Think of RoadPitch as ‘Amazing Race meets Shark Tank’ for Black tech founders

Rohan Brown and Meagan Turner met about a year ago through a “hackathon on wheels”-type of program, where founders developed technical projects and business plans as they traveled through the Midwest. This program had a diversity-focused branch, but Brown and Turner decided that they want to do more to help Black founders specifically.

So they started RoadPitch, a program that invites Black tech founders to join them for weeklong trips in certain regions of the United States so they can pitch to investors in cities they aren’t native to.

Each tour has five or six cities, and the chosen founders have three opportunities to pitch in each city. Through recommendations and applications, Brown and Turner choose five startups to travel with them for the week. In each city, the third event of the day is public, and invites some founders who are local to that city to pitch to investors as well.

The tagline: “Amazing Race meets Shark Tank.”

Meagan Turner and Rohan Brown. (Courtesy photo)

The first trip RoadPitch was completed this February for Black History Month. The group traveled through the Northeast, from Boston to New York City to Philadelphia to Baltimore, and ending in DC. (Delivery service Black and Mobile won the competition in Philly.)

The next trip is planned for the West Coast this June. Brown and Turner said they are planning to travel through other regions in the United States, like the Midwest, in the fall.

“We want to amplify as many parts of the country as we can and get more Black tech founders in front of investors in real time, in person, in the same room,” Brown said.

We want to amplify as many parts of the country as we can and get more Black tech founders in front of investors in real time, in person, in the same room.Rohan Brown RoadPitch

RoadPitch focuses on startups in the pre-seed and seed stages of funding who are at least 51% owned by a person who identifies as Black. The traveling startups must also be based outside of the region that they will be traveling to. Brown said the point of the trip is to expose founders to investors in regions they haven’t experienced yet.

Now based in LA, Brown had previously spent about 10 years in Philadelphia and founded hospitality app Barley Sober here in 2019. While he said he’s grateful for everything he learned in Philly, ultimately his experience in the local tech startup scene helped him understand the importance of location when working on a startup — and Philly wasn’t the best place for the industry he was in. It’s focus on life sciences, pharmaceuticals and healthcare didn’t serve his own, and moving down to Miami before going to LA helped his business a lot.

“It was understanding where to be for your startup that makes the most sense, as well as understanding what does this support look like for Black tech founders,” he said. That experience translated to RoadPitch because he now encourages founders to leave their bubble and find what location works best for their company.

[For further reading: “Does Philadelphia have enough resources to support entrepreneurs of color?“]

Another arm of the program is that for each tour, they focus on companies in five specific industries within tech. The tour they just finished had startups in robotics, adtech, digital health, B2B SaaS and fintech.

“The curation comes from figuring out what industries we want to focus on, sending out the application to see what founders fit that and then of course, aligning them with the investors that invest in that industry so that there’s alignment all across the board,” Brown said. From the last tour, 75% of the cohort received funding less than a month after the tour.

Turner, who is also an electrical engineer, said that it’s important for investors to not know too much about the founders who will be pitching before the actual events. RoadPitch doesn’t provide pitch decks prior to the presentation, only the startup’s name and industry.

“It’s already difficult to get in front of investors as a Black founder, then to raise and go through this due diligence process, but we don’t want them to come up with their own opinion about the startup before the startup is able to defend themselves in real time with a Q&A or clarifying details,” she said. “We’re trying to eliminate as much bias beforehand” as possible.

The two are now working on building relationships with accelerators and startup leaders in all the cities they visit who can recommend startups to apply for their program. RoadPitch is currently accepting applications for their trip through the West coast.

As far as investors and RoadPitch sponsors go, Turner and Brown said they want to work with companies and people who are committed to supporting Black founders long term.

The ultimate goal, Turner said, is just to support as many Black founders as possible. Brown said he wants to be “the navigation hub for a lot of us Black tech ecosystem.”