CompanyJune 17, 2021

Celebrating one year of Tech for Black Founders

This Juneteenth marks the one-year anniversary of Tech for Black Founders. We wanted to take this opportunity to highlight what the program has helped Black-led companies achieve thus far and celebrate the program's mission for the future.

tech-for-black-founders

In May, 2020, the words “I can’t breathe” echoed across the nation as over 15 million people throughout the United States protested in reaction to the murder of George Floyd. Although Floyd’s death was one of the many unjust tragedies that the African American community has suffered in this country’s history, it served as a catalyst that opened the eyes of many across the world to the systematic oppression that Black people experience every day.

In the tech world, only 1% of venture backed founders in the United States are Black. Limited funding makes it more difficult to hire the best talent, build great technology, and access the right tools.

At mParticle, we recognized that the onus was on us to help close the power gap. In June, 2020, we teamed up with partners Amplitude, Branch, Braze, and Radar to launch Tech for Black Founders, an initiative that makes our software completely free to U.S.-based, early-stage startups led by Black founders. 

Today marks the one year anniversary of the launch of Tech for Black Founders, and we’re excited to share that industry-leading companies such as Airtable, Stripe, and Foursquare have joined us and begun offering their services for free as part of the Tech for Black Founders program.

We wanted to highlight one of the great companies taking advantage of the opportunity. 

Telania was accepted to the Tech for Black Founders program in July 2020 and leveraged tools in the program to simplify their data management and increase retention. 

Founded by Don Weobong, Telania are makers of eLeaP, a cloud Learning Management System (LMS) that helps enterprise companies manage organizational compliance and team performance. To gain an edge in their increasingly competitive industry, the Telania leadership team wanted to use customer data to improve the efficiency of their pre-sales process, monitor customer health, and increase renewal rate. The data required to gain these insights, however, lived in disconnected systems, and with limited internal engineering resources the team was restricted from leveraging data to make strategic decisions.

Through the Tech for Black Founders program, Telania received free access to both mParticle and Amplitude. Using mParticle, Don and team were able to track data from their product, understand customer engagement, and integrate data across their growth tools without having to pay for outsourced developers. By forwarding engagement data to Amplitude, the team could dive deeper into customer interactions and get a better understanding of customer health. By connecting data to their CRM, it became possible to automate strategic communications throughout the customer journey. These increases in automation and interoperability allowed the Telania team to increase sales efficiency and deliver more strategic experiences to their customers.

What an amazing gift this mParticle Scholarship has been! eLeaP has been able to leverage the platform to streamline and automate our pre-sales process. There’s much more we are looking forward to being able to achieve with mParticle. I want to thank the leadership and Tech for Black Founders team for their support throughout the year. I am humbled to have been selected to participate and hope to be able to pay it forward for many years to come.

Don Weobong

Founder and President of Telania | eLeaP

Learn more about Telania and the eLeaP LMS here.

Today marks the first anniversary of the Tech for Black Founders program, and we hope that it’s the first of many to come! We encourage all reading this to share the program with your networks so that we can increase awareness and help reduce racial inequality in our industry.

“We stand with the community of incredible black founders. We couldn’t be happier to help them as they build great companies and deliver great experiences for their customers,” said Michael Katz, CEO of mParticle. “The popularity of the program, having industry giants such as Stripe and over 100 other tech companies join Tech for Black Founders and do the right thing is just incredibly inspiring.”

If you’re interested in applying to Tech for Black Founders, you can learn more about the program and apply here.

If you work at a SaaS company that’s interested in joining this initiative, please reach out to info@techforblackfounders.com

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