Google’s Black Founders Fund invests in Utopia Spa, a Durham startup
Utopia Spa and Global Wellness, a Durham company that provides on-demand spa services, is one of 50 startups in the U.S. set to receive a $100,000 investment from Google, as part of an initiative to support companies started by Black entrepreneurs.
The funding, which doesn’t dilute the ownership of the founder, also comes with perks, like as much as $120,000 in donated search advertisements and up to $100,000 in Google Cloud credits.
Naya Powell, founder of Utopia Spa, said the investment is critical as her startup tries to grow during the lingering pandemic.
“The timing could not have been better, because we’ve been operating extremely lean,” Powell said in a telephone interview. “We really needed it, so I’m so excited about where this is going to take us. I think it will catapult us to the next level.”
Google launched its Black Founders Fund last year in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. The company said it decided to start the fund because of a recognition that many Black entrepreneurs face significant barriers to receiving investment capital for their startups.
Just 3% of U.S. venture capital money went to Black-founded companies in 2020, and that percentage hasn’t gone above 5% in the past six years, Reuters reported earlier this year. Roughly 10% of U.S. businesses are Black owned, according to the Reuters report.
That funding number is even smaller for Black female founders, Powell noted. One survey found that Black and Latinx women combined were on the receiving end of just 0.64% of investments in 2018 and 2019, Fortune Magazine reported.
Powell said those numbers show why programs like Google’s are necessary.
“It’s essential because, as a Black founder and especially as a Black female founder, funding is difficult,” she said. “It’s a challenge to try to do so much with so little.”
Powell, who previously worked in talent acquisition for Red Hat in Raleigh, said she will use the money to improve her company’s app and increase its marketing budget.
Powell said she started Utopia Spa in response to the high rates of stress she witnessed in the corporate world. Her company offers on-demand classes, via online instructors, in things like yoga and meditation.
It has found some momentum in the past few months in providing those classes to companies whose employees are all working at home because of the pandemic.
“People need convenience ... because we suffer from time poverty in this country,” Powell said. “A lot of our stress is not always from a lack of financial resources, but it is the lack of time.”
She believes Utopia Spa can help people save even more time, by giving them on-demand workout or yoga classes.
It’s never been easier, she said, to find 15 minutes in your daily schedule to do a meditation class, for example.
“And I don’t think that’s ever going to go away,” she added, “because now we’ve settled in to really understanding how valuable our time is because we’ve had a little more of it.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
