North London care company Axela is one of 30 black founder businesses across Europe to be awarded with a cash award from a $2m Google funding pot.
Axela - which offers care services, training and technology - comprises Axela Care, Respect Care and Axela Innovations and operates in the UK and abroad with around 1,200 staff.
Google’s initiative provides cash awards of up to $100,000 and up to $120,000 in Ads Grants and up to $100,000 in Cloud credits.
Axela founder Nicholas Kelly (pictured) will also receive mentoring with Google experts, leadership training, and will be invited to take part in weekly Founders Standups - designed to help founders to celebrate the highs and navigate challenges with other founders.
Kelly co-founded the company alongside his mother in 2006 after seeing the difference dedicated and experienced care can make to an individual’s wellbeing.
The funding comes at a time where latest figures show less than 0.5 per cent of venture capital funding goes to black-led startups.
“I’ve personally experienced the difficulty in securing funding as a black founder, so I’m really pleased that Axela has been chosen to receive a cash award from Google, alongside many other brilliant businesses,” said Kelly.
“Ours will go towards supporting and growing our team and the Cloud credits will be used to focus on building out our machine learning capabilities,” he added.
Google received 800 applications for the fund from 18 countries in Europe after it announced the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund last October.
The fund was set up to cement Google’s commitment to racial equality in Europe after discovering a lack of diversity in tech.
