She Was Homeless. Now She Runs a $25 Million Investment Fund for Women of Color. Fearless Fund cofounder Arian Simone knows firsthand how hard it is for women of color to raise money. So after many setbacks and reinventions, she transformed herself into the solution she'd been looking for.

In college, Arian Simone launched a clothing boutique in a mall in Jacksonville, Florida — but when she went to raise capital for it, she realized there were very few people to pitch who looked like her. "I was sitting on the floor before the grand opening," she recalls. "And I said, "Arian, don't you worry, because one day you're going to be the business investor you were looking for.' "

It took nearly two decades, seven months of homelessness, and a few reinventions, but she kept that promise to herself. Simone cofounded the Fearless Fund, the first investment fund run by women of color for women of color. Now it's a $25 million to $30 million fund with a portfolio of early-­stage companies, recently landing a $1 million investment from Costco Wholesale as well as a fundraising partnership with Mastercard. Simone has also developed the Fearless Foundation, which distributed more than $200,000 in business grants during the pandemic, plus a weeklong event called Fearless Venture Capital Week, which debuted in August.

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"Venture capital doesn't have the best reputation of getting money in the door when you really need it," says Angela Benton, founder of Streamlytics, a tech company in Fearless Fund's portfolio. "But Arian's team truly understood the momentum our company had and brought their expertise and capital to the table when it was most impactful."

Even as a young girl in Detroit, Simone seemed destined for business. "My friends used to say I would sell my mother's placenta if I knew it had value," she jokes. She sold Christmas poinsettias as a kid and Mary Kay in high school, and opened that store in college — which ultimately shut down. Bad luck followed: Her next employer closed shop, and
153 job applications later, she was still unemployed. She ran out of money and lived in her car for seven months, trying to remain upbeat. "If I were to be depressed and upset, that wasn't going to produce the desired result," she says. "I'm very big on focusing on what that is and staying on it until it is manifest."

Finally, a break: Someone offered her work doing PR, which she'd never done. "I lived out of my office and showered at LA Fitness," she says. Steve Harvey's radio show was in the building, so she networked with everyone who came through the door and ultimately started working with the likes of Sony, Universal, and Disney.

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In 2018, after 14 years in Hollywood, she decided it was time to fulfill her original goal. That was the year the shocking ".0006" figure — the percentage of VC funds going to Black female founders —­ surfaced. She created the Fearless Fund, harnessed her PR skills to promote it, and lined up institutional investors including PayPal and Bank of America. That enabled her to make a meaningful impact: Initial investments run between $250,000 and $500,000.

The .0006 percent figure is now marginally better. In the first half of 2021, 0.34 percent of total VC funding went to Black female founders. Simone says only one thing will fix that problem. "What's going to move the needle is more Black and Brown fund managers who have the ability to get capital and deploy it," she says. "More people like me to cut checks to more people like me."