Celebrating One Year With The BBR Growth Fund

Celebrating one year since our launch with our most significant win yet: the BBR Growth Fund.

Believing that things would get easier post launch is the sort of delusion that startup founders need. All of a sudden, "traction" and "revenues" matter more than the "vibes" on which we sustained ourselves since the project's conception in 2020. This meant we had to shift our focus from games of technological "chicken" with our developers to customer acquisition, so we could fill the life savings-sized crater in our personal bank accounts.

This past year, as well as the years since we registered the business, has been an absolute madness. Corporate collaborations, international expansion, hosting marketplace pop-ups, hiring and firing interns, all with "real life" happening in the background. Don't let the first class flight photos make you believe it's been all air miles and handshakes. It's been the hardest year of the hardest period our family's had to go through. This award has helped make it very much worthwhile, not just in a monetary sense but because of the faith instilled in us by this accelerator programme.

My brothers and I couldn't have done this without the tireless work put into the programme by Adna Ahmed and Jeffrey Oyinlola of the Black Business Residency and our programme mentors Olu Ode and Madina Kalyayeva. Thank you also to Diana Spiegelberg, Penelope Wilmott, Jonathan Reekie and the rest of the team at Somerset House who facilitated the programme, and to Sanghamitra Karra, Rachel Clarke and the rest of the team from Morgan Stanley who have supported the programme from inception.

For the award itself, we'd also like to thank the judges, Dr Yvonne Thompson CBE, Aaron Raybe and Conrad Da Cunha, for their huge show of faith in our mission. Finally, and most importantly, the programme's founder Akil Benjamin, without whom, with no exaggeration, our first year easily could've been our last.

Here's to year two.