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The Chicago-based e-commerce and point-of-sale startup CASHDROP is trying to drop some fairness money into the pockets of small companies.
This week, CASHDROP founder Ruben Flores-Martinez introduced he’s placing $1 million of his personal fairness into what he calls the Latino Renaissance Fund, which shall be distributed to 1,000 Latino-owned companies who use the CASHDROP platform.
“I’m pledging one million {dollars} of my private inventory within the firm and we’re giving it away to 1,000 Latino-owned companies which can be within the platform,” Flores-Martinez stated. “The Latino fairness program is supposed for each single CASHDROP service provider on the platform. We encourage each single individual to enroll.”
Flores-Martinez, who was born in Guadalajara and moved to Milwaukee as a young person, says he felt compelled to launch the fund as a strategy to encourage different younger and aspiring entrepreneurs to take the leap.
“I come from a really entrepreneurial group … as a Latino in tech, I got here to understand the laborious means truly that only one% of all enterprise {dollars} go to Latino founders like me. And it’s not as a result of we don’t have massive ambitions or massive concepts, it’s there’s simply no illustration,” he stated. “So it’s all the time been essential to me to not solely make it for myself, however make an announcement to allow the following technology, the following 10, 15 Rubens that may make it larger, in order that I may help them get there sooner, and the Latino Renaissance Fund for me was only a means of actually placing my cash the place my mouth is.”
Flores-Martinez says the retailers who use CASHDROP have grow to be a various enterprise group.
“Once we launched, it was proper firstly of the pandemic, so there was no site visitors and lots of people that had been used to brick-and-mortar commerce had been pressured to pivot actually quick,” he stated. “So firstly with numerous eating places and meals vehicles and hospitality trade companies that wanted a strategy to begin amassing funds from a distant location due to COVID, after which it type of proliferated into lots of people that simply had concepts for small aspect hustles … in order that type of created this actually fascinating ecosystem for us.”
And Flores-Martinez says he needs to maintain that group constructing by means of this fund.
“The hope is that the 1,000 Latino enterprise house owners that we give fairness to finish up being millionaires by the point that we’re executed,” he stated.
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