Black Momma Brands is getting ready to launch Black Momma Tea and Café after raising $2.1 million, without relying on venture capital.
After retiring in 2013 from her career as an engineer for New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, founder Vanessa Braxton decided to use her retirement money to invest in a distillery.
She initially learned how to make vodka from scratch while in college. "You have so many resources to utilize when you're a college student. You really don't know where it might take you," Braxton told Cheddar. "When I retired from the MTA, and we moved to California, I took the opportunity to utilize my formula, and I said 'You know what? I used to make this in college. Why not take my retirement money and invest it into a distillery and create my own brand.'"
The company now has over 30,000 online and wholesale customers and counting.
Black Momma vodkas are infused with different tea flavors, so in this latest expansion, Braxton decided to keep with that theme, offering traditional, non-alcoholic teas through retailers, online, and at Black Momma Tea and Café locations.
Using crowdfunding and President Obama's 2012 JOBS Act, which eased many of the country's financial regulations to encourage the funding of small businesses, Braxton said she was able to raise capital for the new venture.
"When people see that you are true to your brand and true to your business they want to invest in you," Braxton said.
Beyond her own success, Braxton says helping non-traditional business owners build generational wealth has become a focus for the company. "I found that there are very few women and minority women-owned companies that have any manufacturing facilities and leave anything to future generations," Braxton told Cheddar.
Oracle soars as it cashes in on the AI boom, Plus: Starbucks shares continue to fall under its new CEO, and does anybody actually want a new iPhone Air?
Swedish buy now, pay later company Klarna is making its highly anticipated public debut on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, the latest in a run of high-profile initial public offerings this year. The offering priced at $40 Tuesday, above the forecasted range of $35 to $37 a share, valuing the company at more than $15 billion. The valuation easily makes Klarna one of the biggest IPOs so far in 2025, which has been one of the busier years for companies going public. Other popular IPOs so far this year include the design software company Figma and Circle Internet Group, which issues the USDC stablecoin..
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison wrested the title of the world’s richest man from longtime holder Elon Musk early Wednesday as stock in his software giant rocketed more than a third in a stunning few minutes of trading. That is according to wealth tracker Bloomberg. A college dropout, the 81-year-old Ellison is now worth $393 billion, Bloomberg says, several billion more than Musk, who had been the world’s richest for four years. The switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle. Forbes still has Musk as the richest, however, valuing his private businesses much higher.
