Founder Profiles | diversecityv

DIVINE

DISRUPTOR + URBAN ENTREPRENEUR

"Entrepreneurship is the new street hustle."

FUNDAPRENEUR

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BLAK FINTECH

Empower The Financially Excluded To Build Wealth

BLAK Fintech exists to solve the financial exclusion problem that exists in the U.S. BLAK is an acronym that stands for Building Leverage Acquiring Knowledge. BLAK Fintech is an online and mobile financial services and technology company that builds affordable tech-driven personal financial and banking products, with a focus on the financially excluded and disadvantaged Unbanked and Underbanked.

BLAK's first product is BLAK Card, a next generation Visa branded prepaid debit card attached to real bank account, enabling a user to establish and/or build credit, powered by banking system technology, integrating a social impact component consisting of financial literacy and entrepreneurship education for wealth building.

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FEATURED VIA

FEATURED MEDIA

FOUNDER SPOTLIGHT

Divine is a disruptor in every sense of the word with his relentless ambition, determination, grind and hustle. A former street hustler and Hip-Hop/Rap recording artist turned "urban entrepreneur" he first appeared on the tech community radar in 2014 when he reached out to famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist (VC) Ben Horowitz, Co-Founder of top-tier VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), on social media via Twitter and the two eventually became friends.

With only an 8th grade formal education and no tech background, a year later Divine would officially enter tech when he founded his first financial technology startup, BLAK Fintech and ideated the BLAK Card. His extraordinary story of meeting Ben and entrepreneurial journey that followed has been featured via such media outlets as Tech Crunch, Forbes and Black Enterprise. A formerly incarcerated individual (with a decade of incarceration), Divine now utilizes his life story and journey of redemption to inspire people worldwide.

FOUNDER SPOTLIGHT

INSPIRATIONAL SPEAKER

This year, Divine was selected as a keynote speaker by Georgia State University's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute's Russell Center for their Influential Speaker Series and for the annual France Fintech: Revolution event held in Paris.

He has been featured at numerous events focused on diversity and inclusion in tech and most recently become a voice against mass incarceration and for criminal justice reform. Divine is a Contributor to Black Enterprise and is set to appear with justice reform advocate and New York Times best selling author of Writing My Wrongs, Shaka Senghor, at this year's BE TechConneXt Summit on a panel .

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