Uncle Nearest is on its way to unicorn status.
In December, the Black woman-owned whiskey brand raised capital for its new French subsidiary, and received more funding than it asked for. With that, the company is now valued at $900 million per a Fortune report.
As ESSENCE previously reported, last year the company gained ownership of Domaine Saint Martin, an estate that reaches back more than 350 years to the Lord Mayor of Cognac, Philippe Fé de Ségeville.
This is an impressive feat for the company since was launched less than a decade in 2017, and is now considered the world’s top-selling Black-owned spirits brand globally per sales measures.
The inception of the company after its founder Fawn Weaver learned of the story of Nathan “Nearest” Green, a Black man that mentored Jack Daniels in whiskey-making, but never received his proper credit.
“When I went to the family I asked, ‘what is the one thing you think should happen to honor Nearest?’ They responded, “we think his name should be on a bottle,”’ Weaver previously told ESSENE. “And by then we had already created a foundation with the intention of paying for all of his descendents to go to college. That was something I was working on before I ever came to this story, just looking at taking underprivileged kids and figuring out how to get them what they need in high school so they can get the grades to get into Ivy League. So when I began working on this, I just transferred that passion. Rather than randomly focusing on kids from across the country, I said, I’ll just focus on one family. And bringing it back to the legacy of excellence that their ancestors started. It continued for a couple of generations but I believe that somewhere along the line, they forgot. They were not living up to the same ideals from the work ethic and in terms that level of excellence as Nearest and his children and his grandchildren.”