Jewel Burks Solomon

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Research record

Jewel Burks Solomon · Staged record CTL-P-1316 · Entity Depth Program · 638 words · Evidence grade: VERIFIED (canonical master, carried unchanged) · Researched 2026-10-25

Jewel Burks Solomon's career runs in a deliberate sequence — build, sell, fund — and the Collab Capital team record that verifies this entry catches her at the third stage: she is a managing partner of Collab Capital, the Atlanta-based venture firm she co-founded, which closed its first fund at $51 million to invest in Black-led companies and has backed thirty-six of them. The graph affiliates her with Collab Capital as an institution record and places her on the UrbanGeekz 50 list; those two edges are her wiring here, and the career below is the documented content behind them.

She is a graduate of Howard University, class of 2010, and her first jobs were in enterprise technology — Google, in enterprise sales from 2010 to 2012, after a stint at McMaster-Carr. In 2013 she co-founded Partpic with Jason Crain: a visual-search company whose software let a customer photograph a replacement part and identify it, built in Atlanta's tech scene and aimed at an industrial problem — finding the right part in a catalogue of millions. Partpic raised over two million dollars in seed funding, presented at the White House Demo Day, and in 2016 was acquired by Amazon; the technology launched inside Amazon's app as PartFinder in 2018, reaching more than 150 million app users. Burks Solomon spent the acquisition period as a Google entrepreneur in residence — January 2014 to October 2016 by the reference record's dates, overlapping the company's final independent years — and then moved to the platform side of the ecosystem she had just exited as a founder.

In January 2020 she became the first Head of Google for Startups in the United States, the role she held into 2023. The speaker and firm records describe the work in concrete terms: she led the team behind Google's Black Founders Fund and Latino Founders Fund, which together deployed fifty million dollars in non-dilutive capital to Black and Latino founders beginning in 2020 — a figure Collab Capital's own team page states, and which this entry follows; trade coverage of one fund's launch reported a smaller cumulative figure at an earlier date, and the variance is noted in the batch index rather than blended. The funds were among the largest corporate responses to the racial-equity commitments of 2020, and her administration of them made her a national reference point on capital access for underrepresented founders.

Collab Capital, co-founded with Justin Dawkins and Barry Givens, converted that vantage into a firm: Fund I of $51 million, thirty-six Black-led companies backed, and a thesis — stated on the firm's own site — of growing Black wealth through investment in Black innovation. She resides in Atlanta, where both Partpic and Collab are based. CultureTechLens carries Jewel Burks Solomon as a person record on her firm's authority and the reference record: a Howard graduate who sold a visual-recognition company to Amazon before she was thirty, ran Google's startup capital programs for Black and Latino founders, and then raised a fund of her own — the build-sell-fund sequence, completed inside a single decade, that makes her one of the graph's clearest records of Black venture capital's institutional turn. The sequence matters because each stage credentialed the next in a field where credentials are the currency. Partpic's exit proved she could build a technical product and sell it to the largest platform in commerce; the Google role proved she could allocate capital at national scale, on the record, to the founders the market had been documented to overlook; Collab Capital then raised outside money on both proofs. Her graph presence is correspondingly institutional — a firm affiliation and a list placement rather than a product — which matches the nature of the achievement the sources describe: not a single company, but a position inside the machinery that decides which companies get built.

Sources for this record

• Jewel Burks Solomon — Team — Collab Capital
  Claims supported: Master verification source: Jewel Burks Solomon is Managing Partner and co-founder of Collab Capital; Collab Capital Fund I is $51 million, backing 36 Black-led companies; as Head of Google for Startups US (2019–2023) she led the Black and Latino Founders Funds, which deployed $50 million in non-dilutive capital since 2020; Partpic was sold to Amazon in late 2016 and launched as PartFinder in 2018 to over 150 million app users.
• Jewel Burks Solomon — Wikipedia
  Claims supported: Howard University, graduated 2010; Google enterprise sales 2010–2012; McMaster-Carr; co-founded PartPic in 2013 with Jason Crain; Google entrepreneur in residence January 2014–October 2016; Amazon acquired PartPic in 2016; first Head of Google for Startups US from January 2020.
• Jewel Burks Solomon — Speaker Record — All American Speakers Bureau
  Claims supported: Partpic raised over $2 million in seed funding and presented at White House Demo Day; roles at McMaster-Carr and Google preceded the founding.

Citations

Published October 25, 2026, from the head-verified staged record in the Entity Depth Program (Batches 004–008). Source: CultureTechLens