Native Tech Startup Opens Fund for Latino-Owned Companies: ‘Placing My Cash The place My Mouth Is’ | Latino Voices | Chicago Information

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 are within the platform,” Flores-Martinez mentioned. “The Latino fairness program is supposed for each single CASHDROP service provider on the platform. We encourage each single particular person to enroll.”

Flores-Martinez, who was born in Guadalajara and moved to Milwaukee as a teen, says he felt compelled to launch the fund as a option to encourage different younger and aspiring entrepreneurs to take the leap.

“I come from a really entrepreneurial neighborhood … as a Latino in tech, I got here to understand the arduous method truly that just 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 mentioned. “So it’s at all times been crucial to me to not solely make it for myself, however make an announcement to allow the subsequent era, the subsequent 10, 15 Rubens that may make it greater, in order that I can assist them get there sooner, and the Latino Renaissance Fund for me was only a method of actually placing my cash the place my mouth is.”

Flores-Martinez says the retailers who use CASHDROP have develop into a various enterprise neighborhood.

“After we launched, it was proper in the beginning of the pandemic, so there was no visitors and lots of people that had been used to brick-and-mortar commerce had been compelled to pivot actually quick,” he mentioned. “So in the beginning with numerous eating places and meals vehicles and hospitality trade companies that wanted a option to begin gathering funds from a distant location due to COVID, after which it form of proliferated into lots of people that simply had concepts for small aspect hustles … in order that form of created this actually attention-grabbing ecosystem for us.”

And Flores-Martinez says he needs to maintain that neighborhood constructing by way of this fund.

“The hope is that the 1,000 Latino enterprise homeowners that we give fairness to finish up being millionaires by the point that we’re carried out,” he mentioned.