How single mother Angela Benton set up a company that raised $40 million to support black startups

The combination of motherhood and running a business has always been quite a daunting task for many; for some career women, raising a family means putting their careers or businesses on hold. Despite this challenge, founder of NewMe, Angela Benton, started her business as a project and grew it organically. One remarkable fact about Angela’s story is how she trained herself in the digital space to build her own startup.

Juggling between motherhood and entrepreneurship, Angela ventured into the tech space and had to contend with a white male-dominated industry that made it difficult for women of color to thrive. Moreover, her frustrations in accessing information on black entrepreneurs and their success stories were much stronger than the bottlenecks.

In 2007, she built black web 2.0, which centered on promoting African American startups and the novel things they were doing within the tech space. This was swiftly embraced by the black community, who were yearning to be heard and let the world know what they were doing.

Based on the success of Blackweb 2.0, Angela moved on to establish NewMe in 2011 to provide a launchpad for minority entrepreneurs, and raised over $40 million to support hundreds of black startups that were operating in Silicon Valley, according to Forbes.

She believes entrepreneurs are solving significant challenges and breaking new ground. As a single mother, she is of the view that startups share some kind of commonality with her plight in changing careers.

Before Angela ventured into entrepreneurship, she had a stellar academic grounding. She studied for her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Visual Communications at InterContinental University in 2004. She was employed shortly after graduating at InterActiveCorp, where she worked in various roles in the company and later moved to RealEstate.com and LendingTree.com, where she gained experience in the online business.

In 2018, she discovered she had cancer, a revelation that changed her perspective on life, and influenced her decision to sell NewMe to LightHouse, the parent company of Hillman Accelerator, and turn her focus to another venture, Streamlytics. Angela started the business with the hope that it will impact the future ahead.

She wanted to create a platform that would provide the technology market with the content they needed to make investments and guide them on where they should put their money. She is hopeful the information provided will help other entrepreneurs to come up with innovations that will allow everyday people to solve common challenges they are confronted with.

Angela’s significant contributions have earned her much recognition with some notable media giants. Her work has been celebrated by CNN in their documentary on Blacks in America, The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley; and an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal’s 125^th Anniversary edition – focused on the Future of Entrepreneurship, according to Capital Technology University.