This equity tech CEO now has Steph Curry's backing

3 years ago

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June 22, 2021

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! New Yorkers vote for mayor, the Olympic moments are starting, and an anti-bias software firm gets an all-star investor. Have a great Tuesday.
– Investing in equity tech. Pay equity is a top priority for business leaders these days, but deciphering a company’s gender and racial gaps—and how to close them—is a business unto itself.
One of the leading firm in the space is Syndio, led by CEO Maria Colacurcio. The software company, founded in 2017, counts Salesforce, Adobe, and PagerDuty as clients and says it’s analyzed the pay of 2.6 million employees so far. And Emma has the news this morning that Syndio has received a new $1 million investment from Penny Jar Capital, the early-stage investment firm led by NBA star Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors.
Colacurcio told Emma that Curry’s team was especially interested in Syndio’s ability to suss out pay gaps by race and gender and that the new investment will keep up Syndio’s “momentum as the first and the best equity tech platform.” The firm has raised $25 million to date.
Curry’s Penny Jar Capital only registered with the SEC in May; his advocacy for equal pay predates that. In 2018, he wrote an essay for the Players’ Tribune about his young daughter and how her career ambition—”a basketball player cook,” like her parents—refocused his attention on the gender pay gap.
Every day “the pay gap is affecting women,” he wrote, and it’s “sending the wrong message to women about who they are, and how they’re valued, and what they can or cannot become.”
In that essay, he urged readers to go beyond learning about women’s equality and to start actively supporting it—a challenge he fulfilled today.
Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman
The Broadsheet, Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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