Evan Poncelet
Evan Poncelet is the founding Managing Partner of Dreamward Ventures and Executive Director of Venture Black, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering Black and ally founders and investors to pursue large market opportunities via rapidly scalable business models. A fellow of the VC Lab Venture Institute and BLCK VC Black Venture Institute, Evan works at the intersection of venture capital, community building, and technology creating pathways for underrepresented innovators to access capital and scale globally.
As a graduate of Gonzaga University (B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Seattle University (M.S. in Computer Science), Evan has spent over a decade in the software industry across Seattle and Silicon Valley. At Fluke Networks, he engineered test and measurement systems and directed the Advanced Engineering Program. At Cisco Systems, as a project-founding senior developer, he helped lead the company’s push into subscription-based, massively scalable data aggregation platforms with NLP-driven orchestration and security solutions.
In 2020, motivated by the movement for racial equity following George Floyd’s murder, Evan took a sabbatical from Cisco to join Africatown Community Land Trust as IT Director and board member. There, he spearheaded the technology backbone and programming support for major community development including the William Grose Center for Cultural Innovation, empowering underserved youth to enter the knowledge economy, and the 175-bed Benu Community Home to address the over-representation of Black males in Seattle's homelessness statistics at scale. Under his leadership, Africatown’s IT, security, access control, and back office systems scaled from serving a handful of employees in a single office to supporting a 50+ person team, cohorts of young innovators, and newly re-housed population across a multi-building campus.
These experiences, rooted in the need to counter the lasting effects of racialized policies such as Jim Crow, redlining, discriminatory housing covenants, the drug war, and ongoing global resource conflicts, deepened Evan’s understanding of how systemic barriers to exposure, education, capital, and relationships continue to inhibit wealth and job creation in communities of color—even in opportunity-rich innovation hubs like Seattle. In 2023, after completing the 23rd Seattle Angel Conference and partnering with life sciences investor Jesse Posey, he co-founded the Washington State Black Angel Network, which later evolved into Venture Black and Dreamward Ventures. Today, he is dedicated to scaling this ecosystem by mobilizing relational capital, diversifying the institutional investment landscape, and expanding global ability to pursue venture-scale market opportunities for underrepresented founders.