Tapping His Expertise, Serial Tech Entrepreneur Launches VC Agency To Again Black Founders

Serial entrepreneur and M&A lawyer Luke Cooper began and offered two enterprise expertise firms between 2006 and 2020. Cooper, who grew up in public housing in Bridgeport, Ct., the son of struggling single mom, he’s now tapping the complete vary of his expertise by way of Latimer Ventures. That’s his Baltimore-based enterprise capital agency, which invests in enterprise SaaS startups based by Black entrepreneurs.

Latimer Ventures is called in honor of Lewis Latimer, an African American inventor born to fugitive slaves.

Racial Fairness and Profitability

Based in 2022, Cooper’s focus is on early-stage, post-seed investments in enterprise tech startups. He’s doing so, partially, to deal with the shortage of capital out there to entrepreneurs of colour. But additionally, he sees loads of potential in such firms.

Black founders, he says, are progressing with a better success charge than non-Black counterparts. “Throughout the enterprise expertise, Black founders are over-performing—1 in 3 is getting Collection A funding vs. 1 in 15 general,” he says. “A Collection A is a gold badge for a founder: It means you may have prospects who consider in your product and institutional traders who’re backing you.” He continues, “Investing in these firms shouldn’t be solely the correct factor to do, however it’s additionally worthwhile.”

Plus, Cooper feels that, as a result of he has a greater understanding of the challenges Black founders face, he will be significantly useful. “A founder can discover tons of knowledge everywhere in the web on learn how to begin, develop and exit an organization,” says Cooper. “But when they’ve by no means achieved that earlier than, nor skilled it alongside others, it appears insurmountable.”

“The oldsters who train these items typically lack a whole understanding of the world we come from and the way it may restrict our capacity to belief,” he says. “Now there’s a reputation for this, culturally responsive educating.”

Cooper factors to a 2020 Citigroup research that discovered, over a 20-year-period, the U.S. misplaced about $16 trillion of GDP due to racially biased methods.

Earlier Startups and a Difficult Surroundings

Cooper based two firms beforehand. In 2006, he was a part of the founding workforce of Caldwell Know-how Options, a cybersecurity software program enterprise, the place he was answerable for strategic partnerships, enterprise improvement and M&A. That firm was offered in 2008 to CACI for about $55 million. In 2013, after dropping his telephone on a bus, he based Fixt, a SaaS-based cell machine restore app, which he offered to Assurant in 2020 for an undisclosed quantity. After that, he took a year-long sabbatical, invested in a sequence of startups and determined to start out his personal enterprise capital agency.

His fundraising aim is to boost $50 million by November; he has commitments, as of now, for $20 million. The plan is to make investments of $1 million to $4 million, with the purpose of doing observe on investments. He’s already invested $2 million in 4 firms— Pienso, AI Squared, Meter Feeder and CyDeploy.

Nonetheless, Cooper is aware of he’s fundraising in a difficult setting. There’s the present normal decline in personal funding and the phenomenon whereby Blacks are usually particularly badly impacted by any downturn. “We’re accustomed to the truth that when America will get a chilly, Black folks get the flu,” he says. Plus he sees much less institutional curiosity in supporting Black causes than a couple of years in the past.

Coming from Poverty

Cooper grew up poor within the tasks in Bridgeport, Ct., raised by a single mom. “When folks ask the place I come from, I inform them I’m from poverty,” he says. However when he was 12, a sequence of occasions modified his life. His father was sentenced to twenty years in jail. However he additionally obtained concerned in a program referred to as Community for Instructing Entrepreneurship in New Haven, Ct. And his mom drove Cooper and his sister to Sikorski Memorial Airport, the place a pilot took them up for a trip—and, for the primary time in his life, he understood how huge the world and its prospects have been.

He then gained a basketball scholarship to varsity, attended legislation college, labored as a lawyer, and, after that, obtained an MBA in 2011. (When he graduated, he was so broke, he couldn’t afford to attend his commencement). That doesn’t embrace his two startups.