Hayti

Cary Wheelous, Co-Founder & CEO

Durham, North Carolina

Cary poses next to a vintage portrait of Black leaders, representing a modern digital Black Wall Street

Founder of the Black-owned news & podcast app Hayti: Cary Wheelous

2025

Hayti: one app, one feed, thousands of Black voices

Founded in 2020, Hayti is a Black-owned mobile platform that brings together news from 100+ Black publishers and episodes from 3,000+ Black podcasters all in one place. That way, audiences can discover, read, and listen to content they otherwise may never have known was there. The name honors Durham’s historic Hayti district, once known as a “Black Wall Street” of its own.

Tuning into what’s missing

In 2020, while most of us retreated to our phones and various screens, Cary Wheelous started noticing something that wasn’t there.

He’d open app after app, but would never run into any stories from Black publishers, sometimes not even from outlets he followed himself.

“It didn’t make any sense,” he remembers. “If I couldn’t even find the content, how is anyone else going to?”

It was that singular question that would morph into a calling of sorts for Cary, especially after he and his wife dug into the history behind their city, Durham, North Carolina. For instance, they learned about its own historic Black Wall Street, referred to as the Hayti district at the time, named in honor of Haiti, the first free Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.

But the name also carried with it a promise.

“Hayti” stood for community, one that had built its own thriving ecosystem. Cary wanted to pay homage to that kind of spirit, but this time, for the digital era: a singular home where Black journalism could be discovered online just as easily as everything else competing for our attention.

So he incorporated Hayti in November 2020, and started hardwiring things together: calling publishers one by one, getting their permission, putting in the plumbing (custom feeds, safeguards, things like that), essentially creating a platform that could ingest and beam content all over the world.

The idea was clear: one app, one feed, thousands of Black voices. Because for ad-supported media like the publishers he was working with, discovery isn’t a “nice to have” — it’s basically oxygen.

When content doesn’t surface, impressions are lost. When impressions are lost, ad revenue dries up. And when revenue dries up, local newsrooms and independent creators struggle to survive.

Cary built Hayti to short circuit that downward spiral. His app would curate articles from Black publishers and pair them with an eager audience.

Not only that but midway through, he found another gaping hole on the internet: there wasn’t a directory of Black podcasters either!

“I hadn’t seen a news app that also had podcasts,” he says. “But our audience moves fluidly between articles and audio anyway. So it made sense for the app to reflect how people actually consume media.”

By the time podcasts went live in the app, Hayti’s catalog boasted 100+ Black news publishers, along with 3,000+ Black podcasters, and counting.

It wasn’t just a feed anymore; it was now a map of a global media community, right there in your hand.

Cary giving a presentation on how "Representation Matters"

Making space for Black voices

Cary knew from the start that Hayti would be free for people to use. “If you want to fix discovery and reach people who’ve been overlooked, you don’t put the solution behind a paywall,” Cary says. “You make it effortless.”

And that’s where ads come in.

Showing ads lets Hayti keep the app free while still funding the work behind it: both the company’s work and, just as crucially, the work of all the publishers and podcasters Hayti sends eyeballs and ear drums to.

“If we can drive users to their stories and episodes,” Cary explains, “those outlets can monetize that attention.” It’s a win-win-win: readers and listeners get access, creators get the audience, and Hayti becomes the platform.

Under the hood, Hayti uses Google AdMob to fill its ad slots. The team uses a technique known as mediation, so that every ad request becomes a real-time auction where multiple networks compete to fill a slot. Whoever bids highest wins. That competition helps Hayti get the most for what an impression is worth. Plus, it taps into demand Hayti couldn’t access alone.

And the ripple effects have been powerful: more audiences for Black outlets, more competition for ad supply, more dollars funding app development, and more opportunities to hire. “The more we grow,” he says, “the more opportunity there is for creators to monetize.”

All the while, Hayti’s curation does something all those other fancy algorithms aren’t doing: it makes sure this journalism shows up.

In fact, the app lets people save, like, organize, and most importantly, share content. That way, the work can travel far and wide, sending audiences back to the publisher’s site or the podcaster’s channel even, where they can build direct relationships with one another.

And just like that, a self sustaining ecosystem is formed.

“It's one thing to build an app, but it’s another to know that your technology is acting as a lifeline. When a small Black-owned publication tells us that the revenue generated through our platform has allowed them to keep their doors open, or a podcaster says their audience grew by 20% because of the exposure we provided, that’s where the real joy is.”

Building the digital Black Wall Street

Today, Hayti is one of a kind: Black-owned, lives on both iOS and Android, and combines a network of Black news and podcasts all in one place. The user base has grown as well, with more coming back each month, not to mention, ratings on both app stores that hover around practically perfect.

Every one of those signals definitely matters, but Cary tends to measure success another way: are more readers and listeners actually reaching Black publishers and podcasters?

He thinks about the local newsrooms that needed to find its mobile audiences, or the podcasters too hard to find unless you already knew their names.

The next stage of the plan? Better partnerships with publishers and podcasters, more categories, and of course, easier discovery.

And then, in 2026, the vision is to flip on an e-commerce storefront that lets users buy from Black retailers right inside Hayti — establishing a true “digital Black Wall Street” for the modern times.

Cary’s cognizant of the business model, too. Ads are what make this buildout all possible. They’re a fair trade for free content, and they keep publishers, especially Black owned media (many of whom can get sidelined) in the game.

These days, Cary often returns to the name that inspired it all. Hayti once described a place where Black enterprise succeeded against the odds.

“I built this app for them,” he says. “To help empower and amplify Black voices in the media. Just as the original Hayti community created a space for Black businesses and culture to flourish, Hayti the app provides a digital platform where Black publishers and podcasters can reach audiences, generate revenue, and have their stories seen and heard globally. It’s a tribute to a legacy of Black entrepreneurship, now carried forward in the digital age.”

About the Publisher

Cary Wheelous is the co-founder and CEO of Hayti, the first Black-owned app to aggregate both Black news and podcasts on iOS and Android. After noticing in 2020 that stories from Black publishers weren’t surfacing in any of his news feeds (even from outlets he personally followed), Cary set out to fix things. He incorporated Hayti that November, called publishers one by one to build trust, and built the pipes to bring their content into a single home on mobile. Today, Hayti features over 100 Black publishers and 3,000+ podcasters, connecting them to audiences and driving revenue back to the creators behind them.