Edna Martinson of Boddle and Brooke Hill of Swella now sit on the first national record of Black women who’ve raised more than $1 million in venture capital. Both came up through ACT House, a Build in Tulsa partner program.
Two founders who came up through the work we do in Tulsa earned a place on a national list that didn’t exist until now. The First 200 released the first public archive of Black women in the United States to raise more than $1 million in a single venture capital round. Edna Martinson, co-founder of Boddle, and Brooke Hill, founder and CEO of Swella, are both on it.
The First 200 is a new media platform and founder network started by Amira Rasool, the founder of The Folklore. The index pulls these founders into one place — names, funding totals, industries, and home cities — so the record is public and easy to find. The bar to make it is specific. A founder had to publicly identify as a Black woman, hold a real equity stake at the time of the raise, lead a U.S.-based company, and close at least $1 million from institutional investors in a single round. Every entry was checked against public records, investor announcements, and databases like Crunchbase and PitchBook. New York leads the list by city, and enterprise software, health tech, and consumer brands show up most often. Together, the founders on the list have raised billions.
The number is small because founders who are Black, women, or Latino still receive less than 2 percent of venture capital. That reason matters — not because their companies are weaker, but because money tends to move through networks they are rarely invited into. A public list does something practical about that. It shows investors the founders are here and already winning. It gives the next founder a map instead of a guess. It helps more than the women named on the page.
Both founders came up through ACT House, a Tulsa accelerator for Black and Latino founders and a Build in Tulsa partner program. Edna came through its first cohort, Brooke through its fifth. The accelerator pairs non-dilutive capital with hands-on support and real introductions to investors, the exact gap the funding numbers expose. Build in Tulsa partners on that work and helps keep it anchored in the city, so more founders can build here, raise here, and stay here.
Edna co-founded Boddle, an education company that turns K-6 learning into a 3D game kids actually want to play. The platform adapts to each student, started with math, and now reaches millions of young learners. Her own path stands out: she came to the U.S. from Ghana and finished her business degree at 16, and Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 list in education in 2023. Boddle’s qualifying raise was a $3 million seed round in 2022. The First 200 lists Boddle at $6.9 million raised — much of it built from Tulsa.
Brooke is the founder and CEO of Swella, a company rethinking one of the most common and least modernized parts of Black hair care: getting your hair braided. Swella uses technology to standardize the braiding experience and deliver a consistent, premium salon visit for textured hair. Brooke earned her MBA at Wharton and worked at Google before this. She built Swella’s early proof through accelerators and pitch wins — including a $75,000 prize at ESSENCE’s New Voices Power Pitch — before closing a $1.4 million pre-seed round. That round is what put her on The First 200.
Two founders from the same Tulsa accelerator on a national list of 200 is not a coincidence. It is what Build in Tulsa was created to produce. Build in Tulsa started around the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, to carry forward what Greenwood — the original Black Wall Street — stood for: Black ownership and wealth built close to home. The method is direct. Find the founders the funding system overlooks, put real support behind them, create or partner with programs that carry them to the next round. Edna and Brooke earned their spots on merit. Our work is to keep building the on-ramps that put founders like them in the room — so the next national list isn’t 200 names, but many more.
Congratulations to Edna, Brooke, and every founder on The First 200. We’re proud Tulsa was part of how they got here.
Read more about The First 200 Founder Index - thefirst200.com/founders-list