What if you had direct access to all of the Black-owned businesses within your reach from the click of a button? You don’t have to guess with Blapp, the revolutionary new Black-owned app that offers shoppers an optimized search engine to help them find Black-owned businesses both locally and online. Founder Jon Laster created the application out of his own desire to locate businesses to support while traveling from gig to gig as a comedian. After being forced to make a career pivot due to the pandemic and recalling how hard it could be to pinpoint businesses led by people who look like him, it was time to take things to the next step. “To be honest, it was a career pivot because I was out of work,” Jon Laster recalled in an exclusive interview with AfroTech . “And to be honest, I was out. I did all of the marching and things like that, but while I was out on Eastern Parkway marching it dawned on me that marching isn’t always sustainable. I’m not knocking people for marching because...

Black women are finding even more creative ways to implement fintech into our everyday routines. Spare change technology — also referred to as round-ups — has been around for years, but I Heart My HBCU founder and president Dominique King became the first to introduce this kind of tech to HBCUs via a mobile app. “I Heart My HBCU became the first platform where users could donate spare change to any of the 104 HBCUs in one place,” King shared in a statement. King launched this groundbreaking Atlanta-based funding platform back in 2017 with the help of an elite group of Black women tech entrepreneurs. As a fellow HBCU graduate, her plan for the platform was to preserve the rich heritage of HBCUs across the country, such as Concordia College in Alabama, by connecting them with new ways to fight challenges like closures and lack of funding. Attending Howard University as an undergraduate student gave her a first-hand account of the cultural significance behind HBCUs and why it’s crucial...