Black Tech Nation Ventures

Black Tech Nation Ventures was built in Pittsburgh, and the choice of location is not incidental. Pittsburgh's technology ecosystem — anchored by Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and a growing concentration of robotics, AI, and autonomous systems companies — has produced, for decades, a remarkable pipeline of technically trained founders who have historically left the region to raise capital on the coasts, because the institutional venture capital infrastructure required to back them did not exist where they were building. Black Tech Nation Ventures was created to change that, by building an early-stage fund explicitly designed to invest in underrepresented founders in technology from the geography where those founders are actually located.

General Partner David Motley co-founded the firm in 2021 as an extension of the Black Tech Nation organization — a Pittsburgh-based community that has spent years building the connection between Black technology professionals, founders, and institutional investors. The firm invests at pre-seed and seed stages in SaaS, enterprise software, fintech, healthcare technology, and AI companies built by Black and underrepresented founders, writing checks and providing the operational and network support that early-stage companies require from a partner who understands both the market they are entering and the specific challenges that underrepresented founders navigate in accessing subsequent capital.

The Carnegie Mellon connection is structural: BTN Ventures has built an intentional pipeline from the university's world-class computer science and machine learning programs — programs that produce founders whose technical credentials are unimpeachable and whose difficulty accessing traditional venture capital has been, until recently, a function of geography and network rather than capability. For investors in the fund, the proposition is straightforward: early access to founders who have trained at one of the most competitive technical institutions in the country, in a city whose talent density is consistently underpriced by a venture capital market organized around San Francisco and New York. Motley and his team are building the infrastructure to change the arbitrage. And they are doing it from Pittsburgh.