How Richelieu Dennis is using Venture Capital and entrepreneurial smarts to create other billion-dollar Black companies

Muhga Eltigani is the 32-year-old founder of NaturAll Club, a Philadelphia-based company that makes a line of refrigerated hair care products serving Black women. Born in Sudan, Eltigani conceived the idea for NaturAll in her University of Pennsylvania dorm room, where she began developing a holistic hair care regimen after cutting her hair. She also started a YouTube channel to share her recipes and natural ingredients. In 2017, Eltigani launched NaturAll after women fans – too busy to re-create the recipes themselves from her YouTube channel – encouraged her to sell her products.

At the same time Eltigani was getting her entrepreneurial career under way, another African-born entrepreneur named Richelieu Dennis was selling his company Sundial Brands to Unilever for US$1.6 billion. Raised in Liberia, Dennis started his company by selling shea butter out of his dorm room at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Founded in 1991, Sundial Brands had grown by the time of the 2017 sale to Unilever into a hair care and skin care company with multiple brands aimed at Black women such as SheaMoisture, Nubian Heritage, and Madam C.J. Walker. As part of the deal, Unilever and Sundial Brands created the New Voices Fund with an initial investment of US$100 million to support women of color entrepreneurs.

From afar, Eltigani watched Dennis’s transformation into one of the most powerful and visible champions of Black women entrepreneurs. By 2018, NaturAll had hit US$100,000 in annual sales, and Eltigani was ready to scale the business. She wanted a US$1 million investment and Dennis’s New Voices Fund was an obvious target, but she didn’t know how to connect with him.