women-founders
(29)
The 30-Hour Spreadsheet That Built a Climate Startup
Trucking is the biggest carbon line item in almost every supply chain - and until recently, most carriers reported it by hand. Celine King built software to do it in seconds, and sold it to an industry that hates change.
Erin Gore Built a Cannabis Company From a Kitchen Table and an Engineer’s Mind
A Wisconsin-trained chemical engineer turned informal baking gatherings into Garden Society - then learned to manufacture, finance and expand a consumer brand inside an industry whose rules were still being written.
The Goldman Banker Who Built a Different Kind of Cap Table
Deborah Jackson left Wall Street to fund the founders it kept overlooking. A decade later, Plum Alley has put $100M-plus into CRISPR, wastewater sensors and autonomous freight - and turned its members into the people writing the checks.
Sheena Menezes
Sheena Menezes is the co-founder and CEO of Simple HealthKit, a Milpitas, California digital health company delivering accurate, affordable at-home diagnostics, treatment, and follow-up care. A biochemist with a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, where she discovered a novel tRNA methylase, she built her career in in-vitro diagnostics before founding Simple HealthKit to close socioeconomic gaps in healthcare access. Born and raised in Kuwait with Indian-Portuguese roots, she has been recognized by Fierce Healthcare as one of its Most Influential Minority Executives in Healthcare and named to Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders 500.
Shruti Gupta
Shruti Gupta is the founder and CEO of Zania, a Palo Alto startup building agentic AI 'teammates' that execute governance, risk, and compliance work end to end. Before founding Zania in 2023, she spent years inside security teams at Microsoft Identity, Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex, moving from founding security engineer to CISO. In September 2025 Zania raised an $18 million Series A led by NEA, backed by the Anthology Fund (Menlo Ventures and Anthropic) and a syndicate of operators from Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and PwC. Her pitch is simple: stop shipping compliance tools that organize work, and start shipping AI that does the work.
Shorla Oncology
Shorla Oncology is a specialty pharmaceutical company based in Clonmel, Ireland, with a U.S. base in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that develops and commercializes innovative oncology drugs for orphan and pediatric cancers. Founded in 2018 by Sharon Cunningham and Orlaith Ryan, Shorla focuses on indications where existing treatments are limited, in shortage, or poorly suited to patients - reformulating and reinventing cancer therapies into easier-to-administer forms such as oral liquids and ready-to-dilute vials. The company markets four FDA-approved products in the U.S. and is advancing an early-stage pipeline addressing rare cancers.
Katharine Lau
Katharine Lau is the CEO and co-founder of Stuf, a tech-enabled self-storage company that turns underused space inside commercial buildings into neighborhood storage. She started Stuf in New York in 2020 after a pandemic spring-cleaning session exposed how clunky and inconvenient traditional storage had become. Before Stuf, Lau led real estate growth at the shared-workspace company Industrious and worked across institutional and proptech real estate. Stuf has raised roughly $12.8 million, including an $11 million Series A in 2023, and operates in major U.S. metros from New York to Seattle.
Kim Lalande
Kim Lalande is the founder and CEO of KEY.co, an Austin-based hospitality marketplace that pairs vetted luxury vacation homes with in-home concierge services such as private chefs, grocery stocking, and in-home massage. Drawing on years of business-heavy travel and hotel stays, she built KEY to close the gap between the space of a private home and the service of a five-star hotel. Since founding the company in 2014, she has grown it to thousands of curated homes across dozens of destinations in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, raising roughly $16-18M in venture funding along the way.
Lyndsey Bunting
Lyndsey Bunting is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Onion, a New York-based financial data platform that automates reconciliation and bookkeeping for retail and ecommerce brands. A Wharton-trained finance operator who served as VP of Finance at Birchbox and CFO at Resonance Companies, she started Blue Onion in 2020 to fix the messy, manual reconciliation work she lived through every month. The company went through Y Combinator, has reconciled more than $30 billion in transactions across 200-plus brands, and raised a $10 million Series A led by Viola FinTech in 2025 to build the clean data layer that AI-powered finance teams will run on.
PlaybookUX
PlaybookUX is an all-in-one user experience research platform that helps product, design and research teams recruit participants, run studies, and analyze results in one place. It combines a vetted panel of millions of testers with a full toolkit of qualitative and quantitative methods - unmoderated and moderated testing, card sorting, tree testing, surveys, first-click and five-second tests, preference testing and session replays - and layers AI on top to transcribe, summarize, tag and report on findings. Founded in 2018 by Lindsey Allard and Kristen Giovanniello and headquartered in New York, the company is bootstrapped and grew to roughly $6.5M in revenue and 300+ customers by 2024.
Jayce Hafner
Jayce Hafner is the co-founder and CEO of FarmRaise, a farm financial software startup that turns the maze of USDA paperwork and cash-flow tracking into something a farmer can finish on a phone in minutes. A cattle farmer's daughter from Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, she spent years in environmental policy - lobbying Congress, organizing UN climate delegations, and working on Apple's sustainability team - before deciding that real change in agriculture would come from tools, not talk. She holds an MS in agriculture and an MBA, both from Stanford, and has grown FarmRaise past 20,000 farmers on a mission to make farming more profitable, resilient, and equitable.
Lindsey Allard
Lindsey Allard is the co-founder and CEO of PlaybookUX, a video-based user research platform she launched in 2018 to make customer feedback fast, affordable, and accessible to anyone from a solo freelancer to a Fortune 500 team like Google. A former Division I lacrosse player at Dartmouth and a graduate of the first Quantic MBA class, she ran product at three startups before building PlaybookUX with her college teammate Kristen Giovanniello. The company is bootstrapped, profitable within its first year, and reached roughly $1.8M in annual revenue without spending a dollar on advertising.
Caroline Vanderlip
Caroline Vanderlip is the founder and CEO of Re:Dish, a Brooklyn-based reusable foodware company that swaps single-use containers for durable, USA-made ones, then collects, sterilizes, and redistributes up to 75,000 items a day from an automated industrial warewashing plant. After three decades launching businesses inside NBC, CNBC, AT&T, and her own publishing-tech ventures, she traded media for dishwashing in her sixties, betting that the most radical thing a company can do is wash its own plates and use them again.
Monica Ashauer
Monica Ashauer is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Birdy Grey, the direct-to-consumer bridal brand that put stylish bridesmaid dresses on the map for under $100. A Wharton-trained, ex-McKinsey strategist, she paired with best friend Grace Lee Chen in 2017 to fix a broken category - the six-month wait, the non-returnable polyester, the $300 dress worn once. The result: a hybrid made-to-order model that built reverse working capital, crossed $100 million in revenue by 2024, and made Birdy Grey a wedding-season staple. In 2025 she stepped from President into the Chief Strategy Officer seat and joined the board as Executive Chairman.
Nidhi Kapur
Nidhi Kapur is the founder and CEO of Maiden Home, a New York-based custom furniture company she launched in 2017 after stints at McKinsey, Google, and Birchbox. Frustrated by the gap between generic big-box stores and unreachable designer boutiques while furnishing her first apartment, she built a direct-to-consumer brand that links shoppers straight to artisanal workshops in North Carolina. Maiden Home has grown profitably since day one, opened a New York flagship in 2023 and a 4,000-square-foot Miami Design District flagship in 2025, all under Kapur's discipline of restraint, permanence, and craft.
Phantila Phataraprasit
Phantila Phataraprasit is the co-founder and CEO of Sabai Design, a direct-to-consumer sustainable furniture company she launched in 2019 with Caitlin Ellen. Raised in Bangkok around her mother's eco-lodges and trained as a lawyer at NYU, she set out to prove that earth-friendly furniture could also be affordable. Sabai builds made-to-order sofas from recycled fabrics and FSC-certified wood, ships them plastic-free, and pioneered the first closed-loop furniture program in the U.S. - work that earned a Fast Company World Changing Ideas award and made Phantila the youngest member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council board.
Saroj Gupta
Dr. Saroj Gupta is the founder and CEO of MyDigiRecords (MDR), a patient-owned digital health records app that lets people store, organize, and share their medical history, medications, and immunizations from their phone. A Harvard-trained geriatrics dentist who taught at UMKC, Harvard, and the University of Maryland before turning entrepreneur, she built MDR after her own experience immigrating from India without vaccination records. Founded in 2022 and launched to consumers in 2023, MDR now serves 40,000+ users across India, integrates with the government's Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, and partners with 20+ hospitals and clinics.
Stephanie Lawrence
Stephanie Lawrence is the co-founder and co-CEO of Traveling Spoon, the marketplace she built to put travelers at a stranger's dinner table around the world. Born from a failed quest to learn dumplings from a Chinese grandmother, the company connects guests with vetted home cooks - 95% of them women - across dozens of countries for private meals, cooking classes, and market tours. A Dartmouth and UC Berkeley Haas MBA who worked with Alice Waters and Google.org before launching, Lawrence turned a travel frustration into a business that funnels income to local women while preserving family recipes that might otherwise vanish.
Alex Niemczewski
Alex Niemczewski is the co-founder and CEO of BallotReady, the nonpartisan online voter guide that covers every race and referendum on the ballot across all 50 states. She built the first version for herself before the 2014 midterms because she didn't know how to vote for the down-ballot offices nobody talks about - water reclamation commissioner, judges, mosquito abatement boards. A University of Chicago philosophy graduate who taught coding and ran a research-design consultancy, she turned a personal frustration into a civic engagement platform that informs millions of voters and powers tools for campaigns and advocacy groups.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet
Danielle Cohen-Shohet is the CEO and co-founder of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments and point-of-sale platform built for salons, spas and independent beauty professionals. A summa cum laude Princeton graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst, she taught herself to code and wrote the first version of the product after running a freelance makeup business out of her dorm room. Founded with co-founder Karim Butt and run alongside her twin sister Leah, GlossGenius now serves tens of thousands of beauty and wellness businesses, crossed roughly $100M in revenue, and reached a $510M valuation on its 2023 Series C.
Jen Wirt
Jen Wirt is the founder and CEO of Coral Care, a venture-backed digital health company that sends licensed pediatric speech, occupational, and physical therapists into families' homes and bills their insurance directly. She started the company in 2023 after her own daughter's developmental delays sent her through six months of waitlists and thousands of dollars in out-of-network bills. A former product manager in consumer electronics and digital health, Wirt built Coral Care as a three-sided platform that pairs families needing care with clinicians who want to build sustainable private practices. By early 2026 the company had raised $19.5M, operated across five states, and grown a network of 400+ providers.
Jessica Toh
Jessica Toh is the co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry Labs, the AI-powered children's sleep and parenting app she built with her husband Seng Toh after their own son woke every two to three hours for 20 months. A UC Berkeley triple major in electrical engineering, computer science, and math & statistics with a Cambridge MBA, she turned a personal sleep crisis into data science, then into a company that now reaches more than 5 million families across 150+ countries - including roughly 15% of U.S. babies. Her mission is to make expert-grade parenting guidance affordable for everyone, not just families who can pay a sleep consultant thousands a year.
Kathy Zhu
Kathy Zhu is the co-founder, CEO, and general counsel of Streamline AI, an intelligent intake and workflow automation platform built for in-house legal teams. A former first commercial lawyer at both Medallia and DoorDash, she built Streamline AI to solve the bottleneck she lived through firsthand - legal teams drowning in unstructured requests with no metrics to prove their value. Born in Shanghai and raised across four continents, she trained as a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini before deciding that the tool she wished existed was worth leaving a dream job to build.
Elizabeth Burstein
Elizabeth Burstein is the CEO and co-founder of Neura Health, a virtual neurology clinic she started in 2020 after a two-year fight with a trapped nerve exposed how broken specialist access is in the United States. A Stanford computer-science-and-philosophy grad who built product at LinkedIn, Blue Apron, Zocdoc and Maven Clinic before turning founder, she has grown Neura to serve tens of thousands of patients and raised $22M+ in venture funding, including a $11.4M Series A in 2025 led by the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women Venture Fund.
Sophia Edelstein
Sophia Edelstein is the co-founder and co-CEO of Pair Eyewear, the direct-to-consumer brand that turned eyeglasses into a fashion accessory you can swap as fast as your mood. She and Stanford classmate Nathan Kondamuri started the company in their senior year after interviewing 400 families about why kids hate their glasses, and built it into a vertically integrated eyewear company with the most automated lens lab in the United States. By late 2023 the company had raised roughly $145 million, grown revenue 24x in three years, and sold millions of interchangeable 'Top Frames'. Edelstein leads brand, creative, web and product design while sharing the CEO seat in one of the more visible co-CEO partnerships in consumer tech.
Diana Frappier
Diana Frappier is the co-founder of Promise, an Oakland-based AI-powered government payment platform that helps municipalities and utilities distribute relief, recover revenue, and automate eligibility checks at scale. A UC Hastings-trained lawyer turned social entrepreneur, she co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights with Van Jones in 1996, helped launch the first Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, and then pivoted to fintech after years running operations at Green For All and Honor. At Promise, she and CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins have raised over $48M and built a platform that has distributed $150M+ in government relief to hundreds of thousands of residents.
Maayan Cohen
Maayan Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hello Heart, a Menlo Park-based digital therapeutics company focused exclusively on cardiovascular health. A former Israeli tank platoon commander turned strategy consultant, she built Hello Heart from a 2013 startup into a platform covering 1.6+ million members across Fortune 500 employers, backed by $148.5M in funding from investors including Khosla Ventures, IVP, and Stripes. Named to CNBC Changemakers 2024 and Inc. Female Founders 500 in 2025, Cohen is recognized for her empathy-driven leadership style - including managing her company from Tel Aviv bomb shelters during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war while providing housing and support for both Israeli and Palestinian staff.
Natalie Gordon
Natalie Gordon is the CEO and Founder of Babylist, the universal baby registry and family commerce platform she coded during her son's nap time in 2011. A University of Waterloo computer science graduate and Amazon Fresh alum, she turned a personal frustration with big-box registries into a profitable, $750M+ annual revenue business serving millions of families. She has expanded Babylist beyond registries into first-party ecommerce, editorial content, and a health vertical covering insurance-reimbursed breast pumps—including Medicaid recipients. In 2025, she launched the 'End the Baby Tax' campaign, uniting 30 baby brands against tariffs in a full-page Washington Post ad and a Times Square billboard. Named a 2026 CNBC Changemaker, she is one of the most trusted voices in the parenting and family retail space.
Amy Jo Martin
Amy Jo Martin is a renegade entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, and human innovation expert who pioneered social media strategy for celebrities and brands before most executives knew what Twitter was. She founded Digital Royalty in 2009 - with Shaquille O'Neal as her first client - and grew it into a global agency operating in 10 countries. Today she runs Renegade Global, an innovation company and investment fund focused on propelling female founders and corporate teams into the AI era, while hosting the 'Why Not Now?' podcast with guests like Mark Cuban, Jessica Alba, and Matthew McConaughey.