Erikan Obotetukudo is launching what could be the first venture capital fund focused on crypto startups and led by a black woman.
Audacity Capital LLC will invest in cryptocurrency-related startups run by entrepreneurs of black and African descent, the 29-year-old said in an interview. The Los Angeles-based company raised an undisclosed amount from investors, including IDEO CoLab Ventures and Electric Capital.
The fund plans to invest until $ 100,000 each in up to three startups per quarter. Businesses need to focus on decentralized finance – mostly lending, borrowing and peer-to-peer trading, Obotetukudo said. Preference will be given to Africa-focused startups, she said.
“We will fund companies in neglected and untapped markets,” Obotetukudo said.
Obotetukudo has come a long way in managing crypto funds. She said she first toured Europe as a jazz musician at 16, then researched a cure for AIDS in Brazil and South Africa. Born in California, she also lived in Nigeria, where her parents were from, and experienced firsthand money problems like the Nigerian naira during devaluation.
“I had a $ 15,000 naira bag in my backpack and I would go to all the banks to try and turn that money into US dollars,” she said. “Every bank and every Western Union said no” because there was a shortage of dollars in the country. She worked for a while at Future Africa, connecting investors and entrepreneurs.
Eventually, Obotetukudo invested in Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. Last year, she co-founded Crypto For Black Economic Empowerment, which connects more than 100 entrepreneurs, investors and artists in 20 countries.
A recent Harris Poll found that in the United States, 30% of black investors and 27% of Hispanic investors own cryptocurrency, compared to just 17% of white investors.
“We are going to be the new black crypto on Wall Street, and we cannot be destroyed because we exist on the blockchain,” Obotetukudo said. The blockchain is the digital ledger on which Bitcoin runs.
The fund is started on the anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre in 1921, when mobs of Oklahoma whites attacked black residents. June 19 known as Juneteenth, celebrating the end of slavery in the United States