Morgan Stanley Expands Global Inclusive Ventures Lab with Largest Single Cohort of 23 Companies
12.9.2023 15:00:00 EEST | Business Wire | Press release
Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) today announced the 2023 global cohort of the Inclusive Ventures Lab, with 23 companies selected across North America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), double the size of previous cohorts. The Lab offers a five-month in-house accelerator program for underrepresented founders of technology and technology-enabled startups in the post-seed to Series A funding round stage.
Chosen from over 7,900 applicants – more than three times last year’s pool – the selected startups represent a range of disruptive technologies in industries including healthcare, sustainable solutions, customer service, supply chain, recruiting and cybersecurity. Companies in the cohort receive a $250,000 investment (£250,000 in EMEA) from Morgan Stanley, as well as a variety of mentorship opportunities and business-growth resources from Morgan Stanley’s ecosystem of internal and external partners.
“We are proud to welcome the Lab’s largest cohort yet, marking our continued efforts to create a more equitable investment landscape for overlooked entrepreneurs worldwide,” said Selma Bueno, Global Head of the Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Group. “We are working to bridge the investment gap for underserved founders and to help correct documented market imbalances.”
The selected companies in the 2023 global cohort include the following:
- Ad Auris empowers marketing teams, publishers and content creators to repurpose written content into high-quality audio to reach an audience of listeners (Canada)
- Automated Architecture provides the technological infrastructure for a distributed robotic micro-factory network producing sustainable timber housing (UK)
- Bidrento offers an all-in-one solution for tenant experience and rental property management, helping to save time and money while also reducing CO2 emissions in real estate (Estonia)
- ByFusion provides a zero waste landfill diversion platform to transform non-recyclable plastic waste into reusable building materials (US)
- Cult Mia is an online fashion marketplace for sustainable and ethical brands from around the world (UK)
- DotLab develops breakthrough, actionable AI and ML technologies that lead to better health outcomes for women, starting with the diagnosis of endometriosis (US)
- eBanqo offers businesses an omnichannel platform to drive customer engagement and support (Nigeria)
- Encounter AI uses digital conversational ordering solutions to provide faster, friendlier and more efficient service to customers, restaurants and retailers (US)
- FLUIX Inc. enterprise AI software saves critical infrastructure on energy costs by integrating and optimizing facility systems (US)
- GigBridge is an online platform for construction companies to hire, onboard and pay their workforce all in one place (UK)
- Health in Her HUE connects Black women and women of color to culturally sensitive healthcare providers, health content and community support through a digital platform (US)
- Inicio AI delivers a virtually guided affordability assessment to help organizations save contact center costs while improving their end customer experience (UK)
- MEDIjobs is the first virtual recruiter for the healthcare industry, filling more than 55 types of positions at a rate five times faster than a human would (US)
- Nopalera is a collection of bath and body products powered by Mexico’s nopal cactus – an ancient symbol of Mexican culture (US)
- OKO offers affordable and inclusive crop insurance to farmers in emerging countries using satellite weather data and mobile payment technologies (Israel)
- Oppos provides robust cybersecurity and compliance security solutions for businesses, safeguarding data confidentiality, integrity, and availability (Canada)
- Partsimony enables organizations to build intelligent manufacturing supply chains that are more resilient and sustainable by unifying engineering and supply chain data (US)
- Ridelink leverages technology to enable small and medium-sized businesses to move cargo in Uganda and cross-border in six neighboring countries (Uganda)
- serviceMob is an AI & ML-powered customer service analytics platform that helps businesses optimize operations and improve the customer experience (US)
- Stak Mobility facilitates widespread urban electric vehicle adoption by merging space-saving vertical parking automation with fully integrated EV charging and a seamless mobile self-service experience (US)
- Tall Poppy is a digital security company protecting employees and public facing teams from online threats (US)
- Twipes uses bio-tech to produce flushable, biodegradable wet wipes that break down in water in three hours and biodegrade in landfills in seven days (US)
- Unfabled is a consumer health platform that delivers personalized solutions for women by matching them with health and wellness products (UK)
“We are thrilled to bring our unique accelerator program to more entrepreneurs globally, including our first participants from Africa and the Middle East,” said Sanghamitra Karra, EMEA Head of the Inclusive Ventures Group. “It is highly rewarding to work closely with founders to take their game-changing technologies to scale and help set them up for continued success.”
“By providing these promising startups with much-needed capital, a tailored curriculum and access to investors within and beyond the Firm’s far-reaching network, we aim to ensure that more underrepresented founders can succeed,” said LaToya Wilson, Americas Head of the Inclusive Ventures Group.
Programming will run through February 2024 and culminate in a global Demo Day, when participating companies will present to potential investors, business partners and customers.
The Inclusive Ventures Lab has won multiple Gold Anthem Awards, including Most Impactful Corporate Initiative in 2022 and Corporate Social Responsibility in 2023. The program was also listed as one of Global Finance’s Best Innovation Labs of 2023.
About the Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab
The Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab (MSIVL) is an intensive five-month in-house accelerator program designed to help further develop and scale startups, culminating in a showcase presentation and Demo Day to the investor community. Morgan Stanley launched MSIVL, formerly called the Multicultural Innovation Lab, in 2017 in order to address inequities in funding of underrepresented founders, which our research shows equals over four trillion dollars in unrealized returns.
About Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) is a leading global financial services firm providing a wide range of investment banking, securities, wealth management and investment management services. With offices in 42 countries, the Firm’s employees serve clients worldwide including corporations, governments, institutions and individuals. For further information about Morgan Stanley, please visit www.morganstanley.com.
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230911548537/en/
Contact information
Media Relations: Carrie Hall, carrie.hall@morganstanley.com
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Icon Solutions Showcases How Banks Can Accelerate Digital Asset Innovation with IPF9.6.2026 12:30:00 EEST | Press release
Icon Solutions – the UK fintech enabling banks to design and implement state-of-the-art payment systems – has released a reference implementation showing how banks can use the Icon Payments Framework (IPF) to accelerate support for payments processing using distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based digital assets. As IPF is agnostic to both the type of digital asset and the DLT network on which they are issued, the risk of fragmentation is reduced as adoption scales. There is growing momentum for digital assets such as stablecoins, tokenised deposits, deposit tokens and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to enable faster, cheaper and smarter payments. Yet the emergence of different digital asset types and DLT networks – which must also work with existing financial infrastructure – creates fragmentation and operational complexity for banks. This is compounded by legacy vendor solutions that limit choice and lock banks in, making it slow, costly and risky to make the changes require
monday.com Appoints Ben Barnett General Manager of EMEA to Drive Next Phase of Regional Growth9.6.2026 11:00:00 EEST | Press release
monday.com (Nasdaq: MNDY), the AI work platform that turns strategy into execution at scale, today announced Ben Barnett’s appointment to General Manager (GM) of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, marking a major milestone in the company’s global expansion. Ben, who has been with monday.com for five years, brings a decade of experience in senior B2B sales roles at software companies and has overseen significant, sustained growth at monday.com in the UK and Ireland since joining in 2021. In his new position, Ben’s priorities include delivering the monday.com’s EMEA go-to-market strategy, fostering key partnerships, and bolstering its newly announced AI work platform. He is based in London. Ben’s promotion comes as monday.com builds on a period of rapid regional success, with EMEA revenue up 26% year-on-year in 2025. Last year, monday.com expanded its regional EMEA headquarters in Fitzrovia, London, now occupying 80,000 sq ft across three floors where more than 370 employees are based,
Interactive Brokers Launches Commission-Free iShares ETFs from BlackRock through Recurring Investment Feature Across Europe9.6.2026 11:00:00 EEST | Press release
Interactive Brokers (Nasdaq: IBKR), an automated global broker, today announced the launch of Commission-Free ETFs within its Recurring Investment feature for eligible individual investors across the European Economic Area. Investors can now access more than 500 commission-free iShares ETFs from BlackRock spanning a broad range of asset classes and strategies, including bonds, equities, themes and sectors. The iShares ETFs available on the IBKR platform give individual investors an accessible, cost-efficient way to build well-diversified portfolios. Since investors pay no trading commissions, more of their capital stays invested and compounding over time, while a broad selection of funds across asset classes makes it straightforward to construct and rebalance portfolios. iShares ETFs are available commission-free through IBKR's Recurring Investments feature, allowing investors to automate their periodic ETF contributions. Clients can select individual ETFs or ETF portfolios, set a cont
Forrester Reveals The Top 10 Highest-Performing Brands In Its 2026 Global Total Experience Score Rankings At Its CX Events9.6.2026 10:30:00 EEST | Press release
According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2026 global Total Experience Score rankings of 375 brands evaluated across Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America in 2025 and 2026, 41% improved their scores while only 3% declined. A compelling total experience — calculated by combining Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™), Brand Experience Index (BX Index™), and, for the first time, the new Employee Experience Index (EX Index™) into a unified view of performance — can drive outsized growth for brands. While brand experience and customer experience can each drive revenue independently, the impact multiplies when they are orchestrated together as a unified total experience. In the US, for example, companies delivering a strong total experience see significantly higher returns from retention and enrichment: Automotive firms achieve a 2.6x revenue lift and retailers see a 3.8x increase. The new research finds that CX scores improved in North America, European brands remained mostly st
IQM Announces Novel Quantum Error Correction Approach Toward Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing9.6.2026 10:00:00 EEST | Press release
IQM Quantum Computers, the global leader in superconducting quantum computers, has developed a novel quantum error-correcting code that achieves up to three orders of magnitude lower logical error rates than the surface code, also requiring up to eight times fewer physical qubits. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260609533201/en/ IQM´s breakthrough technology, called barbell codes. Unlike many alternative high-performance quantum error-correction approaches, the new code also maintains a comparatively low hardware complexity, marking a significant advancement toward scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing. Quantum error correction remains one of the defining challenges in the race toward practical quantum computing. Errors introduced by noise must be corrected faster than they accumulate, a requirement that previous approaches demanded either complex hardware or significant performance trade-offs, which IQM's
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom