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Kesha Cash is the sole general partner at Impact America Fund, making it the largest VC firm in America run entirely by a Black woman. She has $65 million under management across two funds, a portfolio of 25 companies, a unicorn and three exits by acquisition. Most emerging managers spend a decade trying to build half that track record. Cash did it without a warm introduction or a family office bankroll.
She grew up on a farm in South Carolina. Her family later moved to Orange County, California, where they lived in a one-bedroom apartment on a Section 8 voucher. Nobody in her family had been to college. She went anyway, studied applied mathematics at UC Berkeley, got an MBA from Columbia, then spent a decade at Merrill Lynch, consulting for inner-city small businesses in Los Angeles and working in impact investing at Bridges Ventures in London. That background gave her something most VCs lack: a firsthand understanding of the communities she now invests in.
Here are five companies behind her investment empire.
1. Impact America Fund
This is the engine of Cash's business life. She founded Impact America Fund in 2013 as a venture capital firm investing in technology-enabled companies that serve low- and moderate-income communities in the United States. The thesis is simple: underserved markets represent billion-dollar opportunities that traditional investors overlook, and the founders closest to those problems are best positioned to solve them.
The first fund closed at $10 million in 2014. The second closed at $55 million, backed by 67 limited partners, including foundations, family offices and institutional investors. Impact America has now invested in 25 companies across consumer finance, education, health care and workforce development. 62% of the portfolio's founders are people of colour. 46% are women. Cash has been named a "Top Five Gamechanger" by one major business publication and a "Power Investor" by another.
2. Jalia Ventures
Before Impact America existed, Cash built her first fund. In 2010, she co-founded Jalia Ventures with serial impact investor Josh Mailman. The name comes from a Swahili word meaning "empowerment," and the $5 million vehicle targeted seed-stage investments in mission-driven companies led by entrepreneurs of colour.
Through Jalia, Cash made early bets on Red Rabbit, a company supplying fresh meals to schools and after-school programs; Schoolzilla, an education data analytics platform; and ConnXus, a supplier diversity software company. Red Rabbit grew from under $1 million in revenue with 13 employees in 2010 to over $7 million in revenue with 130 employees by 2013, with Cash serving on its advisory board. ConnXus was later acquired by Coupa Software in 2020, validating the fund's thesis. Jalia was small by venture standards, but it proved Cash could source deals, back winners, and return capital to investors. That track record gave her the credibility to raise Impact America's institutional funds.
3. Esusu
Esusu is the crown jewel in Cash's portfolio. Impact America invested in the fintech company, which builds credit-reporting infrastructure for renters. Within a year of that investment, Esusu reached unicorn status in 2022, crossing the $1 billion valuation mark. The company helps renters build credit history by reporting their rent payments to major credit bureaus, a service that disproportionately benefits low-income households and communities of colour that have historically been locked out of the credit system. Cash identified the opportunity early and backed a team building financial infrastructure where none existed. It remains the most valuable company in Impact America's portfolio.
4. Mayvenn
Cash's fund made an early pre-Series A investment in Mayvenn, a technology platform that connects customers with hair care products and salon services while directing economic opportunity to independent stylists. The company has raised $50 million in total capital, generated more than $100 million in cumulative revenue and paid over $20 million in commissions to active hairstylists. Mayvenn's network includes roughly 50,000 hair care professionals across the United States, the vast majority of whom are women of colour. The business sits at the intersection of e-commerce, beauty and economic empowerment, a category most venture firms never think to enter. Cash saw the opportunity before most of the industry knew the market existed.
5. CareAcademy
Impact America Fund led CareAcademy's $9.5 million Series A round in 2020. The company provides training, compliance and administrative tools to home care agencies, serving nearly 800,000 caregivers across the country. Cash sits on the company's board of directors. CareAcademy addresses a structural problem in the American health care system: the home care workforce is growing fast, but training and retention infrastructure has not kept pace. The company was acquired in November 2025, adding another successful exit to Impact America's record. Cash spotted a gap between a booming care economy and the workers holding it together, and she put capital behind a company building the infrastructure to close it. It is the kind of investment that defines her approach: unglamorous, essential and overlooked by nearly everyone else in venture capital.
