Fearless Fund

Arian Simone made a promise to herself at age 21, while raising capital for a retail store and looking, unsuccessfully, for an investor who looked like her. The promise was simple: one day, she would become the investor she was looking for. Fearless Fund, which Simone co-founded with actress Keshia Knight Pulliam and business executive Ayana Parsons in Atlanta in 2019, is the institutional expression of that promise — and of a market reality that the firm has documented with precision: less than 0.4 percent of all U.S. venture capital funding reached Black-founded startups in 2024. For women of color specifically, the figure in 2022 was 0.39 percent.

Fearless Fund was built to address that gap directly: a pre-seed through Series A fund investing in technology-enabled companies founded by Black, Latina, and Asian women, backed by institutional limited partners including J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Mastercard, and Ally Bank. Fund I deployed $26 million across dozens of startups, including Atlanta's Slutty Vegan, Clevr, Range Beauty, and Capway — companies that have since raised additional capital and generated the kind of returns that demonstrate the investment thesis is not charitable but commercial.

In 2023, Fearless Fund became the subject of a legal challenge over its Strivers Grant Contest — a case that tested the boundaries of race-conscious investing and made the firm a national symbol of a debate that the venture capital industry was not, until then, having loudly. Simone navigated the litigation with the same resolve that built the fund, pausing fundraising for a second venture fund while launching a $200 million debt initiative in 2024 offering loans between $5,000 and $250,000 to under-resourced founders. In 2025, the firm launched a new global initiative affirming its commitment to investing in underrepresented founders wherever they are building.

Arian Simone — whose prior career included building a PR and marketing firm with clients including Sony Pictures, Walt Disney, and Universal Pictures — received her MBA from Florida A&M University. She has been recognized by Fortune's 40 Under 40, EY's Entrepreneur of the Year, Entrepreneur Magazine's 100 Most Influential Women, and Inc.'s 100 Female Founders. The fund she built is not finished. It is in its second act.