After winning the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce’s Entrepreneur of the Year award, Kwame Anku is raising money to continue investing in Black entrepreneurs through his venture capital investment firm, Black Star Fund.

The entrepreneur raised $12 million in 2018 for Black Star Fund, which supports 20 Black-owned businesses, including ReviverMX, which is developing street-legal digital license plates for cars, trucks, and fleets that automatically renew registration with state departments of motor vehicles, according to KCRA.

“Success breeds success,” Mark Haney, a local serial entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of the Growth Factory accelerator in Rocklin, California, told the Sacramento Business Journal. “What he's done so far gives him a lot of credibility to go out and do it on a larger scale.”

The portfolio includes companies like Actively Black, a leisure and sportswear firm based in Los Angeles; Resilia, a software developer for NGOs in New Orleans; and Partake Foods, a vegan cookie company based in New Jersey.

The Black Star Fund has a 50/50 gender parity for ownership within its portfolio, and over 60 per cent of the capital has landed in the hands of Black women entrepreneurs, according to its website.

“The importance of the work we do at Black Star Fund (is that) it’s not just giving entrepreneurs who historically have not had a chance to participate in this kind of global growth economy, but more importantly, when we think of income inequality, when we think about access and inequality, when we think about systemic exclusion, the way that you rectify that is with systemic inclusivity,” Anku told KCRA 3.