Atlanta-Sandy SpringsRoswell, GA

Serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Paul Judge is perhaps the bestknown black founder to emerge from Atlanta, but he’s more the exception than the rule. According to census data, the city is 52 percent black, but many venture capitalists here are white men who tend to fund companies they find relatable. Jewel Burks Solomon co-founded visual-recognition tech startup Partpic in 2013, and sold it to Amazon for an undisclosed sum in 2016. But of the $2 million she and her cofounders raised, only $25,000 of it came from local sources. Burks Solomon is part of a new generation of Atlanta’s black entrepreneurs in their 20s and 30s who are succeeding, in part, because they’re finding ways around the venture capital issue— constantly traveling to secure funding from other parts of the country, often relying heavily on crowdfunding and angel investments. Says Candace Mitchell, who, after graduating from Georgia Tech with a computer science degree, founded Myavana, a digital hair care startup for people of color: “We’re trying to create this momentum where we can start having major exits or major growth in our businesses to really start shaping the ecosystem.”