Julian Addo founded Adwoa Beauty in 2017 with $80,000 of her own capital and built it into a brand with shelf space at Sephora locations across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. This week, a judge ordered the brand into Chapter 7 liquidation following a legal dispute with lender Aurous Financial. The conflict centered on a retail payment that was redirected to the lender in November under circumstances Addo has publicly described as improper. The business did not recover from that financial blow.
Addo has documented the situation publicly on Substack and told Beauty Independent that she has already begun building something new. The brand is gone. The founder is not.
Rashaun Williams closes a $450M sports fund
Rashaun Williams, the Shark Tank investor and Atlanta Falcons minority owner, has spent years arguing that minority ownership stakes in professional sports are among the most deliberately undervalued investment categories available. This week, Harbinger Sports Partners, the Atlanta-based firm he co-founded alongside Steve Cannon, Mark Cuban and Jonathan Mariner, announced the close of its debut fund with more than $400 million secured from long-term capital partners seeking sustained exposure to professional sports franchises.
What separates Harbinger from outside money is straightforward. Every principal on the leadership team has previously held an actual ownership seat inside a major league franchise. The fund closed above $450 million. That number makes the argument Williams has been building for years without needing much additional commentary.
Taye Diggs launches a mobile content platform
On April 30, Taye Diggs and partners Autumn Federici, Shelby Stone, James Black and Troy Brookins announced the launch of Microhouse Films, a mobile-first vertical storytelling platform scheduled to go live this spring. The platform is structured around creator independence. Filmmakers pay nothing to distribute their work, set their own pricing and retain their revenue through an in-app currency system that viewers use to unlock episodes.
The team formed through their work on the microdrama Tides of Temptation and is now betting that owning the distribution infrastructure matters as much as the content running through it. Creators on most platforms are routinely cut out of meaningful economics. Microhouse Films is built on a different premise.
Two Yale seniors closed $5.1M before graduation
Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow founded Series, a social networking app that operates entirely within iMessage. Users text the platform a description of who they are trying to meet and receive a swipeable set of potential matches with no download required. The two closed a $5.1 million pre-seed round backed by Pear VC, Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman and GPTZero founder Edward Tian.
Johnson has stated that Series has already spread to students at more than 700 schools, with early retention numbers tracking ahead of where major social platforms stood at a comparable stage of growth. Neither founder had received a diploma when the round closed.
Meta is tracking employee keystrokes to build AI
Meta has deployed an internal monitoring tool called Model Capability Initiative that records workers’ mouse movements, keystrokes and intermittent screen captures, feeding that data directly into its AI development pipeline. Employees raised concerns internally about what such a system collects and how it is stored.
The company maintains that the captured data is used solely for building AI models and has no connection to performance reviews. That position is harder to take at face value from a company whose core business was constructed on behavioral data collection at scale. The implications for how work gets monitored inside large technology companies going forward are broader than one internal tool at one company.
