05/13/2026
A***n Simone is a co-founder and the CEO of the Fearless Fund, the first venture capital fund created for and by women of color. She was not "sold" herself, but she is a successful entrepreneur who has sold multiple businesses and also faced a high-profile legal challenge regarding her fund's grant programs.
Business Exits: Simone has co-founded and sold several successful ventures, including a PR and marketing firm and a magazine.
Fearless Fund: Launched in 2019 to invest in businesses led by women of color. It has received backing from major companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Costco.Legal Battle: In 2023, her fund was sued by the American Alliance for Equal Rights, which claimed its grant program for Black women was discriminatory.
Settlement: In September 2024, the fund settled the lawsuit, agreeing to end its specific Strivers Grant Contest while moving forward with new initiatives like a $200 million debt loan program.
Authorship: She has written three books, including the best-seller The Fearless Money Mindset.
A***n Simone was sued to stop her from funding Black women — so she took $200 million to Africa instead.The lawsuit was designed to be a wall. When legal action was brought against A***n Simone to prevent her from directing funding specifically toward Black women entrepreneurs, the intended outcome was a full stop — a legal mechanism to shut down the mission before it could grow further. What happened instead was a pivot that made the mission larger. She moved her focus to Africa and launched a $200 million global fund dedicated to supporting women of color entrepreneurs — the first fund of its scale built specifically for that purpose. The wall became a door.The distance between where she started and where she stands now is not a small one. A***n Simone lived in her car. That is the baseline from which she built everything that followed — the platform, the network, the credibility, and eventually the financial infrastructure to move two hundred million dollars toward women who looked like her and faced the same structural barriers she had navigated without a safety net. The homelessness isn't a footnote to her success story. It's the foundation of why her commitment to other women is not theoretical. She knows what the absence of capital and opportunity actually costs.The lawsuit, the pivot, the fund — each piece of the story is its own statement about what happens when systems try to limit someone whose determination has already survived conditions those systems didn't design. They sued her to stop her from funding Black women. She went global. The response to opposition wasn't retreat. It was scale.
