Meet Barry Givens, the robot bartender founder now running a $125 million fund backing Black entrepreneurs in America

The premise that built Monsieur was small enough to fit on a cocktail napkin. Bars could not consistently pour the same drink twice, and a young mechanical engineer named Barry Givens decided to fix the problem with a machine.

That decision, made in 2012, set Givens on a path that has taken him from the engineering studios at Georgia Tech, through a hardware startup that eventually licensed its technology to a global beverage equipment company, and into a corner of the United States venture capital industry where Black founders are routinely starved of capital. Today, Givens is a managing partner at Collab Capital, an Atlanta-based firm he co-founded that closed its second vehicle at $75 million in 2025 and now manages roughly $125 million in committed capital.

Givens did not arrive at venture capital through a Wall Street internship or a Stanford MBA. He arrived through a robot. Most American venture capital partners come up through finance, consulting or product roles inside large technology companies. Givens came up through a hardware shop floor, a path that shaped both the way he picks portfolio companies and the way founders choose to pitch him.

He is based in Atlanta and graduated from Georgia Tech in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. He worked as a design and manufacturing engineer at John Deere and later moved into project management and sales at Caterpillar, two industrial giants whose equipment serves agriculture, construction and mining around the world.

The seed of his entrepreneurial life was already there. While still a Georgia Tech student, Givens had launched a custom sneaker label called Slushie Kicks. By 2012, he had walked away from a stable engineering career and started Monsieur with co-founder Eric Williams, a computer scientist trained at the same university. The two co-founders brought complementary skills. Givens led mechanical engineering, manufacturing and operations. Williams handled the software stack, including the touchscreen interface and the connected drink-tracking system that turned Monsieur from a piece of hardware into a managed device.

Monsieur was an automated cocktail dispenser, a 50-pound countertop machine that could measure, mix and pour drinks on command using a touchscreen interface and a set of pressurized canisters. The pitch was operational rather than novelty. Bars and entertainment venues lost margin to inconsistent pours, theft and labor shortages, and Monsieur promised to standardize the unit economics of the cocktail. The company eventually marketed a commercial unit aimed at restaurants and venues alongside two consumer-facing models, priced at $1,499 and $2,699, which it unveiled through a Kickstarter campaign.

Investors paid attention. The company won a slot in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2013, raised a $2 million round in 2014, and signed early customers in sports arenas, hotels and movie theaters. The company eventually pulled in more than $4 million in total funding and built a roster of commercial deployments across the country.

The exit was not a unicorn moment. In 2017, Monsieur licensed its core dispensing technology to Napa Technology, a beverage equipment company that wanted the patents inside its commercial wine and cocktail systems. The deal gave Givens a clean handoff and a thesis.

He had spent roughly five years building hardware as a Black founder in a sector with vanishingly few Black founders. The pattern was not anecdotal. Black founders raised less than two percent of United States venture capital in the years he was building Monsieur, a number that has not meaningfully shifted since. After a brief surge in 2020 and 2021, when corporate pledges to support Black entrepreneurs ran into the billions of dollars, capital allocation to Black founders drifted back toward historical levels.

Givens then teamed up with Jewel Burks Solomon, a Black entrepreneur who had sold visual search company Partpic to Amazon, and Justin Dawkins, an Atlanta software engineer and operator, to launch Collab Capital. Burks Solomon went on to lead Google for Startups United States after the Partpic exit. Dawkins is a longtime software developer and a co-founder of Goodie Nation, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to the relationships and mentorship they need at the earliest stages. Collab was structured to look different from the firms that had passed on Givens. It used a hybrid of equity and revenue-based financing, gave portfolio companies access to a network of seasoned operators, and explicitly targeted Black founders building technology businesses.

The inaugural fund closed in May 2021 at roughly $50 million across 99 limited partners, a mix that included Apple, Goldman Sachs, Google, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mailchimp, Bank of America, Foot Locker, PayPal and Carta Ventures. It was, at the time of its close, one of the larger debut funds raised by a Black-led venture firm in the United States.

Fund I went on to back 38 portfolio companies. Among them is SparkCharge, a portable electric vehicle charging startup that appeared on Shark Tank in 2020 and secured investment from Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner.

In June 2025, the firm closed its second fund at $75 million. Apple and Goldman Sachs Asset Management's External Investing Group returned as backers, joined by new institutional capital from the Leon Levine Foundation and California IBank. The close put Collab Capital's total assets under management at approximately $125 million and put Givens, Burks Solomon and Dawkins on a short list of Black-led general partners with two institutional funds under their belt. The firm said Fund II would invest in early-stage startups addressing foundational needs across work, healthcare and community infrastructure.

Alongside the fund, Givens has spent years inside the operating engine of Atlanta's startup community. He served as managing director of the Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator powered by Techstars, a program that selects and invests in early-stage startups working on people, community and planet. The role placed Givens in the operator-investor seat during a window when Atlanta was establishing itself as a leading Black tech hub in the United States.

His public profile has tracked the rise. The Root named him to its Root 100 list of most influential African Americans in 2021. He has advised at startup programs across the Southeast and spoken at industry events about the structural problem of who gets funded in America. The non-extractive financing thesis at the heart of Collab Capital, which lets founders preserve equity while still receiving institutional capital, is one Givens has discussed in public conversations with operators, limited partners and policy audiences.

The personal wealth question is the one Givens does not lead with. He is not a billionaire and has not claimed to be. His economic upside today sits inside Collab Capital, where his carried interest in the two funds and his stake in the management company tie his net worth to the long-term performance of the portfolio rather than to a single liquidity event. Carried interest pays out only after a fund returns committed capital to its limited partners, a cycle that typically runs over a horizon of five to ten years.

Collab Capital is one of a small group of Black-led venture firms in the United States with institutional limited partners, an investable fund size and a portfolio that spans dozens of companies. Its existence changes who can write a first check to a Black founder in Atlanta, Brooklyn, Houston or Oakland. The peer set is small. Harlem Capital, MaC Venture Capital, Base10 Partners and a handful of others have raised institutional venture funds led by Black general partners over the past decade, but the cohort remains a fraction of the broader American venture industry.

Givens lives in Atlanta and continues to invest out of the second Collab Capital fund.