Before
Both came from finance rather than from outside it: private equity at ICV Partners and investment banking, including Barclays' technology, media and telecommunications group. Tingle came from a low-income background and financed Harvard Business School through loans.
The move
While at business school they converted an existing informal angel syndicate into a formal fund thesis built on a structural gap: under two percent of venture assets under management are Black-led. Then they ground out roughly four hundred limited partner meetings across their fundraising history with no institutional track record behind them. Not warm introductions. Meeting volume.
The turn
A forty million dollar Fund I closed in autumn 2019 with TPG as anchor investor, which gave a first-time team the institutional signal it needed to be taken seriously.
Timeline
- Around 2015 informal angel syndicate
- 2017 to 2019 Harvard Business School, thesis formalized
- Roughly 400 limited partner meetings
- November 2019 Fund I closes at 40 million dollars with TPG anchoring
- March 2021 Fund II oversubscribed to 134 million dollars
- May 2024 filed to raise a 150 million dollar Fund III
What this route asks
Stamina for the meeting volume, and a gap in the market you can state in one sentence. This is the least outsider story on this route: both had private equity and investment banking backgrounds and Harvard MBAs. Their outsider status is specifically about race in an industry where Black-led firms hold under two percent of assets, not about lacking access. Fund III's close status is unconfirmed.