Equity Angels was launched in early 2024 by Kenya Burrell-VanWormer, 2018 Inman Person of the Year and Chief Growth Officer of NEO, and Katherine Winston, founding member and head of marketing at Plunk.
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According to a press release sent exclusively to Inman on May 28, technology startup accelerator Equity Angels has selected the first batch of companies for its strategic advisory services.
In early 2024, Equity Angels was launched by Kenya Burrell-VanWormer, 2018 Inman Person of the Year and Chief Growth Officer of NEO, and Katherine Winston, founding member and head of marketing at Plunk.
The two teamed up to create a program that provides professional mentoring, executive leadership and fundraising preparation to companies started by entrepreneurs from a diverse demographic. Both women serve as managing partners at Equity Angels.
The team consists of four companies, each focusing on a unique corner of the proptech space. These include agency and brokerage financial services company Upfront, home visualization solution The Studio Home, recruitment and retention company Maverick Systems, and startup Billions, which improves the operations of high-performing teams.
Equity Angels’ mission is to prioritize founders and missionaries who are underrepresented in the current proptech space, such as Maverick Systems’ Diana Zaya, whose father immigrated from Syria after growing up in a minimalist “mud house” home to the United States.
Top row from left: Front row co-founders Mukund Venkatakrishnan and Pierre Calzadilla, Maverick Systems founder Diana Zaya Bottom row from left: The Studio Home founder Nicole McGuire, Billions co-founders Amber Milks and Andrew Becker
Zaya was inspired by her father, who earned a degree in engineering. Her company offers a way to better leverage data to understand how brokers benefit from strategic recruitment.
Mukund Venkatakrishnan founded his first company at age 17 and a real estate agency at age 20 before co-founding Upfront with Pierre Calzadilla. Tenure builds the team.
“With such a diverse and experienced team of founders, we learn a lot from each other,” Equity Angels founder Kenya Burrell-VanWormer said in a statement. We are honored to work with such inspiring founders and look forward to helping them grow their businesses through our accelerator program.”
Nicole McGuire, whose company The Studio Home works with builders to digitally imagine interior spaces for buyers, realized a need while working at her family’s 80-year-old architecture firm. Users can purchase rendering packages after personalizing their space.
Billions’ Andrew Becker founded the MacDonald/Becker Real Estate team over a decade ago and used that experience to build a software solution that supports and encourages increased revenue, agent count and brand footprint.
Becker partnered with enterprise technology leader Amber Milks to launch the company, which also introduced customer communication methods and a better trading experience.
Founders Winston and Burrell-VanWormer cited a 2022 McKinsey report that found that “Black and Latino founders received only 1% and 1.5%, respectively, of total U.S. venture capital (VC) funding in 2022.” Teams received 1.9% of venture capital funding, and only 0.1% of venture capital funding went to Black and Latina female founders.
The Equity Angel Program will also provide participants with the opportunity to gain some C-suite leadership through senior executives to “grow and expand their businesses at a sustainable pace.”
In addition to its year-long cohort of participants, the accelerator has accepted “a number of founders” into some of its executive programs, Winston said in a press release.
“We were impressed by the caliber of visionaries who applied to our first-year program,” she said, adding that some senior executives are working with new companies “to provide guidance and counsel to startups. The industry works to build new solutions to very big problems, including the housing affordability crisis.
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