Laura I. Gomez grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, an undocumented child from México. With the help of her high school counselor and INROADS, she had her first software engineering internship at seventeen. Since then, she has worked in small startups and big tech companies alike - most notably YouTube and Twitter.
Being the “only” Latina in these companies at the time proved to be exhausting. She found herself speaking out about her experience and lack of Latinx representation, inclusion and leadership in the tech ecosystem.
This led her to be a founding team member of Project Include, a non-profit that advocates true inclusion in tech while also fundraising for her own startup, Atipica. The company focused on data, diversity and AI. It was eventually backed by True Ventures, Precursor Ventures and Kapor Capital.
Atipica became an enterprise startup that built the world's first people analytics platform for diversity. Laura raised the largest financing seed round for a solo Latinx founder in the history of Silicon Valley - $4M in total. While grateful, this was a tiny fraction of male-founded companies in the space raised during that time.
Laura is now building a mental health initiative called Proyecto Solace, a community of Latinx peoples investing in emotional and mental safe spaces for themselves, communities and collective healing.
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