women-entrepreneurs
(32)
Plutus Business Advisory makes the case for the boring bits
An investor introduction gets the applause. Plutus Business Advisory works on the forecasts, valuations and legal details that give the introduction a chance.
AIC Banasthali gives women founders room to experiment
A women-focused incubator in Rajasthan connects university laboratories with startup capital. Its useful trick is to fund the next experiment, then help turn the evidence into a business.
NLOWE and the business advantage of having someone to ask
Five regional facilitators. Home offices. A willingness to travel. NLOWE began with a practical answer to an awkward question: who helps a woman build a business when the help is miles away?
Hello Alice: A good business should not need the right friends
A Houston founder could not move across the country for an accelerator. Hello Alice grew from that inconvenience into a platform for finding capital, getting advice and making fewer expensive guesses.
Brit + Co put creativity in a box. Then it had to rethink the business.
A craft kit, a collapsed traffic engine, and a school for women founders: Brit + Co’s story shows what happens when a publisher tries to turn inspiration into something people can use.
The Jewelry Party Learned to Use a Link
Stella & Dot built a jewelry business in other people's living rooms. The living room has shrunk to a phone screen, but the wager is the same: a recommendation from someone you know can make a necklace feel worth trying on.
The Strange Business of Being Seen
Women Entrepreneurs Inc began with 25 founders trading what they knew. Its current wager is more expensive and more interesting: make the business as visible as the woman who built it.
SHONA Wants Better Businesses, Not Better Pitches
In East Africa's crowded accelerator market, SHONA has built its case around an unfashionable idea: make the company work before polishing the pitch. Its wager combines long-horizon coaching, local networks, and loans designed for the awkward middle between microcredit and venture capital.
TiE Rajasthan brings the investor meeting to Jaipur
At SmashUp, founders get a shot at the people who write the cheques. Behind the event is a nonprofit network teaching entrepreneurs how to make that meeting count.
Impact Hub Harare is building the business after the bright idea
A promising prototype still needs customers, skills and somewhere to work. In Zimbabwe, Impact Hub Harare has made that awkward next step its business.
What AED 1,500 Buys at Dubai Business Women Council
A membership buys access to workshops, mentors and a business community. Dubai Business Women Council’s real proposition is what women can learn to do once they get there.
Yarl IT Hub Wants a Silicon Valley. Its Work Starts in the Classroom.
In Northern Sri Lanka, Yarl IT Hub connects school projects, coding scholarships and startup mentoring. The revealing part is what happens between the programs.
Costa Rica’s chamber of commerce learned to widen the circle
A business association born in 1915 now connects merchants, trains entrepreneurs and helps settle disputes. Its most revealing story is the fight over who gets a seat at the table.
Udyogwardhini teaches the business behind the business
In Nashik, an entrepreneurship academy puts dehydrators, export paperwork and warehouse visits on the syllabus. Its proposition is practical: learn how the business works before you spend money starting it.
AIC-GIM wants you to test the idea before you bet the business
On a Goa business-school campus, AIC-GIM turns startup ambition into customer interviews, sharper business plans and funding applications. Its most useful lesson may be learning which assumptions to abandon.
SIA wants Pakistan’s good ideas to become working businesses
From olive-oil marketing in Balochistan to startup grants and a women-led enterprise summit, Social Innovation Academy is working on the unglamorous parts of social change: skills, customers and connections.
IMPAQTO opened a coworking space. Then it started writing checks.
The Ecuadorian company built a business around the things impact entrepreneurs kept missing: a place to work, practical help and capital that fits. Its most revealing move was becoming a lender itself.
AIC-Nalanda gives Odisha’s startup ideas a place to get real
Inside a Bhubaneswar incubator where prototype benches, patent advice and investor introductions share an address - and the next intake of innovators could still be in school.
Ghana’s young entrepreneurs built themselves a seat at the table
From a circle of 15 founders to a national business network, GCYE has put training, shared workspace and a revolving fund behind its advocacy. A change of chief executive now tests how well that institution travels beyond its founder.
IIMV FIELD puts women at the business end of incubation
The Visakhapatnam incubator pairs management expertise with prototype money and patient mentoring. Its next test: helping 150 women-led rural enterprises build bigger businesses.
Managers wants its readers in the story
The Tunisian business magazine has spent three decades covering enterprise. Its women entrepreneurs’ programme takes that relationship beyond the page, into awards, mentoring and access to markets.
AfriLabs bets on the people behind the startups
A network of more than 500 innovation hubs is trying to make African entrepreneurship less lonely - and better financed. Its experience shows why the people running the support system need support of their own.
Entrepreneur Futures Network gets founders ready for the hard questions
Before the pitch comes the practice. The Berkeley-born nonprofit turns volunteer expertise into structured help for student startups, clean-energy innovators and the organizations backing them.
Maya Cadena Keeps Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
The Vetted founder has built, sold, studied, raised, opened, closed and started again. Her latest bet turns everyday pet care into a game - and makes the pivot itself part of the product story.
Title Nine
Title Nine is a women-owned outdoor and active apparel brand founded in 1989 by Missy Park and named after the Title IX law that opened school sports to women. Headquartered in Emeryville, California, it designs and sells sports bras, activewear, swimwear, and outdoor clothing built specifically for women's bodies. What began as a Bay Area mail-order catalog has grown into an estimated $100M direct-to-consumer and retail business - the largest independently owned retailer of women's fitness clothing - staffed overwhelmingly by women athletes and led by an all-women executive team. Alongside apparel, Title Nine has invested heavily in female entrepreneurs through its annual Pitchfest competitions.
Tory Burch
Tory Burch is a New York-based luxury lifestyle brand founded in 2004 by designer Tory Burch. Blending preppy American sportswear with bohemian and eclectic details, it sells ready-to-wear, handbags, shoes, accessories, jewelry, fragrance, beauty, home decor and the Tory Sport activewear line through roughly 400 stores worldwide, wholesale partners and multi-language e-commerce. The privately held, family-run company generated an estimated $1.8 billion in retail sales in 2024. From the start the brand was built to fund a mission: the Tory Burch Foundation, launched in 2009, advances women's entrepreneurship through access to capital, education and a fellowship program.
Vanessa Rissetto
Vanessa Rissetto is a registered dietitian nutritionist and the co-founder and CEO of Culina Health, a virtual, insurance-covered nutrition care company she started with fellow dietitian Tamar Samuels in 2020. A Fordham history major turned NYU marketing grad turned Mount Sinai senior dietitian, she ran the dietetic internship program at NYU before building Culina Health into a network of about 90 dietitians that has served more than 10,000 patients. In December 2024 she raised a $7.9 million Series A led by Healthworx, the venture arm of CareFirst. She is a frequent nutrition voice on the Today Show and in Vogue, The New York Times and Bon Appetit, and has been recognized by Goldman Sachs, Inc., Essence and NPR.
Microwd Inversiones
Microwd is a Madrid-based social fintech that lets ordinary people invest from as little as 50 euros into microloans for women entrepreneurs across Latin America. It pairs field agents on the ground in Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru and Costa Rica with an online platform where investors fund roughly $1,000, one-year loans at interest rates it says run well below the local microfinance market. The pitch is unusual for the space: not charity, but a for-profit business that claims both financial returns for investors and measurable social impact for borrowers.
Tania Brown
Tania Brown is an ACCA-qualified executive and entrepreneur who serves as Area Vice President of APAC Strategic Customer Engagements (Elevate) at ServiceNow, the $13B+ enterprise cloud platform company. A digital and accounting leader with roots in venture capital, tech startups, and real estate, she has built a career spanning Brisbane, London, Melbourne, Singapore, and Sydney. Alongside her corporate career, she co-founded Jacq Leigh, a women's leather laptop bag brand launched in 2019 after noticing a gap in the market for functional, stylish bags designed for corporate women.
Oriol Rius
Oriol Rius is the CEO of Microwd Inversiones, a Madrid-based social-impact fintech that connects women entrepreneurs across Latin America with microloans funded by impact investors. A senior banking executive with more than two decades in Latin American capital markets at Santander, Merrill Lynch and BBVA, he now channels that corporate-finance machinery toward microcredit, helping run a fund that became the first in Spain to securitize microloans for women entrepreneurs. He also sits on the board of Vista Alta Impact Investments.