latina-founder
(5)
Kayla Rodriguez Graff
Kayla Rodriguez Graff is the co-founder and CEO of SweetBio, a Memphis-based medical device company bioengineering Manuka honey, collagen, and hydroxyapatite into FDA-cleared, Medicare-covered wound care products (APIS and VERIS). She runs the company with her brother, scientist Dr. Isaac Rodriguez, and has raised more than $10M to expand access to affordable wound care, especially in communities hit hardest by diabetes.
Alexandra Bonetti
Alexandra Bonetti is a Venezuelan-born, New York-based founder who turned a barre studio into a thesis about people. She built Bari Studio, ran it for nearly a decade, then sold it in 2018 to launch Talent Hack, a vertical SaaS platform that helps fitness and wellness creators sell classes, find work and grow independent businesses - a company whose $17M Series A was billed as the largest ever for a Latina-led software startup. On the side she co-founded Fair Warning, the members-only fine art auction app started with former Christie's rainmaker Loic Gouzer, where she serves as fractional CEO. Her through-line is unglamorous and consistent: bet on people first, build the tools they are missing.
Maria Artunduaga
Maria Artunduaga is a Colombian-born physician-scientist, inventor and founder and CEO of Samay (formerly Respira Labs), a Mountain View medtech startup building a wearable plus AI platform that uses patented acoustic resonance to monitor lung function at home. She walked away from a plastic surgery residency at the University of Chicago after losing her grandmother Sylvia, taught herself engineering, and turned a kitchen-table idea into a company that has won the world's most competitive medtech accelerator and landed her on Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders list. She holds an MD, an MPH and an MTM, has collected dozens of prizes, six issued patents, and publications in Nature, NEJM and PNAS.
Rebecca Alvarez Story
Rebecca Alvarez Story is a sexologist turned founder and CEO of Bloomi, the sexologist-led clean intimacy brand she launched in 2018. A first-generation daughter of Mexican immigrants, she built her own undergraduate major at UC Berkeley, earned a master's in Sexuality Studies, and turned a decade of clinical practice into a category-defining consumer company. In 2022 Bloomi became the first Latina-founded brand to land nationwide in the sexual wellness aisle at Target, and the company has since expanded to Saks Fifth Avenue and boutiques. She is among the few Latinas in the U.S. to raise multi-million-dollar venture capital, and her stated mission is to bring quality, shame-free intimacy education to a billion people.
Maria Barrera
Maria Barrera is the CEO and co-founder of Clayful, an on-demand chat-based mental health coaching platform that connects K-12 students with certified coaches in under 60 seconds. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who immigrated from Colombia at age 10, she moved from aerospace (Boeing, GE) into edtech (Nearpod) before a New York Times article about rising suicide rates in eight-year-olds pushed her to found Clayful in 2021. The company has raised $9.15M in total funding, serves 50+ school districts across six states in 133 languages, and frames mental health as coaching rather than therapy to reduce student stigma.