12 Open Grants + NYC Tech Week + 9 LaFam Events

Apply to the Seattle Pitch Competition!

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LaFamilia Newsletter
21 May • Read in: 6 minutes

Hola Familia to Edition #123! 🌿

For almost 5 years, we've been the economic infrastructure for meaningful change in the Latine venture scene. You're joining 7,500+ subscribers and 27,000+ followers who get the latest on community, capital, and career opportunities bi-weekly. Stay connected on WhatsApp here | LinkedIn.

This issue: 12 grants open right now (some close June 1), nine events across five city chapters, and what Q1's pre-seed data actually tells you about how to raise.

Table of Contents

💸 Free Money: 12 Grants Open Right Now

Three of these go up to $100,000 each. None of them take equity. All of them are open right now.

  • Famous Amos Ingredients for Success — $50,000 · Black-owned businesses under 5 years old. Closes June 1. Apply →

  • Cartier Women's Initiative — Up to $100,000 · Women impact entrepreneurs, businesses 1–6 years old, raised less than $2M dilutive. Closes June 16. Start now, the application is substantial. Apply →

  • The Pride Fund / LGBTQIA+ National Grant — $20,000 · 20 grant packages for LGBTQIA+ small businesses. Closes May 26. Apply →

  • Women Founders Network Fast Pitch — $25,000 · Tech and CPG/consumer tracks, LA final in October. Closes May 31. Apply →

  • Accelerate California Hub Grant — $100,000 · LA-based tech and science startups in designated innovation hubs. Rolling. Apply →

  • EmpowHER Grant — Up to $50,000 · Female founders (22+) with social impact businesses under 5 years old. Closes June 15. Apply →

  • Visionaries Pitch Competition — $40,000 · Women-owned U.S. businesses with under $500K raised. Pre-revenue welcome with traction. Closes June 18. Apply →

  • LA County Small Business Mobility Fund — $5K–$10K · For businesses opening brick-and-mortar in unincorporated LA County. Closes June 1. Apply →

  • SoGal Black Founder Startup Grant — $5K–$10K · Black women and nonbinary entrepreneurs. Rolling. Apply →

  • Amber Grant — $10,000 · Women-owned businesses. Monthly deadlines. Apply →

  • Entreprenista Evolve Grant — $5,000 · Women-founded businesses scaling operations or product. Closes June 20. Apply →

  • Darcy's Business Freedom Grant — $1,000 · Women building toward financial independence through ownership. Closes June 30. Apply →

If you're not eligible, forward this section to someone who is. (:

Tech News

Pre-seed just split into two markets, and AI is now half of it. Carta's State of Pre-Seed Q1 2026 covers ~3,000 US rounds totaling $2.3B in cash raised. AI startups now take 50% of pre-seed dollars, up from 30% a few years ago. For our founders raising right now, the takeaway is sharp: if you're in AI, you're competing against half the available capital chasing the same thesis. If you're not in AI, the room is less crowded but the bar for clean traction, real customer evidence, and operational discipline just went up. Read more →

👀 Sam Altman just made a "mic drop" offer to every YC startup. At a YC event Tuesday, Altman offered $2M in OpenAI tokens to every startup in the current 169-company class in exchange for equity (uncapped SAFE, converts at Series A). For our FounderFamilia building on top of frontier models, this is the new floor: the cost of compute is being financed by the platform itself. Expect Anthropic, Google, and others to respond. The model providers are no longer just infra. They're investors competing for the next generation of AI-native companies. Read more →

Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash claims it can save trillion-token enterprises over $1B a year. At Google I/O, Sundar Pichai announced the new Flash model beats the 4-month-old flagship at a third the cost. For founders burning on inference, the broader signal is what matters: model costs are dropping faster than most product margins assume. If your unit economics depend on today's API pricing, run the numbers on what next quarter looks like. Read more →

Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. The former Tesla AI director and OpenAI founding team member is joining Anthropic to accelerate pretraining research. Worth knowing: this is one of the most consequential AI talent moves of the year. Where leading researchers go tells you where the next gain is coming from. Read more →

Mercury raised $200M Series D at $5.2B. The startup-banking platform thousands of founders use just raised from TCV, with Sequoia, a16z, and Coatue joining. If you're still on a legacy bank, this is the signal it's worth the switch. Read more →

🌎 Familia Across 5 Cities

This month our city chapters are showing up loud. NYC, Miami, LA, Chicago, Seattle. Nine events, every flavor of LaFam, every kind of room. Wherever you are, find your familia.

🗽 NYC — Tech Week is here (June 1–7)

Over 10,000 founders, investors, and operators are descending on the city for NY Tech Week. We're hosting five rooms across the week. If you're flying in, reply to this email so we know you're around.

  • Cafecito in FiDi — early angels and the LaFam crew, coffee in the Financial District. RSVP

  • Colectivo x LFF: Latina Power — Tech Week panel with CherryRock Capital and Vamos Ventures, plus a panel with VC-backed Latina founders. The lineup speaks for itself. RSVP

  • Builders Without Borders: Founders & Vino — intimate founder dinner in Brooklyn. The kind of room where deals actually happen. RSVP

  • Gender HealthTech: The Next Investment Frontier — pre-seed and seed founders meeting active angels and VCs in one of the most underfunded categories in venture. If you're building or investing here, this is your room. RSVP

  • Post Tech Week Salsa Night Social — because we always end the week dancing. RSVP

🏖️ Miami — Tech Happy Hour in Wynwood

Wednesday, June 10 · 5:30–7:30 PM

Happy hour bringing founders, builders, operators, investors, and ecosystem connectors shaping South Florida tech. A curated room, real conversations, one drink on us. Space is intentionally small.

🌴 LA — World Cup Kick Off at The Big House

Investment panel with a business banker, a VC, and an angel investor, plus bites from the LATAM teams playing this World Cup. Connect, collaborate, celebrate.

🏙️ Chicago — Raíces & Rights: Community Wills Night

90% of Latino families don't have a will. Not because we don't care, but because no one made it easy, accessible, or ours. Tonight we change that.

Raíces & Rights by LaFamilia Chicago x Kinnect — licensed estate attorneys on site, wills at discounted or no cost for eligible attendees, food, drinks, and a Pride Night celebration to close. Latino founders, operators, investors, and their families. This is not a legal seminar. It's a community gathering.

🏔️ Seattle — Launch of LaFamilia Seattle

5 early-stage founders pitching live, prizes from Perkins Coie, Carts, etc are on the line, be at the SVB offices. Whether you want to pitch, invest, or just see fresh startups in action, this is the room to be in for Seattle's launch. Apply to pitch HERE

Subscribe to our Luma Calendar HERE

Founder to Watch: Manuel Vallejos 🇨🇱

Manuel Vallejos is a Chilean engineer and second-time founder who's been building since his university days. His path runs from a student housing marketplace, to a sports media platform that captured early footage of now-global stars, to a fintech that didn't survive Chile's national unrest, to leading distributed teams across Latin America. The thread across all of it: he's drawn to the overlooked opportunities everyone else walks past.

That instinct led him to build Aindez, an AI platform helping staffing companies unify fragmented data and scale operations without growing the back office. Just launched and already live with paying customers, integrations, and early momentum across the region.

The lesson he keeps coming back to: resilience and proximity to the problem are your greatest competitive advantage.

💬 Community Ask: Manuel is looking for customer intros at staffing companies, Pre-Seed investors, and HR tech partners as he expands into the US. Reply to this email and we'll connect you, or find him on LinkedIn.

We Moved to Ramp! 💸

Great tools should be in the hands of any founders. Ramp gives our team and city chapters everything they need.

Because of our partnership, our community gets access to an exclusive offer:

  • $500 sign-up bonus

  • $350K+ in vendor credits (AWS, OpenAI, Notion, and more)

  • An additional $1,000 bonus if you're switching from Brex

  • 2% yield on Ramp business accounts + ~4% on Ramp's Investment Account

Ramp gives founders real-time visibility into burn, tight control over spend, and tools that actually help you move smarter. It's the kind of support our community deserves.

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We Moved to Ramp! 💸

Great tools should be in the hands of any founders. Ramp gives our team and city chapters everything they need.

Because of our partnership, our community gets access to an exclusive offer:

  • $500 sign-up bonus

  • $350K+ in vendor credits (AWS, OpenAI, Notion, and more)

  • An additional $1,000 bonus if you're switching from Brex

  • 2% yield on Ramp business accounts + ~4% on Ramp's Investment Account

Ramp gives founders real-time visibility into burn, tight control over spend, and tools that actually help you move smarter. It's the kind of support our community deserves.

The Corporate Card of Choice for LaFamilia Network

Easy-to-use cards, spend limits, approval flows, vendor payments, and more—plus an average savings of 5%.

ramp.com/partners/lafamilia-foundation

Open Positions in VC and Startups 💼

💻Remote

🌉 San Francisco

Entry / Intermediate

Mid

Senior

Wherever you are this month, we'll see you out there. 🌎

La unión hace la fuerza.