Google’s cash grants to black entrepreneurs have had a “life changing” effect on their ability to build businesses, one of the ten British founders selected for a share of the US group’s $4 million (£3.3 million) Black Founders Fund has said.
Lottie Whyte, who runs an athletes’ recovery equipment company called MyoMaster, said the most valuable impact of the grants was the doors it opened.
“We are a couple of years old and the next stage is about scaling up. I think that is where particularly black female entrepreneurs get stuck,” said Whyte, 34, whose products include massage guns and anti-swelling compression boots.
“At the start you can bootstrap but when you are trying to scale up you really need additional funding to do that. And that’s where black entrepreneurs fall away as they don’t have access [to capital].
“So the Google opportunity is literally life changing for us. The cash is really helpful but if you say to anybody that Google has just backed your business it opens doors.”
Whyte founded MyoMaster in 2018 with her husband Joe Gray, a rugby union player who was capped by England a decade ago, plans to raise a new round of investment and is meeting investors from Google’s network this week.
“Since we shared the news with our small angel investors nearly 50 per cent have come back and said they want to put follow-on money in just because of Google backing us,” she said.
Whyte received $120,000 in cash and $100,000 credit for utilising Google cloud as part of the initiative. The Google scheme aims to tackle what it calls “the stark inequality in venture capital funding” that black entrepreneurs face. It said less than 0.25 per cent of venture capital funding in the UK went to black founder-led startups in 2020.
Google has reduced the number of companies it backs this year — across Europe the number has fallen from 40 to 15 — as it has kept the size of the fund the same but extended its reach to Africa and increased the maximum grant from $100,000 to $150,000.
