Mastercard to make a multimillion dollar investment in Fearless Fund, a venture capital firm founded by Black women with the mission to invest in minority female entrepreneurs.
However, the exact amount was not disclosed.
The credit card giant also revealed a partnership with Greenwood, a fintech firm aimed at Black and Latino consumers and business owners, to issue the platform’s first debit cards.
“This is part of our broader work on financial inclusion,” Mastercard president of strategic growth Michael Froman. “We want to bring all the assets of the company to the table, to engage with them, help them succeed, help them get to scale.”
Fearless Fund consider providing early financing to companies started by women of color in the technology, consumer packaged goods, food, fashion and beauty industries.
Some of the investors in Fearless Fund are PayPal, Bank of America and Costco.
The three co-founders of Fearless Fund; chief development officer Keshia Knight-Pulliam, who played Rudy Huxtable on the “Cosby Show;” CEO Arian Simone, an entrepreneur and best-selling author; and COO Ayana Parsons, a veteran consultant.
Simone said that the Mastercard investment has the potential to be a game changer for the companies in the fund’s portfolio.
“This deal also marks a major milestone for our brand,” she said. “When women of color are provided with the necessary resources and funding to launch their businesses, the sky’s the limit.”
Women of color are “notoriously underfunded,” Simone said, saying that they don’t typically rely on big institutional investments when creating their business plans. “They are prepared to bootstrap and [are] in the mindset that they will need to be the primary driving force behind their ideas,”.
Black and Latino female founders have received less than 1% of venture capital funding, according to a 2020 report from Digital Undivided.
“When a company such as Mastercard provides this level of funding to propel women of color founders, it takes everything that these women are already doing and maximizes it to a degree that will allow them to shake any industry they enter,” Simone said.
