Despite Lack of VC Funding to Black Founders, Iddris Sandu Made History by Raising a Double Digit Seed Round

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Despite Lack of VC Funding to Black Founders, Iddris Sandu Made History by Raising a Double Digit Seed Round
Courtesy of Spatial Labs

In January, web3 infrastructure and hardware company Spatial Labs landed $10 million in funding led by Blockchain Capital, making founder Iddris Sandu the youngest black entrepreneur to raise a double digit seed round. Marcy Venture Partners, the firm co-founded by Jay-Z also participated in this round.

“Moments like this give more founders and more VCs the confidence to back and be confident in sort of their general investment thesis around focusing on women of color, focusing on founders of color,” Sandu expressed. “Moments like this is what makes it worth it and is really what's responsible for breaking down those barriers.”

In 2020, Sandu founded Spatial Labs to do exactly that–build a company that is developing technologies that can make an impact globally.


Last year, the Marina Del Rey-based startup introduced its first product, a microchip called LNQ (pronounced link) to the world. Sandu also launched Gen One Hardwear , his clothing line where he embedded the LNQ microchip into each garment.

“What we've engineered is the nutritional facts of fashion,” Sandu told dot.LA. “It allows anyone that's either purchasing, has purchased or even is interacting with that item to unlock the nutritional facts around that product.”

The startup’s microchip acts like a QR code and all you need to do to gain access to the information is tap the LNQ with your phone. Sandu said you will learn about “where it was made, what materials it was made from, where the materials were sourced, whether the item is sustainable or not, and even lets you know if that item is new, or if it was owned by a previous person.”

In just a week and a half, Spatial Labs made $150,000 in sales and sold out of all its inventory.

“Now we've been licensing that chip technology to other brands to incorporate into their products,” Sandu said.

Though Sandu was unable to share which brands Spatial Labs is currently working with, he said that the price point for each LNQ microchip costs $3 and it can vary depending on the amount the brand needs.

Even though the overall venture funding in the U.S. dropped in 2022 from $337 billion to $214 billion, Black founders were disproportionately hit by the decline.

“Being a founder of color, there is no bull market,” Sandu told dot.LA. “It's always a bear market.”

In 2022, Black web3 founders raised $60 million out of the $11.9 billion given to all U.S. web3 startups. While this number is significantly higher than the $16 million Black founders received in 2021, the total percentage of the money raised for founders of color remains the same, a staggering 1%.

It’s a reality Sandu is familiar with. “You're expected to not have the opportunity to fail or not have the ability to figure things out,” he said. “The first time that you launch something you have to almost push yourself to this level of pressure and be perfect.”

But Sandu hopes his achievement will help motivate other Black founders and show them that raising capital is attainable.

“We (Spatial Labs) were able to raise during a market like this and that shows people that it's less about the story,” Sandu said, “but it's more about the actual product and its global impact that it became so undeniable for them to invest.”

Adding that, “they (Blockchain Capital) are the largest VCs in blockchain and they understood just how revolutionary this tech could represent.”

In the last two decades, some of the most crucial moments in technology, Sandu said, “have come from strides within hardware.” For instance, when Apple launched the iPhone and Mac or when Tesla developed their own vehicles on top of being a software company, they became the standard for other tech companies.

“Today in tech, a lot of diversity looks like affording people of color the opportunity to build these systems that weren't really designed for us to begin with,” Sandu stated, “I always love the idea of being able to show the boundaries of where technology could go in respect to color or race, and the only way that I could do that was through creating hardware.”

He said Spatial Labs’ LNQ is “able to create a seamless way for people to interact with products in a completely unique way, offering more than just sort of like this ethical sustainability factor.”

The microchip will allow brands the ability to add loyalty programs directly into their products. One example Sandu shared was, “let’s say a brand like Fenty said Rihanna is going to be doing a surprise appearance, but your ticket to get in is this product (embedded with LNQ).”

He added, Spatial Labs’ technology is “creating loyalty programs, and immersive storytelling experiences directly into your product.”

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“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

“Millions of Dollars Completely Wasted”: Without Neuromarketing, Tech Firms’ Ads Get Lost in the Noise

At Super Bowl LVII, advertisers paid at least $7 million for 30–second ad spots, and even more if they didn’t have a favorable relationship with Fox. But the pricey commercials didn’t persuade everyone.

A recent report from advertising agency Kern and neuroscience marketing research outfit SalesBrain is attempting to answer that question using facial recognition and eye-tracking software.

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https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la

Behind Her Empire: ComplYant Founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson on Helping Small Businesses

Yasmin Nouri

Yasmin is the host of the "Behind Her Empire" podcast, focused on highlighting self-made women leaders and entrepreneurs and how they tackle their career, money, family and life.

Each episode covers their unique hero's journey and what it really takes to build an empire with key lessons learned along the way. The goal of the series is to empower you to see what's possible & inspire you to create financial freedom in your own life.

Behind Her Empire: ComplYant Founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson on Helping Small Businesses

On this episode of Behind Her Empire, ComplYant founder and CEO Shiloh Johnson discusses her journey to building a multimillion dollar business and making knowledge of taxes more accessible.


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Taylor Swift Concert in the Metaverse? Ticketing Platform Token Is Using NFTs To Optimize Experiences

Andria Moore

Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.

Taylor Swift Concert in the Metaverse? Ticketing Platform Token Is Using NFTs To Optimize Experiences
Evan Xie

When Taylor Swift announced her ‘Eras’ tour back in November, all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of thousands of dedicated Swifties — many of whom were verified for the presale — were disappointed when Ticketmaster failed to secure them tickets, or even allow them to peruse ticketing options.

But the Taylor Swift fiasco is just one of the latest in a long line of complaints against the ticketing behemoth. Ticketmaster has dominated the event and concert space since its merger with Live Nation in 2010 with very few challengers — until now.

Adam Jones, founder and CEO of Token, a fan-first commerce platform for events, said he has the platform and the tech ready to take it on. With Token, Jones is creating a system where there are no queues. In other words, fans know immediately which events are sold out and where.

“We come in very fortunate to have a modern, scalable tech stack that's not going to have all these outages or things being down,” Jones said. “That's step one. The other thing is we’re being aggressively transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So with the Taylor Swift thing…you would know in real time if you actually have a chance of getting the tickets.”

Here’s how it works: Users register for Token’s app and then purchase tickets to either an in-person event, or an event in the metaverse through Animal Concerts. The purchased ticket automatically shows up in the form of a mintable NFT, which can then be used toward merchandise purchases, other ticketed events or, Adams’s hope for the future — external rewards like airline travel. The more active a user is on the site, the more valuable their NFT becomes.

Ticketmaster has dominated the music industry for so long because of its association with big name artists. To compete, Token is working on gaining access to their own slew of popular artists. They recently entered into a partnership with Animal Concerts, a live and non-live event experiences platform that houses artists like Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Robin Thicke.

“You'll see they do all the metaverse side of the house,” Jones said. “And we're going to be the [real-life] web3 sides of the house.”

In addition, Token prides itself on working with the artists selling on their platform to set up the best system for their fanbase, devoid of hefty prices and additional fees — something Ticketmaster users have often complained about. Jones believes where Ticketmaster fails, Token thrives. The app incentivizes users to share more data about their interests, venues and artists by operating on a kind of points system in the form of mintable NFTs.

“We can actually take the dataset and say there’s 100 million people in the globe that love Taylor Swift, so imagine she’s going on tour and we ask [the user], ‘Would you go to see her in Detroit?’ And imagine this place has 30,000 seats, but 100,000 people clicked ‘yes,’” he explained. “So you can actually inform the user before anything even happens, right? About what their options are and where to get it.”

Tixr, a Santa-Monica based ticketing app, was founded on the idea that modern ticketing platforms were “living in the legacy of the past.” They plan to attract users by offering them exclusive access to ticketed events that aren’t in Ticketmaster’s registry.

“It melts commerce that's beyond ticketing…to allow fans to experience and purchase things that don't necessarily have to do with tickets,” said Tixr CEO and Founder Robert Davari. “So merchandise, and experiences, and hospitality and stuff like that are all elegantly melded into this one, content driven interface.”

Tixr sells tickets to exclusive concerts like a Tyga performance at a night club in Arizona, general in-person festivals like ComplexCon, and partners with local vendors like The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach to sell tickets to the races. Plus, Davari said it’s equipped to handle high-demand, so customers aren’t spending hours waiting in digital queues.

Like Token, Tixr has also found success with a rewards program — in the form of fan marketing.

“There's nothing more powerful in the core of any event, brand, any live entertainment, [than] the community behind it,” Davari said. “So we build technology to empower those fans and to reward them for bringing their friends and spreading the word.”

Basically, if a user gets a friend to purchase tickets to an event, then the original user gets rewarded in the form of discounts or upgrades.

Coupled with their platforms’ ability to handle high-demand events, both Jones and Davari believe their platforms have what it takes to take on Ticketmaster. Expansion into the metaverse, they think, will also help even the playing field.

“So imagine you can't go to Taylor Swift,” Jones said. “What if you could purchase an exclusive to actually go to that exact same show over the metaverse? An artist’s whole world can expand past the stage itself.”

With the way ticketing for events works now, obviously not everyone always gets the exact price, venue or date they want. There are “winners and losers.” Jones’s hope is that by expanding beyond in-person events, there can be more winners.

“If there’s 100,000 people who want to go to one show and there's 37,000 seats, 70,000 are out,” he said. “You can't fight that. But what we can do is start to give them other opportunities to do things in a different way and actually still participate.”

Jones and Davari both teased that their platforms have some exciting developments in the works, but for now both Token and Tixr are set on making their own space within the industry.

“We simply want to advance this industry and make it more efficient and more pleasurable for fans to buy,” Davari said. “That's it.”

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