Luke Cooper’s Latimer Ventures, founded earlier this year to fund Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs in Baltimore, has roped in Alana Mann, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with experience of nurturing SaaS startups, as a partner.
Mann, originally from New Jersey, spent considerable time in the startup ecosystem in Nashville, Tenn.Prior to joining Latimer, she served as a principal at Cultivation Capital, where she focused on investments in software and IT companies, notably those cloud-based. At Cultivation Capital, she reportedly deployed $15 million across SaaS startups such as Lionize, Trusty.Care, Chatdesk and Element451.She has also worked with the crowdfunding platform Wefunder.
“I joined Latimer because it is undeniably clear how our team can make a significant impact in this industry,” Mann said, according to Latimer’s post on LinkedIn. “According to the Knight Foundation, in an industry with $82.4 trillion AUM [assets under management], only 1.4% of assets goes to firms owned by women and/or people of color,” she added, citing the difficulty minority entrepreneurs routinely face in raising funds.
In 2018, Mann launched VER CO, a direct-to-consumer fashion brand with the goal of making sustainability more affordable to millennial women. She has also worked at Saks, Saks Off Fifth, Gilt.com, Jet.com, Walmart.com and Club Monaco. Mann holds a B.A. in political science from Vanderbilt University and was named to the HBCUvc 2021 Emerging VC cohort and received an Emerging Leaders Award.
Latimer Ventures aims to invest in Black- and Hispanic-led companiesin insurance, cybersecurity, fintech, enterprise and healthcare, with a focus on SaaS. It has made two portfolio investments —MeterFeeder, which enables parking payments, and cybersecurity startup CyDeploy — with a planned $250 million initial fund.
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Cooper, who started out as a lawyer, is the founder of Fixt, an on-demand device support startup whose early clients included Coca-Cola. He sold it to Fortune 500 insurer Assurant in 2020.
“I started my career as an M&A lawyer in Baltimore, but after a couple of years and a couple of petty bosses, I knew that the only path for me was tech entrepreneurship,” he told Charlie Katz in an interview published on Medium last year. “I didn’t want to waste my time worrying about whether I was wearing the right tie or carefully placed the quotations outside of the punctuation marks.”
Cooper earned a joint degree in law from Syracuse University and an M.B.A. from Babson College. He has served as venture partner at San Francisco-based Preface Ventures, and as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Georgetown University.
