The WOCstar Fund announced the launch of its WOCstar Venture Scout program and its inaugural venture scouts.
The WOCstar Fund is a global group of active investors, entrepreneurs, and business professionals who “represents the new generation of leaders that will advance the WOCstar Fund’s commitment to invest meaningful capital in women of color and diverse tech entrepreneurs.”
“In order to manifest racial and economic equality, we need to increase the diversity of the investing talent equipped to invest in women entrepreneurs and business owners,” said Gayle Jennings-O’Byrne, co-founder of the WOCstar Fund and host of VCs off the Record podcast. “Individually the VC Scouts are impressive but together, we truly are a global group of rockstars ready to invest in North America, India, Africa, Latin America and beyond.”
The fund introduced several of its scouts, including Sherrell Dorsey, the founder, and CEO of The Plug — a digital news and insights platform covering the Black innovation economy.
Dorsey’s work has been featured in VICE, The Washington Post, Seattle Times, The Information, and more, and in 2018, she was named an inspiring woman in tech by CNet.
In May, Dorsey sat down for an interview with Medium, where she revealed how she came up with the idea for The Plug.
“I actually stumbled across the idea accidentally. I have always worked in tech and one of the challenges for me was not seeing folks that looked like me in the tech scene in the media I was consuming,” Dorsey explained. “I grew up in Seattle, so I was constantly around Black engineers, Black programmers, Black network administrators. It bothered me that I wasn’t seeing that reflected in the material that I was reading and that there wasn’t a rigorous and analytical look at what people of color are doing in the tech space.”
