New Voices Amplifies Female Founders of Color at CES 2020

This year New Voices headed to Las Vegas to participate in CES 2020. Leveraging our Village concept, we participated in Eureka Park™ — a forum for early stage companies. We selected our New Voices Pitch Competition winners to participate in the Village, a branded activation for New Voices. The four companies were Royelles, Don’t Get Mad Get Paid, Fria and MedHaul.

CES was an important venue for New Voices as we seek to amplify our work in the tech sector and to provide much needed visibility for our black female founders. Venture capital investments in women are up to 2.8% in 2019, with less than 1% going to black founders. Our hope was to demonstrate the presence of powerful black women tech founders and highlight emerging talent through our pitch competition.

Fria Founder Sheilisa McNeal noted, “Access opens doors that are typically and strategically closed.”

During the course of CES, the New Voices Village received a lot of attention, from large companies to state-funded accelerators. The visitors noted their desire to engage with, and support, black founders due to recent diversity and inclusion initiatives in their firms or aligned with public funding.

This interest is not new for New Voices. Our work is driven by the fact that demographic data in the U.S. shows a new majority emerging in our population. This means more diverse people will seek diverse products and services. We also know that while entrepreneurship among white males is on the decline, black women are creating businesses six times faster than their white male peers.