Beth Gerstein co-founded Brilliant Earth in 2005 after a personal search for an ethically sourced engagement ring turned up nothing worth buying. An engineer by training (Duke BS at 19, MIT MS, Stanford MBA), she built a company that now generates $422 million in annual revenue and trades on Nasdaq (BRLT). Brilliant Earth is the rare luxury brand that treats supply chain transparency as a marketing advantage rather than a compliance headache - offering Beyond Conflict Free diamonds with traceable origins, lab-grown stones, and recycled metals. Under Gerstein's leadership, the company has donated over $2 million through the Brilliant Earth Foundation, partnered with Dr. Jane Goodall on conservation collections, and expanded to 28+ showrooms while maintaining 14 consecutive quarters of profitability as a public company.
Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKid, a Beijing-based edtech unicorn that connects Chinese children aged 4-12 with North American English teachers through live one-on-one video lessons. A high-school dropout turned billionaire builder, she started tutoring English peers at age 15, co-founded an English academy chain at 17, and by 2020 had grown VIPKid to over 800,000 students, 100,000 teachers, and a $4 billion-plus valuation - backed by Tencent, Sequoia, and the late Kobe Bryant.
Coco Mao is the CEO and co-founder of OpenArt AI, the creative platform that grew from a viral Hacker News post about AI image prompts to $70M+ ARR with just 20 people. A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who spent seven years at Google building search products and the Tangi short-form video app, she left in 2022 to co-found OpenArt with CTO John Qiao. Under her leadership, OpenArt scaled 7x in 2025, reached 8 million monthly active users, raised a $30M Series A from Canaan Partners, and launched One-Click Story — a feature that lets anyone turn a single sentence into a complete video with persistent characters.
Emily Gittins is the Co-founder and CEO of Archive, a B2B SaaS platform that powers branded resale programs for 50+ global fashion companies including The North Face, New Balance, and Oscar de la Renta. A Cambridge mathematics graduate turned Stanford MBA, Gittins built Archive after stints at BCG, Google X, and the Global Fashion Agenda, channeling her technical background and sustainability conviction into a company that has raised $76.9M - including a $30M Series B in February 2025 - and been named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2024.
Joy Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Plenful, a San Francisco-based AI workflow automation platform modernizing healthcare operations. A Northwestern-trained economist who cut her teeth at Goldman Sachs and Barclays before moving into specialty pharmacy operations at Shields Health Solutions, Liu built Plenful from first-hand frustration with manual pharmacy workflows. Since emerging from stealth in 2023, she has grown the company to 60+ healthcare customers, achieved 4x year-over-year growth, and raised $76 million in total funding - including a $50 million Series B in 2025 co-led by Danaher co-founder Mitchell Rales. Named to Inc.'s 2026 Female Founders 500 list, Liu is on a mission to return time and focus to healthcare workers drowning in administrative burden.
Lauren Myrick is the CEO and Co-founder of Found, a San Francisco-based fintech company building the all-in-one financial platform for self-employed workers and small businesses. After eight years at Square - joining as the company's second product manager and eventually running Square Payroll as General Manager - she co-founded Found in 2019 alongside Connor Dunn. The company has raised $125M+ across six rounds (most recently a $50M Series C led by Sequoia Capital in 2024) and now serves 770,000+ small business owners with integrated banking, bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax tools.
Laura Behrens Wu is the founder and CEO of Shippo, a San Francisco-based shipping platform that she built after getting frustrated trying to ship handbags from her own e-commerce store. What started as a personal pain point in 2013 became a unicorn company valued at over $1 billion, serving 100,000+ merchants with a multi-carrier shipping API. Born in Germany and raised across four continents - China, Ecuador, Egypt, and Germany - Laura dropped out of her master's program at University of St. Gallen to move to San Francisco, interned at a Y Combinator startup, and co-founded Shippo at 28. She tracked 125 investor conversations, absorbed 115+ rejections, and raised $154.3M in total funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, and D1 Capital Partners, including a $50M Series E in 2021.
May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Writer, a full-stack enterprise generative AI platform valued at $1.9 billion. Born in rural Lebanon and raised in Canada after her family immigrated when she was eight, she studied Economics and Near Eastern Languages at Harvard before stints at Lehman Brothers and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. She co-founded Writer in 2020 with Waseem AlShikh - making a contrarian bet to build proprietary LLMs (the Palmyra family) 18 months before ChatGPT - and has grown it into a platform serving 250+ enterprise clients including Uber, Salesforce, L'Oreal, and Intuit, raising $326M in total funding.
Melissa Wong is the CEO and co-founder of Zipline, the operations platform that fixes the broken communication chain between retail headquarters and store floors. Before building the product, she lived the problem — spending over a decade at Gap and Old Navy trying to get stores to actually execute corporate strategy. She started Zipline in 2014, raised $39.6 million, grew the customer base to 150+ brands including Sephora, American Eagle, and 7-Eleven, and co-authored 'Stores Don't Suck: The 5 Principles of Amazing Retail Execution.' In 2026 she was named to Inc.'s Female Founders 500 and won RetailTech Company CEO of the Year.
Nikki Pechet is the Co-Founder and CEO of Homebound, a tech-enabled homebuilder she launched in 2018 after wildfires devastated thousands of homes in Northern California. A veteran of Bain & Company and Thumbtack, she has built Homebound into a platform that digitizes every step of construction — from custom home design to permitting to build tracking — and has raised over $400 million in equity and real estate capital. She closed her Series A days after giving birth to her third child and has expanded Homebound across California, Colorado, Texas, and Florida, with aspirations to become the Amazon of homes.
Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, the unified API platform that lets B2B software companies offer hundreds of product integrations by integrating just once. A Columbia computer science graduate who detoured through investment banking at Credit Suisse and Silver Lake before becoming Chief of Staff at Expanse, she co-founded Merge in 2020 with college friend Gil Feig after they spent six months talking to 100+ companies about integration pain — without pitching a single solution. Merge has since raised $75M from Accel, NEA, and Addition, serves 7,000+ customers including Calendly, Gong, Ramp, and Brex, and has become critical infrastructure for the AI era as LLMs need real-time access to third-party data.
Vicky Wang is the founder and CEO of WuKong Education, a Silicon Valley-based online learning platform serving 300,000+ families across 118 countries. She built the company from Auckland, New Zealand in 2016 into a Series B-backed edtech brand with 4,000 employees, offering Chinese language, math, and English programs for students aged 3-18. Recognized by Fortune China as one of the Most Influential Business Women in 2021 and 2022, named among HolonIQ's 144 global EdTech Women Leaders, and awarded the 2024 Cognia School of Distinction, Wang is redefining how the world's children learn Mandarin and mathematics.
Rebecca Shostak is the co-founder and CEO of Flodesk, a design-first email marketing platform that reached $36 million in annual recurring revenue without a single dollar of outside funding. A Silicon Valley native who taught herself Photoshop at 10, designed merchandise for Rihanna and Linkin Park, and built a company that Y Combinator rejected - then outgrew - Shostak turned a template shop frustration into a platform serving over 100,000 small businesses worldwide. Now steering Flodesk into AI, she spent five months in Vietnam with her engineering team building proprietary technology and filing seven patents.
Zuzanna Stamirowska is the co-founder and CEO of Pathway, a Palo Alto-based AI infrastructure company building real-time data pipelines and post-transformer AI architectures. With a PhD in Complexity Science from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a background in maritime trade forecasting recognized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, she leads a team that counts NATO, Formula 1, and La Poste among its customers. Pathway's $10M seed round in November 2024 brought total funding to $14.5M, and the company's October 2025 launch of the Dragon Hatchling (BDH) - a brain-inspired, continual-learning architecture - positions it at the frontier of post-transformer AI.
Grace Chang is the Taiwanese-American founder and CEO of Kintsugi, the Berkeley-based startup that built AI capable of detecting clinical depression and anxiety from just 20 seconds of free-form speech. A five-time entrepreneur with roots in signal processing and consumer tech, she raised $28 million, launched Japan's default mental health screener, and built the world's largest annotated voice dataset for mental health machine learning - before making all of Kintsugi's research and technology open source in early 2026 after FDA regulatory hurdles made the venture-backed model unsustainable.
Julia Enthoven is the co-founder and CEO of Kapwing, a San Francisco-based online video editing platform that has grown to 25 million registered users. A Stanford Math & CS graduate and former Google Product Manager, she co-founded Kapwing in 2017 with Eric Lu after they both left Google. Under her leadership, Kapwing evolved from a simple meme maker into a comprehensive AI-powered video editing suite used by creators, brands, and educators worldwide. Named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Tech (2020) and Product Hunt Maker of the Year (2018), she has also launched Tess, an artist-compensating AI image generator, and is an outspoken voice on building ethical AI tools.
Kristy Kim is the Co-founder and CEO of TomoCredit, a San Francisco-based fintech company that uses AI and alternative data to help credit-invisible Americans — immigrants, international students, and young adults — build credit without a traditional FICO score. A Korean immigrant who moved to the U.S. at age 11, Kim was denied auto loans five times despite earning a six-figure investment banking salary after graduating from UC Berkeley, simply because she had no U.S. credit history. That personal experience became the seed of TomoCredit, which has raised over $46.5M in venture funding (backed by Mastercard and Morgan Stanley), serves 4+ million customers, and generates $20M+ in annual revenue. Kim now leads the company's expansion into AI-powered financial wellness with the launch of TomoIQ.
Ellen Rudolph is the Co-Founder and CEO of WellTheory, a San Francisco-based digital health company on a mission to reverse the autoimmune epidemic. A Stanford-trained product design engineer and Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach, Ellen founded WellTheory in 2022 after her own years-long battle with debilitating autoimmune symptoms drove her to create the empathetic, evidence-based care she wished she'd had. WellTheory has since raised $33.4M in total funding—including a $14M Series A led by General Catalyst in October 2025—and achieved 10x year-over-year member growth and 5x revenue growth, serving 50 million Americans navigating autoimmune conditions.
Jennifer Nuckles is the Chairperson and CEO of R-Zero, a San Francisco-based smart building technology company that deploys UV-C light, IoT sensors, and AI to make indoor environments safer, healthier, and more energy-efficient. With 25+ years spanning consumer goods giants (Clorox), social gaming (Zynga), digital health (Doctor on Demand), and fintech (SoFi), she is one of the rare executives who has led marketing and operations at scale across radically different industries. She took the helm at R-Zero in October 2022, raised a $105M Series C, and is on a mission to fix the fact that we spend 90% of our lives inside buildings that were never designed to keep us healthy.
Jiayue 'Jenny' He is the Founder and CEO of Ergeon, a technology-enabled residential outdoor construction company that raised $40M in a Series B round in 2022. A Princeton Ph.D. and top-ranked University of Toronto engineering graduate, she spent seven years at McKinsey before pivoting to build one of the most operationally sophisticated home improvement startups in the U.S. - one that runs a distributed workforce across 40+ countries while delivering fence, artificial grass, deck, and concrete installations to tens of thousands of homeowners nationwide.
Sasha Novakovich is the Founder and CEO of Alchemy Cloud, a San Francisco-based enterprise SaaS company bringing AI-powered lab management and product development software to the specialty chemicals and applied sciences industries. Born in Russia and raised in Los Angeles after immigrating at age five, she built her first company in 1999, sold it to CNET, spent years as an angel investor backing female-led startups, and then spotted a glaring gap - brilliant chemists stuck doing brilliantly manual work with spreadsheets. Alchemy is her answer: a connected lab platform that merges ELN, LIMS, DOE, and AI into one system to help companies like those in beauty, food, building materials, and industrial chemicals bring better products to market faster.
Suzanne Holloway is the Operating Partner for Go-to-Market at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. A hands-on marketing leader who helped Miro scale from pre-Series A to a $17.5 billion valuation, she now advises Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies on building marketing strategies and high-performing teams. With deep roots in early-stage B2B startups - from Greenhouse Software to Zugata (acquired by Culture Amp) - Holloway brings rare operational credibility to a firm better known for writing checks than rolling up sleeves.
Lori Coulter is the co-founder, CEO, and President of Summersalt, the St. Louis-based direct-to-consumer swimwear and apparel brand built on data from 1.5 million body measurements. She turned a pre-teen concession stand hustle into a generation-defining brand that has sold over 4 million garments, raised $30M+, and landed in Vogue, Elle, and Forbes. She now serves as an Operator Advisor at Redbud VC and adjunct faculty at Washington University's Olin Business School, championing equitable venture funding for female founders.
Rachel Soper Sanders is a Venture Partner at 2048 Ventures and the CEO and co-founder of Rootine, a precision nutrition company that personalizes cellular health through DNA analysis and biometric data. A Harvard Business School MBA and former healthcare investment banker at Raymond James who worked on $5B+ in M&A deals, she pivoted from Wall Street to wellness after personally battling burnout and fatigue. She co-founded Rootine in 2018 with Dr. Daniel Wallerstorfer, raised a $3M seed round and a $10M Series A, launched the Apex Optimizers NFT project bridging web3 and health optimization, and hosts the Smart Health with Rachel Sanders podcast. She brings over a decade of health-tech experience across investment banking, product strategy, and company building to her venture investing role.
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Pear VC (originally Pejman Mar Ventures) in 2013 with no prior VC experience - learning the trade from Amazon-purchased books. A Stanford PhD who holds 14 patents and founded three startups (two acquired), she has grown Pear VC to over $800M AUM with a portfolio that includes DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, and Dropbox. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (#29 in 2021), she also teaches Stanford's Lean Launchpad course, champions women in VC through All Raise and her Female Founder Circles initiative, and is known for her conviction that great founders are made, not born.
Renata Quintini is a Brazilian-American venture capitalist and co-founder of Renegade Partners, a $228M early-stage VC firm she launched in 2020 with Roseanne Wincek. Known for coining the 'Supercritical Stage' - the critical post-product-market-fit phase before full-scale growth - she brings two decades of investing experience from Felicis Ventures and Lux Capital, where she backed companies generating over $40B in enterprise value at exit, including Dollar Shave Club, Cruise Automation, Warby Parker, Wise, and Glossier. A Stanford-trained lawyer and MBA, three-time state karate champion, and Bossa Nova guitarist, Quintini is one of the rare women who runs her own venture fund.
Diane Greene co-founded VMware and built it into the company that pioneered x86 virtualization, leading it through the largest tech IPO of 2007. After being ousted from VMware in 2008, she co-founded Bebop, sold it to Google for ~$380 million, and became CEO of Google Cloud - growing it from $2.1B to $8B in annual revenue. A naval architect and competitive sailor before turning to software, she is the first woman to chair the MIT Corporation and sits on the boards of Stripe, SAP, Intuit, and Maersk.
Morgan Beller is a General Partner at NFX, the seed-stage venture firm known for backing network-effects businesses. Before VC, she co-founded Facebook's Libra (later Diem) digital currency project at age 25, making her one of the most consequential figures in crypto policy history. A Cornell statistics graduate, she cut her teeth at Andreessen Horowitz before stints at Medium and Facebook, where her geopolitical alarm about China's digital currency ambitions drove her to attempt something audacious: rebuild global money on a blockchain. She now backs founders in crypto, fintech, AI, and space from San Francisco.
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva, the Australian graphic design platform that grew from a school yearbook tool built in her mother's living room to a US$42 billion company used by 220 million people across 190 countries. She survived 100+ investor rejections, learned kite-surfing purely to network with Silicon Valley VCs, and wore a $30 engagement ring while becoming one of the wealthiest women in tech - then pledged to give most of it away.
Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded Tinder, sued it for sexual harassment, and turned that lawsuit into Bumble - the dating app where women make the first move. By 31, she became the world's youngest female self-made billionaire and the youngest woman to take a self-founded company public in U.S. history. After stepping down as CEO in 2023 and experiencing what she calls an 'ego death,' she returned to lead Bumble in 2025 with a new vision: rebuilding it as 'The Love Company.'