Eventnoire, a Black-owned ticketing platform, just won first place in a $1m startup competition

Black-owned ticketing platform Eventnoire has emerged as winners of Mountain Dew’s Real Change Opportunity Fund Competition. Hundreds of startups competed in the Shark Tank-style competition which had DJ Envy of The Breakfast Club, Morgan DeBaun, and Lala Anthony as judges.

Eventnoire will receive a share of the $1 million prize pool which will allow them to continue to work to strengthen Black businesses, uplift Black communities, and create a level playing field for Black people in America, according to this statement on Presswire. Eventnoire went through multiple rounds pitching its business model and innovative concepts.

Founded in 2018 by Jeff Osuji and Femi Masha, Eventnoire is an event management platform celebrating Black culture within the event industry. Its core focus includes meeting the social and event curation needs of the Black community which is often neglected by mainstream ticketing firms.

On its website, Eventnoire describes itself as the “leading ticketing solution for events that celebrate Black people and culture every day.”

The duo, with over 15 years of experience in the entertainment industry, realized that mainstream ticketing events and platforms weren’t meeting the needs of the Black community, the statement said.

“We realized this was an opportunity to vertically integrate and launch our own ticketing solution that actually recycled dollars back into organizations that worked with us as well as other event curators,” explained Osuji.

Eventnoire plans to use the money from the startup competition to invest in new technology upgrades and expand its team. The platform has also raised $250,000 and has attracted investors such as music mogul John Monopoly, known for discovering cultural icons such as Virgil Abloh, Kanye West, and Don C.

Mountain Dew’s Real Change Opportunity Fund Competition is an initiative of PepsiCo. The five-year, $400+ million plan aims to uplift Black communities, strengthen Black businesses and level the playing field for Black people in America.

The competition seeks to help “Black entrepreneurs who are current students or recent alumni from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), with existing PepsiCo relationships, turn seedlings of ideas into businesses or scale existing ventures.”

“As a first step, we have created the $1 Million, Real Change Opportunity Fund where we will help Black entrepreneurs who are current students or recent alumni from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), with existing PepsiCo relationships, turn seedlings of ideas into businesses or scale existing ventures,” information on its website explained.