Daughters of Ugandan immigrants become first Black women to raise $1M in funding in Kansas

Two sisters who are originally from Uganda have become the first Black women in Kansas to raise $1.4 million to jump-start their company, QuickHire. The seed funding round was led by MATH Venture Partners, which also includes participation from Sandalphon Capital (Chicago), KCRise Fund (Kansas City), October Minority Impact Fund (Kansas City), and Tenzing Capital Ventures (Wichita).

Others include Accelerate Venture Partners (Wichita), Sixty8 Capital (Indianapolis), Ruthless for Good (New Orleans), Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund (D.C.) and ETF@JFFLabs (Boston), PRNewswire reported.

The report added that the sisters — Deborah Gladney and Angela Muhwezi-Hall — are now only two of some 100 Black women to raise more than $1 million in venture funding as of December 2020.

“We are underserved founders serving underserved workers. The more barriers we can remove, the more opportunity we can unleash for deserving, hard-working people,” said Muhwezi-Hall.

QuickHire is a platform that is focused on quickly hiring candidates in the service industry. The platform connects job seekers to blue-collar service industry jobs. The money raised would be used to invest in technology and team expansion, according to PRNewswire.

Gladney and Muhwezi-Hall founded QuickHire after seeing an opportunity in the services sector and decided to fill the void.

“People don’t have time to wait around for that next opportunity,” Muhwezi-Hall, the COO of QuickHire, told Ksn.com. “That may make the difference between, ‘Can I feed my family?’”

Since QuickHire was launched in April, the app has had more than 60 employers using it and over 11,000 job applicants.

“Just helping create more opportunity and remove barriers for other Black women in technology,” Gladney, the CEO of QuickHire, told Ksn.com.

The popularity of Quickhire has ballooned since the outbreak of COVID-19. The pandemic led to hundreds of job losses, with Black businesses being the hardest hit.

“These are people who have faced decades of neglect, career stifling, bad pay—so many different issues. And so with COVID happening, that was just kind of the final straw for them where people have literally marched with their feet, walking out of jobs saying, “’ We will not take it anymore’,” said Muhwezi-Hall.

QuickHire currently targets workers and businesses in the metro areas of Wichita and Kansas City. The company plans to expand across the Midwest and add skilled-labor verticals in 2022.