All results
Bun B always saw the full potential of what has become a beloved burger spot in Houston. The UGK rapper is co-founder of Trill Burgers, which offers smash burgers, lemonade, and fries, and on Tuesdays, smash tacos. Andy Nguyen (creative director) and Nick Scurfield (chief marketing officer), as well as chefs Mike Pham (chief operating officer) and Fernando Valladares (executive chef) are also co-founders in the business. Trill Burgers’ first storefront opened in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston in 2023 and had already secured the accolade of making the best burger in America by “Good Morning America” a year earlier, as AFROTECH™ previously told you. The business has been a fixture at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo since 2023 and also earned its Gold Buckle Foodie Award for Best Classic Fair Food. Additionally, Trill Burgers is a vendor at Texas Dow Employees Credit Union Stadium for University of Houston football games, according to information shared with AFROTECH™. “I’ve...
Deidre Mathis caught the travel bug, and it led her to become an entrepreneur in the hospitality industry. While pursuing a bachelor’s degree in graphic communication and broadcast journalism at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University , she studied abroad in the Dominican Republic during her sophomore year, she told AFROTECH™. After graduation, she wasn’t fulfilled in her profession, which prompted her to return to school to earn a master’s degree in corporate communications. Then she moved to Australia, staying in a range of hostels and boutique hotels. “I was living there, and I was just traveling around by myself, and I was staying in a bunch of hostels and a bunch of boutique hotels because those were places that were easy for me to meet people because I was by myself,” she told AFROTECH™. “I always tell people I had my ‘Oprah aha moment’ one day when I was staying in this beautiful hotel, and it was this small, cute hotel. It had 12 rooms, and I said, ‘You know what? I...
Beyoncé has another blooming partnership under her belt. As AFROTECH™ previously reported, the Houston-born singer inked a partnership with Levi’s following the release of her single featuring Post Malone titled “Levii’s Jeans.” The partnership has led to $65 million in media value for the company and a 12% increase in its women’s denim business. “What I can tell you is our partnership has exceeded expectations, both in terms of what it has done to be part of the equation to drive our top-line sales, you know, year to date — our sales are up in the high single digits. And our profit margins are expanding,” Levi Strauss CEO Michelle Gass shared with CBS News. What’s more, Beyoncé has also been making waves with her partnership with Ulta Beauty, which carries her award-winning, science-backed haircare brand Cécred. This brought the self-funded venture to customers across 1,400 Ulta Beauty locations beginning in April 2025, according to a press release. “Launching Cécred exclusively at...
Avante Price and Eli Taylor-Lemire are finding great success with their live events platform, POSH. The pair were students at New York University (NYU) and met while working at events. Price was a DJ, and Taylor-Lemire was a photographer. During an interview with Forbes, Price shared that the pair initially worked with other event brands geared towards college students, who he claims were missing the mark. POSH The founders believed they could create a solution that would provide a better overall event experience for students and organizers, which led to the formation of the live events platform POSH. Though the platform was initially built in 2019 as a software product to benefit the pair directly, it launched to the public in 2023 along with a mobile app. “POSH at the onset was just an IRL events company for NYU and Columbia kids to have a posh upscale experience,” Price told Forbes. “We got a lot of different experience with Eventbrite or these other products that existed at the...
A new cohort of small businesses has received a financial boost to power their business with AI. The C oramino Fund Through The Coramino Fund, the investment arm of Kevin Hart and Juan Domingo Beckmann’s tequila company Gran Coramino, $10,000 grants have been allocated to small business owners over the past three years so they can utilize AI training provided by 1st Street Partnerships to improve their operations. The program was launched in partnership with Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC) and is part of a $1.5 million commitment to support more than 150 under-resourced entrepreneurs across the U.S. and Mexico as they compete with larger companies, according to information provided to AFROTECH™. “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of new businesses fail within their first year, and nearly 50% fail by their fifth year. The most successful entrepreneurs — locally and nationally — are the ones that have support, whether from their networks, communities,...
It’s a family affair over at the Shaq Brand. Walking Away From Reebok As AFROTECH™ previously told you, Shaquille O’Neal had a multi-million-dollar shoe deal on the table from Reebok. However, he walked away from the deal in 1998 to launch an affordable shoe line in partnership with Walmart. This was prompted after a mother told him that his younger fans couldn’t afford his shoes being sold by Reebok . O’Neal recounts on “The Big Podcast” that he went to his mom in hopes she would counter what the woman had said. However, his mother not only agreed but she also reminded him about his hometown of Newark, NJ. “She’s like, ‘Remember, you ain’t never had no shoes that cost more than $40.’ So, I said to myself, ‘All right, I’m gonna start my own line.’ I called Reebok and said, ‘Hey, we’re not going to renew.’ I had like $50 million on the table. I had no idea what I was going to do. So, I was thinking about where do my people go. Walmart. Walmart is the best distribution in the world....
With Giving Tuesday underway, a New York-based nonprofit is calling for support of Black-owned small businesses and highlighting their impact on local economies. According to a press release, the African American Small Business Foundation Inc. is using the Dec. 2 observance to raise funds that will help minority-owned businesses navigate rising costs, shifting market conditions, and limited access to capital. Currently, the organization serves as a resource center for African American entrepreneurs seeking funding, training, and business connections across New York. The foundation reports that many Black-owned businesses continue to face challenges securing loans, grants, or investment funding. To address this, it connects entrepreneurs to micro-grants and loan programs, community financial institutions, credit-building tools, and capital-readiness training intended to support growth and hiring. Training and technical assistance are another key part of the foundation’s work. Through...
Uncle Nearest is reportedly attracting buyer interest. As AFROTECH™ previously told you, Uncle Nearest whiskey brand, founded by Fawn Weaver and her husband, Keith, has been opposing a court order that placed them under receivership in August 2025. This decision stemmed from claims by lender Farm Credit Mid-America that Uncle Nearest defaulted on more than $108 million in loans. In August, Tennessee attorney Phillip G. Young Jr. was named receiver by U.S. District Judge Charles E. Atchley Jr., so he now oversees Uncle Nearest’s assets, including its distillery in Shelbyville, TN, as well as “real estate holdings, intellectual property, affiliated ventures, and related entities,” according to Moore County Observer. The Weavers had placed fault with Uncle Nearest’s former chief financial officer, Mike Senzaki. They claimed he inflated the company’s whiskey barrel inventory, which resulted in a $24 million credit increase from Farm Credit, according to a separate article from...
Miami-based founders Justin Elliott and Jahreem Samuels have scored an investment for their AI and blockchain-verified commerce platform. The pair’s journeys brought them together, and they became united in business through shared pain points in their respective industries. Elliott explored mechanical engineering while in high school, but in college, he shifted to marketing, maintaining an interest in web development, and eventually became the head of digital marketing and e-commerce for a jewelry company that launched several businesses. “I’ve always had my own businesses where I’ve had to learn how to build websites, learn how to do the marketing, learn about SEO, so I’ve always been on that side of things,” Elliott told AFROTECH™. “I’ve also been in music, so like engineering, technical side, and music has always been parallel in my life.” For 10 years, Elliott worked as a full-time DJ, touring globally, until the pandemic hit. At what felt like the height of his career, he no...
Darrick Johnson and his team have launched a new software to put actionable insights at the fingertips of sports agents and teams. Johnson is a South Central, LA, native who knew technology would always be in his playbook. His father worked at various tech companies, including IBM and Intel, so Johnson always maintained positive sentiments toward the sector. In college, his undergraduate studies centered on business administration, marketing, and management. He then had a short nine-month stint as a professional football player in Canada, but he always knew there was more in store for his career. “I got back home from Canada and was sitting on the couch waiting around for phone calls. Phone wasn’t ringing. I was like, ‘You know what? I got a degree.’ So I literally looked up technology sales jobs and found an inside sales job … So I was making 100 calls a day for almost 18 months before I actually landed my first tech job at Dell,” Johnson told AFROTECH™. One year into his time at...
Black-woman-owned Prismm has secured significant funding to help families in times of crisis. Prismm Prismm is a transaction-enabled digital vault. It stores critical records that become essential during an emergency. Users can upload documents, property and asset information, and financial accounts. They can also add beneficiaries, trusted persons, lawyers, executors, or advisors as connections, granting them view-only, view-and-modify, or no access across all categories, according to the company’s website. All information stored on Prismm is encrypted using HTTPS and kept in a digital vault that can be decrypted only with an authorized user account and the correct account key. Prismm intends to protect deposits for financial institutions and automate the inheritance transfer process, which is timely given that $84.4 trillion in wealth is projected to be transferred to Millennial and Gen X heirs by 2045, according to financial services organization, Cerulli Associates. Inception...
Being a good entrepreneur requires an understanding of how to build a lasting community. Will Lucas understands this. Becoming A Community Builder His formal introduction to community building began when he founded TEDxToledo, an event he has organized since 2012, according to information from his alma mater, the University of Toledo, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in organization technology. The decision grew out of frustration with the constant conversations about what his midsize hometown lacked. Instead of accepting a “little brother syndrome” mindset, he wanted to shift the narrative by gathering people who were genuinely optimistic about the city’s future. “A friend of mine was a TED speaker. I just happened to be talking to him on the phone. He was talking about TED, and I’m like, ‘That’s the kind of energy I need in my hometown,'” Lucas told AFROTECH™. “And then I found that you could apply for a license to host one of the TEDx conferences. That’s a great way to...
These twin brothers flew across the world to pursue their dreams in anime. Raised in Paterson, NJ, Arthell and Darnell Isom split time between their parents who lived separately. Their mother enjoyed writing, and their father was a musician who also doubled as an artist and liked to draw and paint, Arthell said in an interview with the BBC. Their father was also a carpenter. “I described him as like he’s a serial entrepreneur. So anything that my dad could do, he would do it … And he would create like a whole like business from it,” Arthell said, according to the outlet. It may come as no surprise that the brothers caught the creative bug. They didn’t have many toys, but that didn’t put any limits on their imagination. Arthell recalled to BBC that they would spend a lot of time together and create “fake movies” with their dogs as characters, filmed on a video camera. They would also draw superheroes using the abundance of paper from their mom’s home. “We had like a big black binder,...
Joulenie Pierre had faith the size of a mustard seed and has watched her bakery grow to new heights. Pierre was a college student double-majoring in economics and political science on a pre-law track in Miami when she ventured into entrepreneurship. To support herself financially, she had a job working 30 hours a week at Lululemon, she shared on TikTok. Feeling stressed, she said she leaned into her passion for baking. “Baking was my way of having my own peace, my own clarity, and being as calm as I possibly can be. It helped keep me grounded. It was like my form of therapy essentially,” Pierre, 20, explained on TikTok. @therollanddough Part 2 out of 5 addressing the concerns ♬ original sound – Roll & Dough Roll and Dough With the help of her business partner, Jovan, she launched Roll and Dough. Pierre had just $100 in her bank account at the time and was waiting on her financial aid to come in to cover her rent. She went two months without being able to pay her rent, but she did...
This Black-woman-owned wine brand is expanding its reach while delivering a more personalized customer experience. IBest Wines is the brainchild of Ingrid Best, a respected leader in the wine and spirits sectors who wants to share her love of South Africa with wine enthusiasts across the globe. She got her start as a brand ambassador and remained in the industry for 20 years, building her experience in branding and marketing with Diageo, Moët Hennessy, and Bacardi (working with Jay-Z’s D’USSE), as AFROTECH™ previously reported. “I was so fortunate to be exposed to every facet of the business, which typically, in an ambassador role, you aren’t exposed to,” Best told BET.com. She now has established ownership in the industry through IBest Wines, which launched in 2023 and was inspired by her time in South Africa, as AFROTECH™ previously reported. “I fell in love with South Africa quickly and, over time, discovered the infinite layers the country has to offer — from its wine to its...