriers that prevent patients of color from accessing high-quality care and to improve outcomes for Black and brown communities. Founder and CEO Kimberly Wilson built the company from personal experience of the problem and has framed the market need using data on disparities in care. HUED has attracted attention and early traction through accelerator and pitch programs, including the Northwestern Mutual Black Founder Accelerator. The company has positioned itself at the intersection of healthcare and education, aiming to both connect patients to available clinicians and to increase cultural competency across provider networks. Financially, HUED closed a $1.6 million seed round to scale its product and training offerings.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2020

A Kids Company About was founded in 2019 in Portland, Ore., after CEO Jelani Memory wrote A Kids Book About Racism. The company began as a book publisher and has expanded into podcast production and a newly launched series of online classes targeting middle- and early-high-school students. Content is developed via a workshop model that produces books in a day and centers first-person “owned voices” on topics such as racism, divorce, anxiety, activism, gender, cancer, and authenticity. Memory emphasizes honesty with kids and inclusive contributor workflows to lower barriers for new storytellers. The startup has prioritized a diverse team and investor base and has quadrupled headcount in the past year to 25 employees. In April the company closed a $7 million Series A, strengthening its financial position for continued content and product expansion. A Kids Book About publishes short illustrated children’s books that tackle difficult subjects such as racism, cancer, divorce and COVID-19. The company uses a fast, workshop-driven model that co-writes a book in a single day and typically brings titles to market in about 45 days. It launched in 2019 with 12 titles and today offers 25 titles with more planned, including fast-tracked books on white privilege and systemic racism. The business is primarily direct-to-consumer and follows a novel publishing model that pays authors no less than 10% of book revenue. After George Floyd’s murder the company saw a rapid spike in demand—within 10 days it recorded north of $1M in revenue, sold out nearly all titles and at one point had roughly 50,000 books on backorder. During the pandemic the company produced a COVID-19 book in four days as a free e-book and has a physical edition available for pre-order.