Black Tech Week announced it will relocate for the next iteration of its conference.
Leaders such as Columbus Mayor Andrew Githner announced on Friday at the CBus Soul Fest that the event is moving from Cincinnati to Columbus. The relocation of Black Tech Week is intended to accommodate more attendees. Experience Columbus expects to draw 10,000 attendees and generate about $5.4 million in visitor spending.
More information on where and when the event will be held has yet to be announced. The move to Columbus was hinted at on social media days before the official announcement.
For the past three years, Cincinnati has hosted Black Tech Week. In 2023, the festival organizers held a bid to select the host city. After Cincinnati won the bid, they announced that it would be a three-year commitment, holding the tech week in the city in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
“It touches everybody’s lives and so really what we’re doing here is making certain that everyone understands how tech touches their life, how tech touches their job, and really giving them a full experience,” said Candace Matthews Brackeen, CEO of the Lightship Foundation, a foundation that helps entrepreneurs with building their projects, per WCMH Columbus.
The announcement comes a little over a month after the last iteration of Black Tech Week.
Held from July 14 to July 16, the conference offered attendees a variety of events, including the opportunity to attend a VC Founder Funder Mixer and several panels featuring notable speakers.
More than 145 speakers were scheduled throughout the three-day event. Under the theme of “CTRL. ALT. CREATE.,” speakers included the founder of Zone of Genius, Ramon Ray; CEO of Suttle Strategies, Angel Suttle and CEO of CurlMix, Kimberly Lewis.
Founded in 2015, Black Tech Week was established to support Black entrepreneurs in the technology sphere. It has since grown to connect entrepreneurs beyond Black founders as well, addressing the lack of venture capital among Black founders.
Crunchbase News reports that less than 1% of all venture capital is offered to startups with a Black founder or co-founder. This amounts to around $942 million out of billions invested into new companies.
Black Tech Week aims to address this disparity by bringing together investors and budding entrepreneurs and giving them a space to network.
