{"id":413,"date":"2016-10-01T23:34:13","date_gmt":"2016-10-01T23:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/black-female-founder-raises-7-million-for-renewable-energy-tech-startup.html"},"modified":"2016-10-01T23:34:13","modified_gmt":"2016-10-01T23:34:13","slug":"black-female-founder-raises-7-million-for-renewable-energy-tech-startup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/black-female-founder-raises-7-million-for-renewable-energy-tech-startup.html","title":{"rendered":"Black female founder raises $7 million for renewable energy tech startup"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to tip my imaginary hat off\u00a0to Jessica O. Matthews, the black female founder and CEO of\u00a0renewable energy tech startup\u00a0Uncharted Play<\/a>. Her company\u00a0just closed a $7 million Series A\u00a0round led by the NIC Fund with participation from Kapor Capital, Magic Johnson Enterprises, BBG Ventures and Lingo Ventures.<\/p>\n

With the new injection of funding, Uncharted Play plans to build out the team and better equip itself\u00a0to support the partners the company is bringing on in the coming months. Uncharted Play\u2019s mission is to spread awareness about global energy and clean power through technology and play.<\/p>\n

The $7 million investment in Uncharted Play makes Matthews\u00a0the 13th black female founder who has raised more than $1 million in outside investment. Earlier this month at Disrupt SF, Morgan DeBaun of Blavity said that she\u2019s raised over $1 million in funding and is still actively raising<\/a>. DeBaun was the 12th black female founder to raise over $1 million.<\/p>\n

In the tech ecosystem,\u00a0black female founders receive basically zero venture capital. Of the several thousand venture deals that went down from 2012 to 2014, less than 1\u00a0percent of them went to black women, according to a recent report by #ProjectDiane<\/a>. And the black women who received outside funding on average only got $36,000, while the average seed deal size in February of this year was $4.5 million, according to CB Insights<\/a>. At the time of the #ProjectDiane report, only 11 black female founders had raised more than $1 million in outside funding.<\/p>\n

Uncharted Play\u2019s first product, SOCCKET, is a soccer ball that doubles as a power generator. The SOCCKET\u00a0uses the rotational energy that gets generated every time the ball rolls to produce three hours of light for every hour of play.<\/p>\n

\"soccket\"<\/p>\n

Uncharted Play\u2019s second product is the PULSE, a jump rope that doubles as a light.\u00a0Both the SOCCKET\u00a0and PULSE\u00a0are powered by MORE (motion-based, off-grid, renewable energy, Uncharted Play\u2019s proprietary technology for micro-generator systems. Those systems can integrate into anything that moves, which is what transforms the product, like a soccer ball or a jump rope, into a source of off-grid power. Uncharted Play\u2019s goal is to better utilize kinetic energy in order to complement or even replace other energy systems.<\/p>\n

Uncharted Play\u2019s business model entails partnering with product manufacturers across industries like consumer electronics and infrastructure to put the MORE technology inside the everyday products we use, like strollers, shopping carts and suitcases. The idea is that you could then use the energy produced by that product to charge your cell phone and other things.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe not only aim to disrupt how energy is generated, but how it is consumed,\u201d\u00a0Matthews said. \u201cWe envision a world where people shift from a \u2018hoard\u00a0 save\u2019 energy mentality to a \u2018continuous and on\u00ad-demand\u2019 energy experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Article source: https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2016\/09\/19\/black-female-founder-raises-7-million-for-renewable-energy-tech-startup\/?ncid=rss<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019d like to tip my imaginary hat off\u00a0to Jessica O. Matthews, the black female founder and CEO of\u00a0renewable energy tech startup\u00a0Uncharted Play. Her company\u00a0just closed a $7 million Series A\u00a0round <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-networking-and-communication","tag-network-and-communication"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t