Atlanta, GA
Hawks launch $50M venture fund to support underrepresented startups
The Atlanta Hawks brand is seen on the courtroom earlier than the beginning of a recreation between the Washington Wizards and the Atlanta Hawks at State Farm Enviornment on Might 10, 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Picture by Casey Sykes/Getty Pictures)
ATLANTA – The Atlanta Hawks have created a brand new fund to speculate thousands and thousands of {dollars} into minority- and woman-led startups in addition to companies specializing in buyer expertise.
Thursday, the Hawks introduced the launch of Hawks Ventures, a $50-million enterprise fund trying to give capital to underrepresented startups over the following 5 years.
In an announcement, the group says the fund will even look to help “customer-obsessed companies with the potential to affect or rework the way in which a services or products is skilled.”
“Hawks Ventures is precisely the sort of community-enhancing effort we dedicated to creating once we bought the workforce in 2015. Making a fund that would strategically improve our enterprise and leverage the expertise and skills of our possession group has been one thing that now we have been working to place our assets and power into from the start,” mentioned Hawks Principal Proprietor Tony Ressler. “Hawks Ventures is an endeavor that our possession group is extraordinarily keen about, and we’re excited to have the ability to spend money on and work with the numerous untapped potential of minority- and women-led entrepreneurs.”
Operating the fund can be Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Innovation and Investments David Garcia, who was beforehand the workforce’s Senior Vice President of Expertise and Innovation.
“I’m thrilled to have the chance to steer this initiative and to have the ability to meaningfully contribute to driving financial empowerment in underrepresented communities,” Garcia mentioned. “With the expertise economic system being a driving pressure of a lot enterprise worth and our deal with range and inclusion, we consider there can be no scarcity of nice concepts and founders to spend money on.”
Garcia has been with the Hawks since 2018 and the workforce says he helped flip State Farm Enviornment into the most important voting precinct in Georgia historical past throughout the 2020 common election’s early-voting interval and the Georgia Senate runoff.