Stella Ashaolu is the CEO and Founder of WeSolv, a platform that connects companies to more diverse candidates and automates assessing skills and competencies with real projects to reduce hiring bias. She is also a Founding Partner and Interim Managing Director of Fifth Star Funds, the preeminent philanthropic venture fund investing in Black founders at the “friends and family” stage in Chicago.

As an MBA candidate at USC Marshall School of Business, Stella experienced the harsh realities of recruiting for strategy and consulting roles with a non-traditional background and limited network. It was there she realized the power of experiential learning and the need to democratize access to underrepresented candidates to build and showcase the skills necessary to get hired. With 15+ years of management consulting, big data, and predictive analytics expertise, Stella brings her lived experience to building a research and data-driven technology solution to improve diversity hiring for enterprise customers such as Salesforce, Pinterest, and Discover and a network of over 35,000 diverse business candidates. In addition to serving as a Techstars alumni mentor and 1871 mentor, Stella is a vocal leader and diversity advocate in the Chicago tech ecosystem. She also holds a BA from UCLA.