Jewel Burks Solomon

Jewel Melanie Burks Solomon was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and began working for family businesses at a young age. She earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from Howard University, and her early experience in her family's businesses shaped her interest in the problems that small companies face.

That experience inspired her to co-found Partpic in 2013 with Jason Crain. The artificial intelligence start-up used computer vision to let people identify and order maintenance and repair parts by taking a photo, streamlining a process that had long relied on catalogues and guesswork.

In 2016 Amazon acquired Partpic, when Burks Solomon was 27. She left Google, where she had been working, to oversee the integration of Partpic's technology into the Amazon mobile app, and her story became a widely cited example of a Black woman founder building and selling a technology company.

In January 2020 she became the first head of Google for Startups in the United States. In that role she created initiatives that have deployed over $50 million in non-dilutive capital to more than 500 under-served businesses since 2020, working to level the playing field for founders from communities that traditionally receive little venture funding.

Burks Solomon is now managing partner of Collab Capital, a $125 million-plus early-stage venture capital fund she launched to invest in what she calls the building blocks of shared prosperity, including economic mobility, healthcare access and community infrastructure. She serves on the boards of The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, CallRail, the Center for American Entrepreneurship and Spelman College.