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Meet Sevetri Wilson, The First Black Female Tech Entrepreneur In New Orleans To Raise $2M

Meet Sevetri Wilson, The First Black Female Tech Entrepreneur In New Orleans To Raise $2M

Written by Ann Brown

Jul 18, 2018

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Young entrepreneur Sevetri Wilson is used to firsts.

At age 22, she built her first company with zero investment capital into a seven-figure firm. She won Business Woman of the Year in Louisiana and she was recognized by the Barack Obama administration.

Wilson, who lost both of her parents by the age of 22, is also a first-generation college student.

Now, she may be the first Black female tech entrepreneur in New Orleans to raise $2 million for her startup.

Wilson will use the funds to expand ExemptMeNow — her software-as-a-service platform that helps nonprofits become exempt and helps already existing nonprofits manage compliance and sustainability issues.

“It’s hard to pinpoint my biggest accomplishment as I’ve had a lot of ‘firsts’ in my career and I feel that I am achieving new accomplishments all the time,” Wilson told Black Enterprise. “Yet, the success I experienced with SGI allowed me to start ExemptMeNow and fund it myself out of the gate with little investment capital early on. I think this is important to note because there is this fixation around raising capital, especially for Black women. Yet, I started my first company at 23 and grew it organically without raising any outside capital. Now that I’ve switched gears from professional services to tech, we have to raise in order to scale. Yet, even out of the gate for ExemptMeNow our No. 1 priority was finding a product market fit and generating revenue. Then we went out to raise capital,” she told

Wilson is about to launch the second version of ExemptMeNow. She previously founded Solid Ground Innovations and is now raising an additional $1 million to close her seed round.

“ExemptMeNow simplifies the creation, maintenance, and management processes for startup and existing nonprofits. We also provide an enterprise solution that caters to the government (think cities, police departments, etc..), corporations, and private foundations, or anyone deploying funding into initiatives, programs, and, as many do, to non-profits. The number of tax-exempt organizations has tripled since 2007; public charities reported over $4 trillion last year and charitable giving reached an annual high of over $400 billion last year. With our software, we are targeting what we know is a growing but fragmented market,” she told Black Enterprise.

ExemptMeNow is disrupting the civic and Govtech space. “Our products speak to each other in a way that allows for collective impact to happen, ultimately allowing for complex, large-scale social issues to be tackled and problems to be solved faster. Often times those who are deploying capital and those who receive it are working in silos with little to no information and data sharing. We are literally creating an ecosystem to disrupt this,” she told Nola.

Wilson says she got attracted to the tech world after receiving the Bill and Melinda Gates Scholarship to attend college. “The way (Bill) Gates used his success in tech to bring about change throughout the world was inspiring to me,” she told Nola.

And Wilson realizes that she is one of very few Black women to raise more than a $1 million in tech funding. But she’s not going to let anything stop her.

She told Nola: “People ask me how do I feel about being called a ‘Black Female Founder.’ I don’t feel a certain type of way. I’m Black, aren’t I? I’m a woman, aren’t I? The bigger issue is what people may or maybe not be subconsciously attributing to this. There are a lot of people speaking on behalf of Black female founders who aren’t Black female founders themselves. We aren’t out here asking for charity. I want you to invest in my company because we are hitting our target numbers, because our customer success associates are backlogged weeks out and we need to increase capacity, because our growth is evident in our actual revenue, and we have the most capable team to solve a massive problem. That’s why you need to invest in my company and the other Black female founders in similar situations who are not receiving capital.”

 

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