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Ruka Hair has raised new funding to scale its mission of ensuring hair and beauty solutions work for the textured-hair community. Ruka Hair Ruka Hair Co-Founder and CEO Tendai Moyo was 17 when she went to a corner shop in Swindon, England, on the hunt for hair extensions, she explained in an interview with Translate Culture. She recalled seeing inexpensive hair extensions and later realizing the industry had changed little over the years. “I was a strategy consultant prior to this, and the industry hasn’t changed very much. It’s still really hard to find high-quality hair extensions that work for Black women. Success for us is about creating a brand that brings Black women joy,” Moyo said in the video. “ For too long in this space, getting your hair done is painful. When you’re a kid, it comes with a lot of t ears. I t’s expensive, you’re spending money on products that don’t work, and oftentimes, you don’t really know what you’re doing because you haven’t had that expert access. So...
MEDASE Cocktails has expanded to another retailer. As AFROTECH™ previously reported, the Los Angeles-founded venture was cofounded by Inga Dyer and Monica Cornitcher. The two were inspired to launch the company in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic when Cornitcher relocated from Atlanta to California, allowing her to spend more time with Dyer, who was already based there. “Then we started to talk about, ‘Hey, it wou ld be nice to have a cockt ail, right?’ Because we did drink cocktails throughout college, after college, but we were kind of slowing down on drinking . And Inga’s reason for not drinking was that she was battling breast cancer at the time,” Cornitcher said in a previous interview with AFROTECH™ . “ And during her battle with breast cancer, she was not drinking at all . And we were starting to experiment with mocktails in the space . We probably tasted everything out there at the time.” In 2023, MEDASE Cocktails launched as a premium, zero-proof, organic,...
Reality television or not, entrepreneurship was always in the cards for Porsha Williams. Reality TV Before making her debut on “ The Real Housewives of Atlanta ” for its fifth season in 2012, Williams was already a business owner. In a conversation on “ Forbes Talks Shop, ” she revealed that her mother had owned child care centers since Williams was two. At 24, she began following in her mother’s footsteps . “Twenty-four is when I started my very first child care center myself. So I’ve always been in business,” she told Forbes. “I think that since I transitioned from being a child care center owner and then closed it to being a wife, then straight to reality TV, people don’t know the business side of me. But that’s what I lean on. That’s what I’ll do. Even when reality TV is gone. So for me, being an entrepreneur is very important. It’s something that when you have a dream or you have an idea, you build off of it. You work hard, and you stick to it.” “The Real Housewives of Atlanta”...
Diarra Bousso said goodbye to Wall Street to find fulfillment as an entrepreneur. DIARRABLU Bousso is the founder of DIARRABLU, a conscious lifestyle brand that uses creative mathematics and AI to design collections that reduce textile waste by more than 60%, according to her LinkedIn profile. Before launching the brand, Bousso spent years in finance on Wall Street. She traded more than $1 billion in assets during that time, she wrote in a LinkedIn post. However, she walked away from it all to pursue her creative aspirations and passion for math. “If your heart is not happy, long term, you’re just destroying anything that could work for you,” Bousso told Essence in 2025. Journey To Entrepreneurship At 23, she became a painter and traveled the world, and later became a math teacher. Working with various Black and brown female students, she observed that they were not engaging in class but became energized when she introduced color, pattern, and textiles, Essence reports. This...
Founder Julian Addo is fighting to maintain control of her beauty company, Adwoa Beauty, amid mounting legal and financial challenges. Addo launched Adwoa Beauty in 2017 and has retail partnerships with Sephora in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, as well as Cult Beauty UK, Amazon, and its direct-to-consumer website. In 2022, it raised $4 million in seed funding from Pendulum Holdings, according to Forbes. In an interview with AFROTECH™, Addo said funding was exhausted within three years and acknowledged strategic missteps, including overspending on packaging and failing to build the right team to scale. She said those financial pressures intensified when the company sought bridge funding. According to Addo, the initial terms offered by an investor were “super unfavorable,” prompting her to decline them. But after unsuccessfully raising capital elsewhere, the company returned to its only investor. However, it was too late, and the investor acknowleged “there’s no more...
Dr. Ashandra Batiste is leading a dental practice embracing technology. At 11 years old, Batiste already knew she wanted to become a dentist. The decision stemmed from an accident in which she hit her two front permanent teeth while getting out of a pool. Her longtime dentist restored her smile and confidence. That moment was her career epiphany. In 1998, Batiste enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin and obtained a bachelor’s degree in human development and family sciences. She worked as a dental assistant while in undergrad, spending half days in the office three days a week. In 2003, she enrolled at Howard University College of Dentistry. Reflecting on her experience, she told AFROTECH™ that the program fostered a sense of collective ownership among peers that she said can’t be replicated at a predominantly white institution, and demanded high standards, required rigorous training, and had no room for cutting corners. Elite Dental Wellness Batiste credits the university’s...
Monica Cornitcher is keeping her late friend’s legacy alive through their cocktail brand, lighting up the market. Inga Dyer was Cornitcher’s close friend for more than 30 years. The pair met while attending Howard University in the 1990s, where they also pledged Delta Sigma Theta. In their respective careers, Dyer became an entertainment lawyer, and Cornitcher built expertise in mergers and acquisitions and business transformation while leading her own company for nearly 25 years. At the time, they did not realize their skills would eventually lead them to start a business together, though Cornitcher felt entrepreneurship was always her path and never worked in corporate again after turning 28. The progression of their entrepreneurship journey together was planted during the wake of COVID-19, Cornitcher shared in an interview with AFROTECH™. She had been in Atlanta but moved to California to be closer to family, and Dyer already lived in California . By default, the pair was hanging...
Pat McGrath Labs is no longer under Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As AFROTECH™ previously reported, the beauty company founded by British makeup veteran Pat McGrath had filed to “restructure its balance sheet and to forge a path to thrive,” according to a company spokesperson. The majority of the debt had resulted from a loan obtained from its lender, GDA PMG Funding, in April 2025, according to Business of Fashion. Pat McGrath Labs remained in operation throughout the process and had previously been exploring an asset sale before deciding to file for bankruptcy protection in January 2026. Soon after, it was fueled with nearly $30 million in financing from GDA PMG Funding as part of the restructuring, according to a separate article from AFROTECH™. The breakdown included $10 million in new debtor-in-possession financing and $20 million in “ post-emergence working capital. ” In a press release shared on April 20, Pat McGrath Labs announced that it is no longer under Chapter 11 protection...
Entrepreneurship is generational for founder Alexa Christina Rice. Her grandmother, Eunice Walker Johnson, was married to John H. Johnson, who took a $500 loan, with his mother’s furniture as collateral, to launch Johnson Publishing Co. (JPC) in Chicago, per the company. The venture’s portfolio included Ebony and Jet magazines, which drew in millions of readers at its peak, WBEZ Chicago reports. John was also one of the first Black self-made millionaires in the U.S., the outlet notes. Fashion Fair Cosmetics Eunice was forging her own lane as well. She is the mastermind behind the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling fashion show launched in 1958 to showcase rising Black designers and couture pieces from the U.S. and Europe. Ebony Fashion Fair also raised more than $55 million for Black organizations, per WBEZ Chicago. In 1973, Eunice launched Fashion Fair Cosmetics, which catered to darker skin tones and was sold worldwide at stores including Neiman Marcus and Printemps, according to the...
Emma Grede has weighed in on the criticism surrounding Diarrha N’Diaye’s role at SKIMS. Ami Colé N’Diaye is the founder of beloved clean beauty brand Ami Colé, created for melanin-rich skin. On July 17, 2025, four years after its inception, she announced in an Instagram post that she was winding down the company. She shared some challenges the company had faced, including appeasing investors, especially as some backers appeared to shift away from the inclusivity-focused mindset they embraced in 2020. “We were a brand rooted in purpose, storytelling, and the bold celebration of who we are. Let’s not forget bomb ass products … This moment is bittersweet. You’ve witnessed me start from a sketch in my Brooklyn apartment to the shelves of every Sephora in North America in 4 years,” she wrote. “Thank you for everything you’ve taught me about living your dreams out loud. Thank you to the investors who genuinely believed in me. @sephora for making a home for us. My team for the amazing work...
Tracee Ellis Ross followed her own rulebook to get Pattern Beauty in the hands of consumers. Her haircare brand, which caters to the textured-hair community, had been a long-held vision of hers since she was on the hit television show “Girlfriends.” Ross pitched the idea for Pattern Beauty in 2008, but the brand didn’t formally launch until 2019, Inc. reports. View this post on Instagram A post shared by PATTERN (@patternbeauty) “I can say this now from this position, that people didn’t understand the power of the market, the space, the gap, the money on the table. They also really systemically didn’t understand the importance and the beauty of textured hair,” she expressed at the 2026 Inc. Founders House Los Angeles on April 16. The tide changed after Ross met with Mary Dillon, who was Ulta Beauty’s CEO at the time, and Monica Arnaudo, then senior vice president of merchandising. This, too, was intentional on Ross’s part, as she sought out retail partners before connecting with...
Happenstance led functional non-alcoholic beverage startup, Sensori, to pursue a strategic hire. Shanna Pearre (CEO), Darean Rhodes (COO), and Ashlyn Knox (CMO) are three best friends who cofounded the startup in 2024. Sensori beverages are powered by mushrooms, adaptogens, nootropics, and botanics, with the goal of replacing alcohol during modern social and self-care rituals, Pearre explained to AFROTECH™. Wellness had long been important to the friend group, and they had a yearly tradition of participating in Dry January, an alcohol-abstinence challenge. It was during one of those Dry January periods that Pearre began seeking a way to recreate the feeling often associated with drinking without the alcohol. She created various concoctions in January 2024, offering Rhodes and Knox samples along the way. “She calls me after … that Julion had told her, her husband, ‘Why don’t you all just make this into a product, the concoctions,'” Rhodes said on the “She’s So Lucky” podcast, hosted...
Cardi B’s new and improved, “old school” haircare brand is in demand. When she was a teenager, the “Am I the Drama?” artist learned how to make hair masks and hair oils, but she hadn’t been consistent with her hair health, she told Elle. She was also perming, bleaching, and dyeing her hair, and admitted to gluing tracks directly onto her hair at 17. “You know what’s so crazy that I think about, why the hell would I do that? What the hell was going on? Why were we doing that? That’s how much I was mistreating my hair. I kept flat-ironing my hair every day,” she said, according to the outlet. Eventually, she adopted a healthy hair routine, which she has remained vocal about on social media, as AFROTECH™ previously reported. In a 2020 Instagram post, she shared the ingredients for her hair mask, including avocado, two eggs, mayonnaise, and black castor oil. Her journey resonated with audiences, and fans encouraged her to turn it into a business. “For a long time, my fans were asking me...
The receiver of Uncle Nearest says the company is insolvent. Phillip G. Young Jr. is the court-appointed receiver of the whiskey brand Uncle Nearest, owned by Fawn Weaver and her husband, Keith. The receiver was appointed after the company defaulted on more than $108 million in loans, as AFROTECH™ previously reported. Young now oversees assets such as Uncle Nearest’s distillery in Shelbyville, along with its real estate holdings, intellectual property, affiliated ventures, and related entities. Young said that upon his appointment as receiver, he inherited unfiled federal income tax returns dating back to 2018, along with unreliable financial records and books that could not be trusted for accurate reporting, according to the Moore County Observer. Young informed a federal court on Friday, April 10, that Uncle Nearest is insolvent and at risk of being forced to close within 30 days without ongoing lender support, the Moore County Observer reports. In the latest quarterly report for...
Monique Rodriguez believes founders should position their businesses for acquisition. The former registered nurse is the founder of Mielle Organics, a textured haircare company that launched in 2014 from her kitchen without a formal blueprint, according to Fortune. She bootstrapped the venture, alongside her husband Melvin, who worked as an engineer. They used their paychecks and savings to fund the company, which she described as a “huge risk” in conversation with Emma Grede. “We had to make this work because we didn’t have a plan B to fall back on. We took all of our life savings. We took all of everything that we were making to just solely put it into Mielle. And that’s the hard part that people don’t see. They see the glory on the outside, but not really understanding the turmoil that comes with the stress of not knowing where your next payment is going to come from to fund your inventory,” Rodriguez told Grede on the “Aspire” podcast. Despite internal challenges, Rodriguez...