In 2016, Tracey Pickett left a career as an attorney to start Hairbrella, an Atlanta-based company that makes headwear and accessories to shield hair from the rain and other elements. For years, the 40-year-old Atlanta entrepreneur had salon hairstyles ruined by the rain, and now she had a solution to this problem, one that she hoped would help her and millions of other women. After getting some traction in the new business, Pickett tried to raise capital from a few white male angel investors. She was not successful.
Pickett got a break about a year later when she was introduced to Jewel Burks Solomon, another Atlanta-based, Black female entrepreneur. Solomon had previously sold her own business, Partpic, a visual recognition technology company for replacement parts, to Amazon. Solomon gave Pickett a $30,000 personal loan to help fund inventory and mentored Pickett as she developed her products into the best selling rain hat on Amazon.
In 2019, Solomon co-founded Collab Capital in Atlanta to invest primarily in founders of color and help them have a smoother route than she had as a first-time founder. Collab’s first investment was $500,000 into Hairbrella in 2020. With continuing support from Collab, Pickett has built Hairbrella into a profitable company that has doubled its revenue over the past three years and is on track to hit $14 million in 2025 revenue. “Jewel has been a hero on my path,” Pickett says.
As difficult as things were for Pickett starting out, for some Black founders, the path has become even more difficult lately, particularly when it comes to raising money. In 2024, startups with a Black founder or cofounder received just 0.4 percent (or $730 million) out of $314 billion total U.S. venture funding, a two-thirds drop from the all-time high of $4.9 billion in 2021, according to Crunchbase. That makes Black-run venture capital firms like Collab critical to closing this funding gap, particularly amid the current DEI backlash that has spread from the White House to corporate America. According to a Columbia Business School report, when a Black person heads the investment team, according to the study, the funding gap narrows by nearly 50 percent.
Earlier this year, Collab closed a $75 million Fund II that will invest in companies creating solutions across work, healthcare, and infrastructure. But Collab is taking a different approach with the new fund than it did back in 2021.