In the year 2020, from February to April, about 41% of black-owned businesses shut down in the U.S., making African-Americans worried about the future of their businesses. In this day and age, creating digital or online communities has become the norm, and blacks are not backing down in scaling businesses through networking digital platforms in these difficult times.
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Enlisted below are a few Black-Owned tech platforms that have pushed through all the years remaining in the spotlight of top successful black-owned networking platforms.
Black-Owned Technology Platforms Building Digital Communities
- Calendly
Calendly is a popular cloud-based service that develops a business communication platform where people can schedule, set up, and follow up on external meeting times with others. Founded by Nigerian-born entrepreneur Tope Awotona in 2013, this new scheduling platform has made the scheduling nightmare a breeze. With team features like automated meeting assignments, pooled availability, and security, Calendly is the perfect scheduling solution for any business. According to reports, more than 60 businesses and 100 developers use Calendly as a meeting platform to grow their firms.
- Blavity
Blavity is a Los-Angeles based American website founded by Morgan Debuan and Jeff Nelson in 2014 for black millennials in business looking for new perspectives on politics and society across the African continent. Blavity creates a space for intelligent content that fills a significant void in the media landscape for young Black people. Specifically targeted at black female users, the company’s website provides fitness, health, beauty, entertainment, lifestyle, and travel-related content. Blavity also supports several film and television productions through Shadow & Act.
- Black Girls Code
The stereotype that technology is a white, male industry is changing in the modern era, thanks to innovators like Electrical Engineer Kimberly Bryant. In 2011, Kimberley founded Black Girls Code to rectify the underrepresentation of African-American girls and women in the technology industry.
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The San Francisco-based non-profit organization offers training in robotics, website design, game design, mobile application development, computer programming, and coding to thousands of Black girls. With this, they equip African-American youth with the skills they need to fill some of the more than one million computing jobs currently available in the country and benefit from the current tech marketplace.
Unquestionably, Black Girls Code is developing one of the US’s fastest-growing digital communities, fostering the growth of more robust economies and equitable societies.
- Diversant
Owned by Gene Waddy, Diversant is the biggest Black-owned IT staffing company in the United States, with an estimated 1,300 IT consultants supporting clients nationwide in key business sectors, including banking and financial services, telecommunications, energy, and insurance, to name a few.
Diversant connects IT Professionals with top companies across the US, offering a wide range of services, including staff augmentation, direct hire, payroll services, and innovative diversity mentorship programs.
- PopCom
Dawn Dickson, an e-commerce entrepreneur, founded PopCom as a hybrid firm in 2017. Popcom, also known as Solutions Vending International, develops software for hardware to advance the automated retail sector. The company’s automated retail technology platform provides business owners and brands with retail solutions that are geared for the future and enable rapid retail development, fantastic customer experiences, and valuable sales data.
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- NixCode
Sydney Davis released software in 2020 that allows non-technical founders of tech startups without a CTO to create mobile apps without knowing how to code. NixCode, the first piece of no-code and artificial intelligence software to keep the strategic product focus for more than 500 tech firms, challenges the app development market by transforming ideas for apps into successful products. Over 56,000 people are developing apps on NixCode.
Many black-owned tech platforms have transformed obstacles into opportunities by filling many gaps in the tech sector. And the top six listed above have unquestionably created online communities that support expanding businesses.
