In 2023, Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng dropped out of their Stanford University degree programs to found Pika, an AI video generator. The pair found existing AI video tools difficult to use, and sought to build a better, more intuitive platform. Today, their free app allows 5 million users to produce and modify videos in a wide range of styles, from anime to realistic footage. Pika has raised $135 million across multiple funding rounds, the first two led by GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and its Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which brought the startup's valuation to nearly $470 million, per PitchBook.

JT Garwood (right) and Jack Miller started bttn to make it easier for hospitals and doctors offices to order healthcare supplies like gloves, bedpans and IV catheters online, offering transparent pricing across thousands of products. The company has raised $26.5 million from Tiger Global and others, and is valued at $110 million. Revenue is projected to hit $30 million in 2022, up from about $4 million in 2021.

Dakotah Rice is the founder and CEO of Miami-based Poolit, a fintech platform that simplifies investing in private equity and VC funds. Users need to have a $1 minimum and are able to exit their investment after a year. Before starting Poolit, Rice, who graduated from Brown University, worked as an investor at firms including Goldman Sachs, Carlyle and Coatue. Poolit has raised $5.3 million from Harlem Capital and its projected revenue for 2022 is $1 million.

Ex-Google employee Jeremy Wood started OpenStore with prominent venture capitalists Keith Rabois (Founders Fund) and Jack Abraham (Atomic). The e-commerce aggregator has acquired more than 40 Shopify stores, a model that gives it economies of scale and allows it to cross-sell products across its customer base. OpenStore has raised over $150 million from General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and Lux Capital, and is valued at $970 million.

Harvard graduate Linda Du is the chief operations officer at New York-based Valon, a startup that handles customer service with homeowners on behalf of mortgage investors. Valon services $12.1 billion in mortgages, with more than 70,000 homeowners on the platform and has raised $126 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, 166 2nd LLC and other firms. Du, who started her career as an engineering intern at Google, leads 124 employees at Valon, which is on track to book $10 million in revenue in 2022 and is valued at $590 million.

Thanks to Pasternak, vegetarians can feel happier about homemade Happy Meals. His startup, Simulate, makes Nuggs, a vegan version of America's favorite Frankenfood. "Chicken nuggets are already integrated into internet and meme culture," Pasternak says. "It's easy to create a fun brand around it." Based in New York and primarily sold online, Nuggs is on track for $8 million in revenue this year. The Australia-born Pasternak began building iOS games at 14 and dropped out of school at 15. By 18, he had built and sold Monkey, a video-chat app with 10 million users. Simulate, his latest venture, has raised more than $15 million from Lerer Hippeau, Alexis Ohanian and McCain Foods. Ever the programmer, Pasternak continually tweaks his plant-based poultry. Nuggs has tested thousands of formulas and released nine versions to the public. Next on the menu? Veggie hot dogs.

Magnus Müller and Gregor Zunic are the cofounders of Browser Use, an open-source library that transforms websites into clean, machine-readable formats that AI can easily understand. The founders have built AI tools that interact with websites just as humans would: clicking buttons, filling out forms, and moving about the web and navigating changes to websites seamlessly. Because Browser Use is open source, developers everywhere can use, modify and contribute to it for free, driving rapid adoption and cultivating a community of more than 10,000 daily users with 3 million downloads per month. It has raised $17 million in total funding led by Felicis Ventures.

Unify's AI-powered software helps sales teams automate the most mundane parts of their jobs. Its AI detects signals from buyers, identifying the clients that are most interested in purchase and reaching out to them via email or LinkedIn. Fast growing AI startups are sold: Companies such as Cursor, Perplexity, Decagon, SoFi, and hundreds of others have used Unify to boost sales. Heggie and his cofounder Austin Hughes have raised $58M in funding from name VCs like Thrive Capital, Emergence, the OpenAI Startup Fund, and Battery Ventures.

Coding the first version of Posh in their dorm after meeting sophomore year, Avante Price and Eli Taylor-Lemire built out a platform anyone could use to scale their events. Launching in October 2020, the duo dropped out of college in May 2021 after raising $1.5M. Since then they have raised close to $40M in funding. Now, Posh is a full-stack event management and marketing platform powering everything from dinner parties to massive music festivals. Last summer, POSH raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Goodwater Capital. POSH has amassed more than 6 million users and more than $250 million in ticket sales.

Sophie Hengst always loved planners growing up, but could never find ones that fit her needs. So she began designing planner pages herself and started sharing them as free printable pages on her blog. Thousands downloaded them. So, she self funded The Dailee to launch planners for college students. By 2024, sales (all DTC) had reached $3.1 million. She's on track to make $6.1 million this year, thanks to a loyal social media audience of more than 1.47 million followers across platforms.

Aidan Gomez cofounded Cohere after spending time at Google Brain as an intern, where he worked under renowned computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. There, Gomez coauthored novel research on AI transformers, a type of deep learning model, and met his future business partners Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang. In 2019, the trio launched Cohere, an enterprise company that helps developers create AI-powered products, such as chatbots and search engines. Cohere has raised $970 million in total funding from investors like NVIDIA and Oracle and is valued at $5.5 billion, per PitchBook.

Alex Yu cofounded video generation AI startup Luma AI in 2021. His company recently launched Dream Machine, an AI model that creates high definition and hyper-realistic videos from text and images. The startup has raised about $70 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners, Matrix Partners, NVIDIA and others and stands at a $240 million valuation. It claims to have 10 million users.

Suno's music generation AI software allows users to turn text-based prompts into full fledged melodies. With that promise, it has raised $125 million till date from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross and others and accumulated some 12 million users. CPO and cofounder Martin Camacho graduated Harvard at the age of 18 and was the first engineer at healthcare company Firefly Health. Major record labels including Sony, Warner Records and Universal Music Group have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Suno AI, alleging that the company used its music to train its AI models. The company has responded saying that scraping those recordings for AI training is under fair use.

Peggy Wang and her Ego cofounder, Vishnu Hari, 33, spent hours talking about the future of video games while carpooling to their jobs at Facebook (now Meta) before deciding in early 2023 to strike off on their own and build that future themselves. The fledgling company, now with seven employees, exited Y Combinator in April and has raised $7.5 million to bring its sandbox-style simulation game to life. The game engine, which is still in its very early stages, promises to enable players to create their own custom simulation games (think "The Sims" or "Minecraft") without any coding, using simple text prompts à la ChatGPT. Even more mind-bending: Ego claims that the computer characters inhabiting these worlds will be able to use AI to rewrite their programming in real time, creating the potential for unlimited unique experiences. "We're building a game that people can play forever," says Wang, a Stanford graduate and a rare female entrepreneur in this male-dominated industry. The company plans to debut an alpha version next spring.

After Anne Nguyen was diagnosed with postpartum depression, her doctor recommended medicinal saffron as a safer alternative to prescription medications while she was breastfeeding. She began to sleep better and worry less, and also noticed her skin became brighter. She started House of M, making saffron-infused skincare that she first sold on Facebook to her local Vietnamese community. Now, her skincare line is sold at Nordstrom and sales are expected to quadruple to $8 million in 2023.

After watching her mom struggle to put on her bra because of chronic pain in her hands, Emma Butler started adaptive intimates brand Liberare. The company sells bras and underwear for women who are disabled, have arthritis or have recently had surgery, offering easy-on features like front-facing magnet closures on their bras. Butler has also sought to differentiate products from existing medical options with colors like blush and lilac. Its bras are sold online by Aerie. Liberare has raised $1 million in funding.

Harry Gestetner and Simon Pompan launched Fanfix, a subscription-based platform for Gen Z creators to monetize their content, as sophomores in college. By senior year, they'd sold the company to talent agency SuperOrdinary for "tens of millions." While Fanfix couldn't confirm the exact number, Crunchbase reported the sale was for $65 million. On the platform, which now has more than 15 million users and dozens of employees, fans can subscribe to see exclusive content from creators, pay to chat with creators and tip them for their posts. Gestetner and Pompan said the company differentiated itself by being clean, Gen Z-targeted and mobile-first.

Want to raise the next Elon Musk or Lisa Su? Better start early. Agrawal's Kira Learning teaches computer science basics to K-12 students. In 2021, she and fellow Stanford alumnus Andrea Pasinetti cofounded the online coding school, which has helped some 10,000 students and teachers learn and teach programming and AI skills. The startup recently added an AI companion, built on large language models like GPT-4, to detect mistakes in a student's code. Palo Alto, California-based Kira Learning has raised $22.5 million in venture funding at a $75 million valuation, with more than $2.5 million in revenue so far this year. "Computer science is a pretty scary subject," Agrawal says. "We're thinking about how to make learning this technology more accessible, motivating and engaging for beginner learners."

Schuler started building apps at 16 years old, and at 18, he skipped college to cofound Eligible.com, software that lets patients check their health insurance coverage before paying a bill and that now helps process $4.8 billion annually in healthcare expenditures. He left Eligible after just a year and cofounded a few other startups, including a bitcoin debit card, before starting Kafene in May 2019. The company lets low-income customers rent or finance essential items like refrigerators and tires. It uses machine learning to assess creditworthiness and is an available financing option in 2,000 U.S. retail stores. Customers can choose to pay off a lease in 90 days or less, typically for a $50 fee (50% choose this option). Alternatively, they can lease an item for 12 months or more and pay higher fees, or they can rent and return it. Kafene has processed $100 million in transactions to date. The company says it reached $50 million in annualized revenue in 2022 and expects to reach $100 million in 2023. It has raised $64 million in equity financing from investors like Third Prime and Valar, most recently at a $218 million valuation, according to PitchBook.

Tired of the damage caused by acrylic nails, Ruth Ismayelyan started experimenting with her own cuticle oil until she landed on a formulation that worked. When someone asked the TikTok influencer (followers: 1.5 million) how she grew her nails so long, she credited her "miracle" nail growth oil and began selling it online. She has since expanded into lip liner and lipstick. The company, which hasn't raised any funding, expects sales north of $1.2 million this year.

Toronto-based Tempo Labs wants to do for code, what Figma did for design. Second-time founders Gokhshteyn and Michael previously built Perpetua, an AI ads startup that exited for $150 million, where they saw many hours wasted translating design to code. Founded in May 2023, the startup wants to make web app development faster and accessible to anyone with AI tools. Using text-based prompts, Tempo can generate and edit code and design a layout for web pages and applications. Still in its early stages, it has raised over $1.2 million in funding from Y Combinator and General Catalyst.

WishRoll Inc is the maker of Kiwi, a music sharing app that has 2 million downloads across the world. Users call the song-recommendation app the "BeReal of music." Based in New York City, the company was cofounded by three friends in 2021, and has raised $2.9 million from Y Combinator and General Catalyst. Cofounder Nur, who is currently enrolled in law school at Harvard Law School, says Kiwi was number 1 app overall in the Spain iOS charts in January 2023 and in France in August 2022.

At 16, the Missouri native dropped out of high school to build Minecraft servers and created an analytics program that collected info about player numbers, locations and peak traffic times. In 2017, he sold the app for a few thousand dollars and bought a plane ticket to San Francisco. In 2020 he and cofounder Connor Hollasch started Branch to build social Web3 games. Branch's first game, "Castaways," in which players transform desert islands, is free to play, but superusers can earn special in-game items that they can sell to other players. Branch, which has raised $14 million, gets a 10% cut. Still in alpha, "Castaways" has 125,000 monthly active users.

Daniel Snow started his media company RapTV in 2017 to cover news from music and entertainment to e-gaming. The RapTV brand generated a revenue of over $4.5 million in revenue last year and a valuation of $48 million - projecting a $10 million revenue year-to-date, and currently receives over 2.5 billion impressions monthly across the brand's almost 40 million social following monthly. Snow has partnered with various brands: from music labels like Atlantic and Columbia to McDonalds to BMW. Through his full-service business, The Snow Agency, he's generated over $8 million in revenue last year for DTC, partnering with companies such as Shopify, Google, Meta and more.

Five million-plus customers use Chipper Cash to zip money among seven nations including Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, the U.K. and the U.S. Customers can pay bills, as well as trade stocks and crypto. Raised in Uganda, Serunjogi was a junior Olympic swimmer before attending Iowa's Grinnell College, where he met his Ghanaian cofounder, Maijid Moujaled. "We had seen firsthand how difficult it was to send money from one country to another within Africa," Serunjogi says. In 2021, San Francisco-based Chipper made more than $75 million in revenue, mostly from foreign-exchange fees. The pair launched it in 2018 and have raised $300 million, hitting a peak valuation of $2.2 billion in November 2021.

Founder and CEO of social fitness app Corecircle, Nastassia Ponomarenko has helped more than 300,000 people achieve their goals via exercise tracking and connecting with other fitness buffs. The 22-year-old raised $600,000 from angels including Joe Thomas (Loom), Joshua Browder (DoNotPay), and Sander Daniels (Thumbtack). A Patreon for fitness influencers, Corecircle has a valuation of $18 million with projected revenue of $1 million for 2022. Ponomarenko, who dropped out of college, also built a seven-figure fitness apparel brand at 18.

A Y Combinator alum at 18 and a Thiel fellow, Prasad cofounded a private securities marketplace that transacts billions in pre-IPO stock annually. Forge has raised over $250 million in VC funding and went public in a $2 billion deal with Motive Capital in March 2022. Last year, he launched a money manager that invests in tech startups before they go public called Destiny (D/XYZ) with $100 million in raised capital.

With cofounders Benoit Pagotto and Chris Le, Vasilev launched RTFKT (pronounced artifact) in 2020 to create digital clothing and sneakers for the metaverse. Vasilev previously crafted real-life custom kicks for celebs. "I saw how sneakers were becoming status symbols for Gen Z kids, how physical marketplaces worked, and I thought it could be more frictionless with digital assets." In May 2021, RTFKT raised $8 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others and was acquired by Nike that December for an undisclosed price. This past April, as the NFT craze peaked, Nike worked with RTFKT to launch its first collection for the metaverse, releasing 20,000 digital sneakers dubbed Nike Dunk Genesis CRYPTOKICKS. Some special editions fetched upward of $130,000 each.

Benjamin Smith struggled with bad skin for years, and started Disco to help more men feel comfortable buying skincare. He sells facial cleanser, eye cream and face masks online and at Nordstrom, using tongue-in-cheek ads and approachable packaging that isn't overly masculine. Disco has raised $5 million in funding, with revenue expected to hit $10 million in 2021.

When a friend complained about the difficulty of finding relevant makeup tutorials online, Stanford classmates Jay Hack and Brandon Garcia set about using artificial intelligence to match shoppers with personalized beauty content and products. Their company, Mira AI, was acquired for $28 million by FemTec Health in October 2021, which also owns Birchbox and will use its tech to send customers personalized products. Mira had previously raised $9 million from Unilever Ventures, Founders Fund, Glossier's Emily Weiss and others.

The son of Silicon Valley engineers, Tejas Konduru started Via to help retailers engage with customers on the device they carry around all day: Their mobile phone. Via puts together campaigns on mobile-native channels like apps, text and direct messages on Facebook and Instagram. Konduru has raised $75 million from Tiger Global and others, and projects revenue will quadruple to $10 million in 2021.

Launched out of Schneider's dorm at Cal State in 2015, the social media agency works with brands like Mercedes-Benz and Nordstrom and expects revenue of $1.75 million in 2020. In addition to working with brands like Mercedes and Nordstrom, Modifly created a way for breweries to ship beer directly to consumers in 38 states during the Covid-19 pandemic rather than the usual one-state restriction and was recently acquired by the marketing agency CourtAvenue.

Serial entrepreneur Maxime Jour, and cofounders Bobby Giangeruso and Justin Bureau raised $3.2 million to launch Jour, a guided journaling app that helps users manage stress and improve well-being. Jour is re-envisioning the therapeutic experience. Jour is backed by True Ventures, Kima Ventures, Secocha Ventures and charges a $60 subscription fee. The company expects half a million in revenue this year and $7 million next year.

Based in Oakland, Nabis provides software and logistics for cannabis brands in California, allowing them to ship wholesale orders within 36 hours--a requirement in high demand as more states legalize marijuana. It is the brainchild of Vince Ning and Jun Sup Lee, both 27, who launched the company in 2017 and have raised $10 million at a valuation of $180 million from a celebrity roster of tech executives, including Doordash cofounder Stanley Tang, Gmail creator Paul Buchheit and Twitch cofounder Justin Kan.

In 2015, Sam Wang cofounded ProGuides, an esports training platform where he serves as CEO. Headlined by a YouTube channel that boasts 1 million subscribers, 60 courses and 3,000 videos, the company also offers an on-demand coaching feature, which has helped push its revenue into the millions. ProGuides has to date raised $7.4 million in venture funding.

Benjamin Brook and Michael Farrell launched Transcend while still in college at Harvard, after setting out to receive their own personal information from more than 100 companies such as Spotify and FitBit�a process Brook compares to going to the DMV. Seeing an opportunity, they built Transcend to help companies achieve compliance with digital privacy laws like GDPR which hone in on companies' handling of users' personal information. With $29 million raised after a big capital injection in June, Transcend is now valued at nearly $100 million and serves 20 customers including Robinhood and HashiCorp.

The cofounders of this Toronto-based ad-tech company were early to using artificial intelligence in advertising and even have a patent for their deep-learning algorithm. Founded in 2012 by Karan Walia, Sobi Walia and Anton Mamonov, Cluep's AI-powered tools analyze videos, photos and text across a variety of platforms to re-target users with relevant ads. The company, which has 40 people in four countries, raised only $500,000 from angel investors but has brought in 65 million Canadian dollars in revenue since it started while running 2,000 campaigns for 700 brands including Starbucks, Amazon and McDonald's. Last year it sold for $40 million to Impact Group, a Boise, Idaho-based grocery sales and marketing agency owned by CI Capital Partners.

Want to send someone a love note from Stormy Daniels or a get-well message from Charlie Sheen? Devon Townsend can hook you up. His marketplace Cameo sells personalized videos from thousands of minor-league celebrities and aging sports stars. A custom video from NFL-great Brett Favre costs $500. One from the guy who played the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld? $60. Celebs name their price and take 75%�Cameo gets the rest and pockets "tens of millions" in revenue a year. In 2014 Townsend quit his gig as a Microsoft engineer to travel the world with his friend the Youtube star Cody Ko. While globetrotting, they launched a travel and comedy account on Vine that got 3 million followers tens of millions of views. A flood of requests for personalized videos convinced Townsend there was an unmet market. "We've tapped into something in the American psyche," Townsend says. The investor psyche too�Cameo has raised more than $65 million from Kleiner Perkins, the Chernin Group, Bain Capital and more.

"Millions of women around the world are expressing their buying intent over social media," says Jessie Zeng, cofounder of e-tailer Choosy. With algorithms that act like style sleuths, Choosy scans social posts to spot the hottest looks. Choosy then makes up to 25 new products a month. Zeng is on pace for $6 million in sales in 2019 and has raised over $10 million in funding. A Wellesley graduate, Zeng traded currencies, moonlighted as a fashion blogger and in 2017 launched the company. To avoid flops, she uses Chinese factories that can make as few as 80 units. Hits are restocked fast.

Sascha Eder met his cofounder Germain Chastel (over 30) in 2015 when they worked at McKinsey. Frustrated with traditional market research companies like Nielsen, they founded NewtonX: A platform to connect experts and market research clients. For any customer survey, NewtonX's search engine identifies and contacts up to 80,000 relevant professionals in a day. It's raised $15 million in funding at a valuation of over $50 million.

Zhenghua "Z" Yang started a game development and publishing studio in 2014 called Serenity Forge. It's released critically acclaimed titles like Where the Water Tastes Like Wine in 2018, as well as Lifeless Planet in 2014, which sold more than 500,000 copies. His team is now co-developing and publishing psychological adventure game Neversong. Projected revenue in 2019 is $1.2 million. Yang was driven to start his company after a severe medical incident at 18. His platelet count dropped to a fatal level and hospital staff told him he'd die in mere hours. He miraculously didn't die, but was hospitalized for two years, keeping spirits up by playing video games.

Amelia Friedman launched Hatch Apps, a platform that automates software development aiming to make it possible for anybody to design and launch a mobile app without coding. Founded in 2015, the company has raised $2.3M from Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Morgan Stanley's Multicultural Innovation Lab, and the Y Combinator Fellowship. Friedman and her cofounder Param JAGGI (CEO and Forbes 30 Under 30 alum) created a Cards Against Humanity for the 2016 election called Election Game, which went viral and of which they sold thousands of games worldwide that they used for Hatch Apps.

With Rick Ling as CEO and Jonathan Lin as CTO, Blitz Esports produced strategy videos for a monthly audience of 2.5 million competitive gamers and raised over $3.6 million from investors. Blitz's team was acquired by gamer chat app Discord in early November for a sum estimated to be in the high seven figures, with Ling and Lin taking over Discord's activity feed and games tab team and Blitz ceasing production.

Alex Ashton and Aurielle Kaminski are cofounders of Agency Eight, a performance-driven influencer and community marketing agency that helps consumer brands grow by building repeatable systems for creator seeding, affiliate and content strategy. To create repeated success with clients, they use infrastructure like automating reporting, templating onboarding and integrating with Shopify. The company has shipped more than 25,000 packages in 2025. Their 14-member team manages more than 30 clients, including Seed, Jolie, Vacation, POV Beauty, Masa, Momofuku, Camp and Public Goods. Projected 2025 revenue is $2.3 million.

Alexia Ioannou is the founder of Nou, a vintage studio turned footwear label that is redefining what it means to create future vintage. The company started as a curated archive of rare vintage designer pieces, worn and collected by stylists, editors and discerning dressers. Then in 2025, Ioannou launched Nou Shoes, debuting with a pump silhouette that sold out in less than a week. The shoes are made-to-order in Portugal. Nou has a highly engaged social media audience of more than 200,000 across platforms and was recently spotlighted in Vogue. They are on track to surpass $2.5 million sales in 2026.

Fastino cofounder Ash Lewis has been coding since age six, launching businesses since he was 13 and received his first VC check at 17. His latest venture is Palo Alto-based startup Fastino, which trains AI models at a fraction of the usual cost. The company's models are designed to be small and highly task-specific, allowing them to be trained on cheap gaming GPUs (at less than $100,000). Fastino offers a suite of lightweight models, each tailored to a specific enterprise task, such as redacting sensitive information or summarizing internal documents. Fastino has raised some $25 million from Khosla Ventures and Microsoft.

A frustration with wrapping presents turned Bryan Perla into an entrepreneur. Little ELF's signature product is a patented gift wrap cutter that makes slicing wrapping paper faster, easier and perfectly straight. An appearance on Shark Tank and a strong social media presence (over 700 million views) propelled Little ELF into big-box retailers like Walmart, Hobby Lobby and Aldi, among others, and it's since become a best-seller on Amazon. The company reports more than $30 million in lifetime sales and projects surpassing $7 million in revenue for 2026.

At nascent startup Axiom Math, Carina Hong is building a so-called "AI mathematician" a model that can solve complex mathematical questions, generate detailed proofs of the different steps it took to get to the answer and check its own work. In less than a year, the startup has raised $64 million in seed funding at a $300 million valuation and lined up a string of seasoned tech veterans, many from Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab. The 24-year-old founder grew up in Guangzhou, China, loving mathematics. Hong, a Stanford PhD dropout, got her bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from MIT, where she wrote nine research papers and took 20 courses on advanced mathematics.

Chelsea Miller is the founder and CEO of CPM Global, a digital communications company helping organizations reach audiences through purpose-driven content. CPM Global has partnered with clients including the Michigan Department of State, Tufts University, and Essence, activating digital campaigns that drive cultural and economic impact. The company has surpassed $500K in revenue and is projected to reach $1M by the end of this year. Miller is a 2025 Tory Burch Foundation Fellow and a recipient of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award.

Y Combinator alums, Tomer Cohen and Ben Wiley believe that speech will be the main way we interact with artificial intelligence in the future. Cohen, a former McKinsey business analyst, met his cofounder Wiley while working at data labelling giant Scale AI. Their startup, David AI, supplies high quality audio datasets in 15 languages to major tech firms including some of the "magnificent seven," helping them build smarter AI models capable of understanding and producing speech. They have a straightforward approach to getting all that data: David AI simply pays people to record it. The startup has raised a total of $80 million in funding from investors like Meritech Capital, Alt Capital and Amplify Partners and reached a $500 million valuation.

GlassPass is a social marketplace for glass art, connecting collectors, galleries and artists all in one platform. Specializing in smoking accessories, its cofounders are working with artists who have largely built their brands on social media, but online censorship and have difficulty selling in brick and mortar stores because of low foot traffic and high prices. Revenue is expected to top $4.5 million this year, up from $2.8 million in 2024 thanks to new states legalizing cannabis. GlassPass takes a percentage of each sale made through the platform and sells advertising on its website and app, but is looking to expand into a subscription program to fuel growth.

Jae Seung Lee is a first generation immigrant from South Korea and the founder of Two Fold, a small vintage shop in Sacramento that has since grown into a recognized name in global vintage clothing. In 2024, it relocated to Los Angeles, where the brand now runs a private showroom and regularly hosts curated pop-ups that bring together collectors, designers, and fashion enthusiasts from around the world. Most of its pieces are sold online through its website. Two Fold has been recognized as a top vintage destination, with a focus on original garments from the 1940s to early 2000, as well as repurposed older designs. The bootstrapped store is expected to make $1.2 million in revenue this year.

Jagdish Whitten is strategy director at Zoned, a full-service creative agency, where his laundry list of clients include Epic Games, Paramount Pictures, Converse, Jack in the Box, and PRIME Hydration, plus talent like Kai Cenat, Logan Paul, KSI, Bella Poarch, Ninja, Valkyrae, Joel Embiid, and the New York Knicks. He helped make SpongeBob become the most successful non-partnered IP in "Fortnite" (5.5 million gameplays and 70 million total impressions) and helped Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles achieve record-setting engagement in "Fortnite Creative" (5 billion minutes played). These partnerships helped Zoned grow its annual revenue from $3 million to $12 million. Whitten also runs "off the internet", a community street art project in San Francisco designed to spark creativity and IRL connection. By leaving blank stickers and colorful markers on city poles, he invites neighbors to collaborate on public canvases, which are later transformed into collage prints.

The next time you complain to customer service about an incorrect order, the apologetic agent issuing a refund might be an algorithm and you probably won't be able to tell. That's the bet behind AI unicorn Decagon. Founded in 2023, the San Francisco-based startup already boasts a $1.5 billion valuation on the promise that it can build AI agents to handle common customer service tasks like product returns, cancellations and credit card replacements. Decagon says its AI can respond with human nuance and personality, without the human downsides of exhaustion, temper and a bad attitude. "We want to build the smartest, most human-like, most empathetic agents," says cofounder Zhang. So far, he has signed deals with companies like Duolingo, Hertz and ClassPass. Decagon has raised $255 million from big-name backers including Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, although Zhang claims he "never really sought out funding."

Jordan Lazarus founded gaming and esports organization Xen in May 2019, and now has a roster of 35 top creators primarily in "Fortnite" and "Call of Duty," reaching 45 million followers and hundreds of millions of monthly views. Lazarus has brokered partnerships for his creators with brands like Amazon, Walmart, NASCAR and many more. As one of Epic Games' preferred partners, Xen has collaborated with the Dallas Cowboys, The Walking Dead, Tetris, and billionaire Marc Pincus, founder of Zynga. The company claims to have paid out over $1 million last year and is on track to surpass that in 2025.

Kaitlin Kahler founded PartnerSmarter, a creative marketing agency that blends data science and storytelling to help brands scale revenue through "smarter" creator partnerships. In under two years, she has generated over $10M in creator-driven revenue and $1M in agency revenue, working with brands like Hinge, Notion, Wix and WhatNot. Their services have saved clients 5,000+ work hours and taken brands from $0 to $1M/month on TikTok Shop in just four months. The company provides pro-bono consulting for BIPOC and queer-owned small businesses and donates a portion of revenue to social justice causes and mentor creators.

Anybody can go viral on the TikTok algorithm. Before Fang was a content creator with over 7 million followers, she was an overworked and miserable restaurant server. In 2023, she filmed herself crying while getting ready for yet another long shift, a video that unexpectedly went viral. People came for the relatability but stayed for Fang's makeup tips and unfiltered personality. Now Fang, who is still an undergrad at NYU, raked in an estimated $4 million in earnings last year as a beauty influencer. Her fellow sophomores probably marvel at her doing brand deals with the likes of Dior, becoming the face of skin care company Cetaphil's campaigns or appearing on billboards for cosmetics brand Kosas. What's her growth strategy?" "My brand is all about being unapologetically yourself and not being afraid to show the raw emotions," she says. "I don't plan my content; that feels too curated. I film when I'm in the moment and have something to say."

Lauren Huttner founded Pebble in 2022, a company that builds data-driven creator programs for consumer brands - specifically apps. Brands pay Pebble to scout, train and manage creators. The creators make new accounts to post content solely for that brand. Pebble will end this year at over $1 million in revenue, a large jump from its 2024 revenue numbers of $164,144. Their clients have gained over 200M views and more than 6M downloads. They have more than 20 clients and a team of four. Beyond brands, they have helped more than 200 creators engage with TikTok shop opportunities, live streaming and influencer-style campaigns.

Marilyn Califano is the cofounder and CEO of Hempress Hygienics, a hemp-based period and personal care company creating sustainable pads, liners, and tampons. The products use organic hemp, a naturally antimicrobial, carbon-negative material that requires less water and land than conventional fibers. The brand is pursuing FDA clearance for its hemp tampon and is available online and in HEB, Central Market, and Earth Fare stores, projecting $1 million in revenue this year. Latvian cotton-based products manufacturer ICotton purchased a majority stake in the brand in 2023, which valued the company at $8.9 million post-money, though Califano has stayed on as the brand's CEO.

Swedish entrepreneur Max Junestrand cofounded Legora, a legal tech startup building collaborative AI tools for lawyers, in 2023. Today, the startup touts 300 law firms as customers including Cleary Gottlieb, Goodwin and others, and has grown to 100 employees. A Y Combinator alum with no legal background, Junestrand started out by interviewing some 100 lawyers to learn more about the inner workings of the profession. He would send LinkedIn messages to lawyers, asking them to meet for lunch and offer to pay them their hourly rate, Junestrand said on a recent podcast. The company has raised some $260 million in total funding including its recent $150 million Series C funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, valuing it at $1.8 billion.

Monica Ravichandran is a former software engineer and a beauty creator specializing in makeup for deeper skin tones. She combines storytelling with AI-driven insights to demystify color theory, challenge outdated beauty standards, and educate underrepresented communities. She reaches over 70 million people monthly, has 2.3 million followers across platforms, and generated $1.25 million in revenue in 2024.

Former Stanford PhDs Sharon Lee and Fan-Yun Sun cofounded Moonlake AI, an applied research lab that has raised $30 million in seed funding at a $120 million valuation. The pair are developing AI software that can quickly create visual simulation environments and "interactive 3D worlds" that might help AI's data scarcity problem. The idea is that people will use the tool for gaming, animation, filmmaking or even for education, which in turn would create data that can be used to train more advanced models, said cofounder Sun, who previously worked as a researcher at Nvidia, building virtual worlds to train and evaluate robots.

Inkeep is a startup helping over 200 companies— including Anthropic and Midjourney—build and deploy AI agents for tasks ranging from writing blog posts to handling customer support. What sets Inkeep apart in a crowded field of AI agent startups, Gomez says, is that it's built for non-technical users. A marketing manager, for example, can create a custom AI assistant to answer questions about internal documents or generate product presentations, no coding required. (Inkeep's core product is a no-code software that lets users design AI workflows in plain English, with an option for a code-based interface for those who need it.) In September 2025, it raised a $13 million seed round led by Great Point Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator.

As CEO of Agora, van Eck is building the next generation of digital dollars. He launched the stablecoin AUSD in 2024, which has since grown to $138 million (market cap), with more than $200 million in weekly transaction volume. Agora also offers the infrastructure for other companies to issue their own stablecoins and earn a share of the yield generated by the cash and Treasurys backing AUSD. Partners include gaming startup Immutable, blockchain developer Plume and DeFi platform Katana. The company recently raised a $50 million Series A led by Paradigm, bringing total funding to $62 million. Before founding Agora, van Eck was a partner at General Catalyst.

Paraform is an AI-based platform that connects companies like Cursor, Ramp, Rippling and Palantir to a network of specialized freelance recruiters. Cofounders Jeffery Li and John Kim launched Paraform after the two tried to recruit each other and realized how inefficient the process was, with more time spent on menial tasks than with candidates. That's why Paraform offers its recruiters AI tools like transcription services and candidate matching to help automate the busywork. Recruiters don't need to waste time finding clients: they can simply apply for the roles posted on Paraform. The company has expanded from 5 to 45 employees in the last 8 months and recently raised a $20 million Series A led by Felicis, with participation from A*, BOND and Liquid 2.

Natalie Barbu, Natacha Bomparte, Connor Boyce and Nick Kane founded Rella in 2021. Rella is a project management and content planning tool built specifically for social media teams and agencies. It helps teams simplify content planning, collaborate in real time, track performance and replace the need for multiple tools in their workflow. At the center of Rella is Ella, an in-house created AI creative assistant. By linking social media accounts and providing a persona, Ella gains access to past content, captions and hashtags, grasping a brand voice and creating content ideas and speeding tedious content creation tasks. Rella is projected to hit $2M in ARR by November and $3M by January. They have reached 31K followers on Instagram and 14K on TikTok.

Backbone is a venture-backed consumer mobile gaming company known for creating controller attachments that turn iPhones into fully capable gaming consoles. Rohan Kapur joined as the second employee and founding engineer, and, over the past 6.5 years, has helped grow the product from zero to millions of users globally. Backbone has raised almost $100 million from Index Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, The Weeknd, Kevin Hart, Nadeshot, Mr. Beast etc. and have done the same in annual revenue. The company has also launched products with Playstation, Xbox and forged partnerships with Kojima and Post Malone.

Sarah Ganzenmuller and over-30 cofounder Regan Plekenpol started Rediem in 2022 as an omnichannel rewards and engagement platform powering purpose-driven consumer brands like Olipop, Sun Bum, Vita Coco, Rahua, and Harmless Harvest. Rediem's AI-powered software helps brands more directly target customers across holiday sales, in-person events and new product launches. Brands are seeing a 70% lift in average order value and a 20% boost in repeat purchases, as engagement rates soar as high as 65%. Rediem also integrates with Shopify, working with more than 4.4 million e-commerce stores. Since its inception, it has raised $1.2 million in venture funding and onboarded $100 million in gross merchandise value from brands.

Sarah Wooders and her team built MemGPT, an AI system designed to remember past interactions and use that to constantly update and improve itself, giving the large language models long term memory. The project began at UC Berkeley where Wooders got a PhD in computer science. Founded in 2024, Letta is a platform that lets developers build AI agents that have better memory and get smarter with every interaction. The company has raised $10 million from investors like Felicis, Jeff Dean and Clem Delangue, and now works with groups including Tufts University, Bain & Company, Nokia and Accenture.

Sebastien Delvaux represents big creator talents at Evolved--most notably Félix "xQc" Lengyel, negotiating his $100 million megadeal with Kick in 2023. The company has negotiated $25 million in brand deals in the past two years, and is diversifying into other businesses like event production, advising startups and developing its own tech. Delvaux founded his first company at age 18, a multichannel YouTube company called Paragon, which was acquired by StreamElements in 2021.

Tudor Chirau is the founder of NOBLESIP, a barware and drink accessories company. Born during the pandemic, the company's products take a strong influence from Chirau's native Moldova, famed for its winemaking heritage. Its cocktail glasses and smokers can be found at the Tennessee Whiskey Trailhead and 5-star hotels in the United States and Italy (LINDEHOF Luxury & Spa DolceVita). NOBLESIP's revenue is expected to double this year to about $2 million thanks to DTC sales and retailer expansion. Its products can be found online through Amazon and Walmart and in 300 stores across the U.S. and Canada.

Vapi is a platform for building AI powered voice agents used by some 500,000 developers--from startups to Fortune 500s. It has powered more than 500 million voice calls to date, CEO Dearsley claims. Founded in September 2024, the San Francisco-based startup has raised $22 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins and others. The startup originated as a conversational AI therapist after Dearsley faced a existential crisis feeling "stuck" while building his previous company and realized that AI tools like Siri still couldn't talk to humans. That's when it pivoted to a platform that lets developers build their own voice enabled AI applications.

Gabriel Adzich and Adam Rodriguez launched WKNDHRS in 2020 with no traditional agency background. The agency operates as embedded units for brands like Coca Cola, LIV Golf, X Games, Gopuff, Bodyarmor and BevMo. At the center is Overclock, its AI powered platform that powers more than 1,000 branded outputs every month, enabling the company to deliver at scale. WKNDHRS has generated more than $5 million in revenue this year and is on track to surpass $10 million in revenue in 2026. Projects have reached audiences on five continents, from national retail activations to X Games rebrand, launching LIV Golf, global branded events and concert production from Coachella to the Jungles of Brazil.

Yash Daftary started FanBasis as an all-in-one platform powering tens of thousands of online businesses selling internet products, services, and communities. The e-commerce platform brings together everything required to build and scale an internet-first business--payments, content hosting, community upsells, financing, fulfillment, and analytics--into one seamless interface. With a focus on powering creator-led brands, businesses on FanBasis over double their revenue in their first year, according to Daftary, and has now processed over $1 billion in merchandise value. The company closed a $20 million series A funding round in May led by Left Lane Capital.

Albert Dong is CEO and Founder of Godling, a creative studio that helps seed-to-Series C company founders land investments. Godling does this by first performing an audit of the startup company. Then they help founders develop a company story and narration to present to prospective backers through pitch deck, memos, elevator pitches, and more. Godling is on track to earn $2.5 million in revenue for 2024, and has helped more than 70 startups raise more than $3.5 billion in capital. With a focus primarily on companies in AI, climate, space and defense, clients include SimpliFed (Seed, $8.5M), Anthro Energy (Series A, $20M), and Leaf Logistics (Series B, $37M).

At just 27 years old, Anthony Borowczyk has already built and exited entrepreneurial ventures totaling $27 million. He currently runs product and operations at video game media company Enthusiast Gaming, after finalizing the sale transaction for gaming stats and reputation tracking platform Tabwire to Enthusiast for $11 million in 2021. One of his tasks at Enthusiast was to oversee a cost reduction, and he achieved a reduction of $2.5 million in budget within 12 months.

This podcast phenom started creating content with one goal: to make money. Althoff tested countless angles, including life as a nanny and house cleaning videos, before embarking on the style that would ultimately skyrocket her to success: parody videos about being a "bad mom." In 2021 she posted her first viral video on TikTok, where she joked about naming her daughter Richard because she wanted a son. She hit 3 million followers in early 2023 (she now counts 13 million) and that same year launched "The Really Good Podcast," which became known for her deadpan and sarcastic interviews with folks such as Mark Cuban, Shaquille O'Neal and Jason Derulo. In 2024, Althoff signed a year-long deal with Studio71, a Beverly Hills-based content shop that helps digital creators sell ads and otherwise monetize their output. Over the 12 months ending in August 2024, she earned approximately $2.9 million between this deal and brand partnerships. "I don't know how it keeps working for me," she says. "I'm just taking it one interview at a time."

Brent Comstock is founder and CEO of BCom, an advertising and media agency which he launched a decade ago, at the age of 19. BCom focuses on social causes and advocacy clients, for which the company builds media campaigns. BCom helped launch the successful Ashland-Greenwood Community Performing Arts Campaign, which successfully raised more than $3.5 million for a new performance space in the small town of Ashland, Nebraska. BCom also worked on digital outreach and communication strategy with the North Carolina Education Corps to recruit and train more than 500 tutors to work with students statewide. BCom campaigns have raised more than $100 million for clients and causes including women's rights, national animal conservation groups and rural art museums, among others. The company employs more than 40 people and is earning more than $10 million annually.

Joshua Francis and Matthew Eaton are the cofounders of Bullseye Games, Inc., a "Fortnite Creative" team that has earned more than $20 million in revenue and amassed more than 1.8 billion game plays by 165 million unique players since its inception in 2023. The creators have also accrued a community of 240,000 TikTok followers and 16,000 Discord members to workshop their games. Before becoming a full-time "Fortnite" creator, Francis worked as a registered nurse and Eaton studied mechanical engineering at the University of Southern Indiana before dropping out to create games full-time.

In 2020, Calvin Thedinger re-founded CT Sounds, a company that makes car audio products and was originally started by his brother. After his brother's death in 2019, Thedinger took over a "garage full of products" and designed and launched new items, from amplifiers and subwoofers to speakers and wiring accessories. Selling DTC through multiple online channels including its own website, Amazon, and eBay, CT Sounds is projected to reach $11.5 million in revenue this year. Thedinger has not sold equity to fund the company, and restarted it with a $100,000 personal investment.

Kala Therapy makes a medical-grade red light therapy product designed to improve health and wellness. The company says it is in common use by many pro sports teams across North America, among other medical clinics. Founder Cam Stajer tells Forbes that the company will have a projected revenue of $17 million for 2024. Additionally, the company donates one unit to a mental health clinic for every ten sold. Its red light therapy mask is now available at Costco.

Former Stanford researchers Arjun Desai and Brandon Yang are cofounders (along with CEO Karan Goel, Chief Scientist Albert Gu, and Chris Re) of Cartesia, a startup that specializes in AI that can be processed while offline. The company created a new AI architecture it calls "state space" models, which the founders claim work more efficiently than the tech underpinning language models like ChatGPT. They've raised over $20 million from venture firms including Index, Lightspeed and General Catalyst.

In 2021, Charlotte Trecartin was a marketing major who launched CharCharms from her parents' basement in suburban Illinois. The company, which makes fashion-forward accessories for water bottles--from marble-print chapstick holders to floral wallet pouches--will hit $10 million in revenue this year, up from $2.5 million last year. CharCharms has major retail partnerships with Target and Dick's Sporting Goods. The startup is now securing additional retail partners, growing its warehouse space, and expanding its product lines into kids' accessories.

Homefield makes and sells college- and professional sports- branded merch. The company's origins go back ten years, when Christa Hitchcock and over-30 cofounder Connor Hitchcock made their own t-shirts, curing ink in their kitchen oven. They sold the tees door-to-door before getting 30 local shops to carry their product. Today the company has over 200 collegiate licenses and has partnered with brands like the Indy 500. Valued at $28 million from investors including XRC Ventures, Homefield expects to make $18 million in revenue in 2024. Growth has been fueled by its presence in over 100 retail stores and sales of high-priced items like bomber jackets.

What if, instead of being an expense, your marketing tactics could open an entirely new revenue stream? That's what Güven is trying to unlock for her 28 clients, which include chocolatier Godiva and the International Air Transport Association. Inspired by moneymaking marketing programs like United Airlines' MileagePlus, Kalder embeds cash-back and rewards programs directly into its clients' websites. "If you look at giants, what they did great for the past decade is they built financial technology capabilities inside their marketing machines," Güven says. Kalder charges 60 cents monthly (and a small processing fee) for each customer who links their credit card to its programs, plus a half-cent per dollar on every transaction made with that same card at one of 25,000 partnering merchants. Backed by $11 million in funding at a $35 million valuation, Kalder brought in $1.5 million in revenue this year.

Jared Quincy Davis first faced a shortage of GPUs (powerful chips that run AI systems) as a computer science PhD student at Stanford, when he had to use Google Sheets to reserve time slots on a block of hardware. A former research scientist on Google DeepMind's deep learning team, Davis started Foundry in 2022 to provide AI builders access to cloud-based GPUs, just as bottlenecks had begun to emerge on the supply of compute. Backed by the likes of Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, M12 Ventures, NEA, Redpoint and others, Foundry has raised $80 million in venture funding. Davis also chairs Foundry Institute, a nonprofit that aims to address the gaps in compute resources available to academia.

Kahlil Greene is the CEO and founder of "Gen Z Historian," a TikTok channel and educational media company dedicated to uncovering "hidden history" often overlooked in standard curricula. He is the winner of a Peabody Award and two Emmy nominations; he also has a book deal with Penguin Random House and is producing a docuseries for National Geographic, which boasts over 23 million subscribers on its YouTube Channel. All while having secured over $1 million in brand deals and contracts in just three years. Last year, the State Department sent Greene to Angola, Africa to help teach young people to create history videos about the dangers of government corruption.

Louise Astorino cofounded Not An Ad with her partner Evan Reeves. Not An Ad offers social media marketing strategy and production, with projects ranging from large scale influencer campaigns to commercial video production. Their specialty is in user-generated style content. Prior to Not An Ad, Astorino held roles at Jerry Media (owned by social media creator @FuckJerry), where her job included managing in-house accounts, leading brand photoshoots for clients like What Do You Meme? and campaigns for brands like Hinge. Last year, Not An Ad signed with Domino's Pizza as their first social media agency. And in the first 6 months of their partnership with Domino's, they surpassed their biggest competitor on TikTok, and broke 1 million followers. Not An Ad booked more than $1 million in 2023 revenue.

After being unable to find fightwear for female athletes, Maya Nazareth founded Alchemize Fightwear to sell rash guards, shorts and singlets for women. The startup recently closed a $1 million seed round, valued at $5 million, and is currently working with Michelle Waterson, a top ten female MMA fighter, to design a new collection. Most of the company's sales come from its online shop; it also sells to gyms, high schools, and universities and is aiming to open three retail stores by 2026. She runs a free women's self-defense program for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault in Philadelphia.

Former developers for Cosmos, a.k.a the "Internet of Blockchains" where multiple blockchains can interact and share data seamlessly, Aggarwal and Ojha built a decentralized exchange that lets users trade across 100+ blockchains while keeping full control of their assets. Since its 2021 launch, Osmosis has processed $35 billion and raised $36 million from top investors including Paradigm, Ribbit Capital and Electric Capital. Aggarwal also co-founded Blockchain at Berkeley, a leading university blockchain group, and helped launch one of the first blockchain courses, still taught today. Ojha specialized in zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method for verifying data without exposing it.

Ex-Meta AI researchers Anand Kannapann and Rebecca Qian spoke to 60 company executives and found that their worst fear was launching an AI product and making headlines for the wrong reasons. They started AI evaluation startup Patronus AI in September 2023 to develop tools and models to evaluate the performance of AI systems. The duo has launched tools like Copyright Catcher, which detects when an AI model produces copyrighted content and Simple Safety which assesses safety risks like producing harmful responses related to suicide, child abuse and fraud. The company has raised $20 million in funding from backers like Lightspeed Venture Partners.

When global supply chains were disrupted during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Prince Ghosh launched a digital supply chain platform to help retail and e-commerce brands inspect and test their products as they are manufactured around the world and audit their factories (its competitors usually focus on one or the other). Ghosh, a former NASA aerospace engineer, has raised $7.1 million from investors like Amity Ventures, Dynamo Ventures, and Addition Ventures. The Y-Combinator-backed company works with 160 global brands across 28 countries including Brooklinen, Dr. Squatch, and Harry's. It expects to make $3.2 million in revenue this year.

Reactiv, a company that is just barely a year old, aims to use AI to quickly and easily convert websites into smartphone apps. The company's ultimate goal is to "make mobile websites irrelevant in 5 years," says cofounder and CEO Ross Correia. In just a short time, the Toronto-based company has raised $5 million in a seed round and employs 25 engineers across North America. Reactiv has partnered with Shopify as a way to onboard brands (clients include multi-billion dollar retail brands). The company is projected to make just under $1 million in revenue by the end of 2024.

Samuel Lam, who has a degree in computer science and statistics from Harvard University, is a cofounder of PermitFlow, a software company for developers and contractors to prepare, submit and track building permits across municipalities. Contractors commonly research, apply and track permits on their own, but PermitFlow aims to automate this process and make building homes faster and more affordable. PermitFlow has supported permits for more than 5,000 housing units. The startup, cofounded by Francis Thumpasery, its CEO who is over 30, is a 2022 alum of Y Combinator and has raised $36.5 million from investors that include Kleiner Perkins and Altos Ventures.

Zack Peng and Bill Liu are the cofounders of Seel, a B2C company that makes it easy for small retailers to accept free returns and guaranteed deliveries, among other features that normally are out of reach for small businesses. The co-founders got the idea after hearing an apparel marketplace CEO talk about his refund policy, and they offered to build a custom pilot for him. Soon, the business was born. Seel powers post-purchase experience for over 3,000 retailers and doing over $20 million annual recurring revenue. It has raised $50 million from Lightspeed and other Tier 1 VC firms.

Former data scientist Valerie Zhang is the cofounder and creative director of 2023-launched VX Media. VX Media offers influencer marketing, talent management (they represent 16 creators), social media consulting, and advertising and campaign content production. The startup has collaborated with more than 400 renowned fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands--including Zhang recently directing commercial and social campaigns for Kiehls, Maybelline, Hugo, Dior Beauty, and Cash app. The marketing startup has also produced campaigns for UGG and Tiffany & Co. VX has brought on more than 2,000 influencers globally for social content and this year opened a Paris office as a second location to their NYC headquarters. Zhang has more than 210,000 followers across her Instagram accounts, where she shares much of her creative work. Revenue is set to hit $6 million this year.

On a trip to Senegal five years ago, Cameroon-born Wilglory Tanjong found herself inspired by the country's local artisans and began creating handbags with them. This led to the birth of Anima Iris in 2020, a handbag brand inspired by African art and heritage. Each piece is handmade in Africa. The brand recently launched a new tennis line, selling tennis totes and racquet bags. Anima Iris bags are sold online and at top luxury retailers Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale's, and expects to make $1.2 million in revenue this year. Pop singer Beyonce has sported its bags.

Zander Brumbaugh is the founder and CEO of Gamebeast, a live-ops and data insights platform for the user-generated content space that raised $3.7 million in pre-seed funding in September. Brumbaugh has been a creator on "Roblox" since 2014. His titles have accumulated more than 500 million play sessions and earned millions in revenue. He enrolled at the University of Washington at just 17 years old and eventually taught an accredited course titled CSE 390G: Coding in Video Game Development, focusing on using the "Roblox" engine to create games. Brumbaugh also authored a book called "Coding Roblox Games Made Easy" at 18 years old, which was the #1 game programming book on Amazon at the time.

More than a period-tracker, Aavia is a Gen-Z focused hormone health app for all people with ovaries. Cofounded by Alexis Wong, Aya Suzuki along with CEO Aagya Mathur, it helps people track how their ovarian hormones impact their daily lives, from health insights to cycle trends and general education. Launched in 2017, Aavia has raised over $7 million in funding from investors including Seven Seven Six, Asset Management Ventures, and Meridian Street Capital.

This startup aims to prevent the sleep deprivation caused by hot flashes during menopause. Cofounders and MIT researchers Loewen Cavill, Emilio Sison, and Felipe Radovitzky built the company's patent-pending sensor bracelet that uses biometric data and AI to predict and mitigate hot flashes in real time by connecting to a cooling pad that adjusts a sleeper's body temperature as they are experiencing a hot flash. Backed by DeltaV, Matter Health, the MIT Venture Mentoring Fund and others, the startup has raised $3 million in funding.

Former fashion journalist Amira Rasool started The Folklore to make it easier for shoppers to buy from black-owned and other diverse brands. Her wholesale platform is now used by Nordstrom, Crate & Barrel, Bloomingdale's and over a dozen other retailers to source minority-owned brands. It has raised $3 million in funding from investors, including Black Tech Ventures Funding and Techstars Seattle. It charges brands a monthly fee to be listed on the platform, plus takes a cut on orders that it facilitates.

Asher Genoot is the cofounder of US Bitcoin Corp (USBTC), which builds and operates data centers for bitcoin production. Founded in 2020, the company is committed to managing operations through the use of low and no-carbon sources of energy. USBTC is on track to grow to 1.2 GW by the end of 2023 and has partnered with leading renewable energy companies, including NextEra, Constellation and Generate Capital. They sold more than 3 GWh of wind energy to ERCOT in July 2023 in their joint venture with NextEra. In the coming months, USBTC expects to become a publicly listed company traded on the NASDAQ and TSE after completing a merger with Hut 8, resulting in a post-merger market cap of around $1 billion.

Austin Kreinz is the founder of Atomix Logistics, which helps e-commerce brands fulfill orders. Brands pay for space within Atomix's warehouse, where products are packaged and shipped according to their specifications. The startup has over 150 customers, and expects to do revenue of $7.5 million in 2023, up from $1.3 million last year.

Benjamin Cohen grew up in the distribution industry, working for a business his great-grandfather started that had become one of the largest dental products suppliers in the United States. That institutional exposure led him to devise a business idea for selling more products by leveraging the industry's large volumes of transaction and customer data. Proton's AI-powered CRM tool helps distributors track customers and manage teams to gain insights into sales opportunities. Cohen leads a 35-person team and has raised $24 million from investors such as Felicis and Battery Ventures, among others.

Bobby Palmieri cofounded Lilo Social, a bootstrapped growth marketing agency with 26 employees, in 2016 with over-30 cofounder Zac Fromson. In the past year, the company has achieved a revenue of over $3.5 million. They lead e-commerce growth for companies including Bauer, Microsoft and Bleacher Report.

Exhausted after working long night shifts as a nurse in the Covid unit at the University of Virginia Medical Center, Johnson logged into the hit multiplayer game "Fortnite" to relax. Using the platform's creator tools, he designed new popular minigames like "Go Goated," an intense, zone- based shootout that garnered 500 million plays in 2022, turning his hobby into a full-time job. Last March, Fortnite's parent company, Epic Games, began distributing a small percentage of the game's $6 billion in annual revenue to creators like Johnson, and within six months, it had paid $120 million to 13,000 creators. Eighty-five percent of them made less than $100, but Johnson is on track to make seven figures in 2023. And he's scaling. His startup, Good Gamers, now employs six freelance developers to produce "Fortnite" games like "Teddy," where players try to escape a monstrous stuffed bear, and "Food Fight," featuring hamburgers battling tomatoes. "There's a huge market for this, and we can grow astronomically," he says.

After losing her leg in a car accident, Erica Cole started No Limbits out of a personal need for adaptive clothing that would work with her prosthetic. She now sells apparel for people with prosthetics, who are in a wheelchair or who have limited dexterity. The clothing, which was shown at New York Fashion Week, is sold by Walmart, QVC and Moosejaw. She has raised $1.8 million in funding.

Fizz is a social media platform exclusively for college students that aims to be a safer, private and more engaging space to share authentic content. COO Teddy Solomon and CTO Ashton Cofer, Stanford dropouts who launched the company as students in 2021, say the private nature of the Fizz community (limited only to your school, accessible only with proof that you go there) helps relieve the social anxiety that can stem from filtered, curated or inauthentic content presenting a "false reality" on other platforms. Students can use Fizz to stay up to speed on news, events, parties and other happenings across campus; exchange intel and recs on what classes to take; connect with peers and more -- with the goal of fostering relationships off the app, IRL. The cofounders say Fizz is now live at more than 130 schools across the country and that they recently raised a $25 million series B, bringing their total funding to $41.5 million. "Gen-Z's story reads turbulently -- it is one of social anxiety and a feeling of inferiority because of the highlight reels we see on legacy social media," Solomon says. "Fizz is working to change this and make Gen-Z's legacy one of positivity, community and togetherness."

Previously an engineer at Meta, Glen Wise built tools to combat espionage, terrorism planning and child predators. Realizing these digital threats are not limited to a single platform, he left to cofound Cinder, an operations platform to give other digital-first businesses similar tools. So far, that's entailed a software platform that helps trust and safety teams to analyze their data and make decisions with it. Cinder has raised $14 million from investors including Accel, Y Combinator and Outpost.

The duo leads the development of the Injective blockchain, which, according to Chen and Chon, has facilitated over 300 million transactions totaling nearly $13 billion at an average cost of less than 1 cent. The firm raised $57 million from investors like Binance Labs, Mark Cuban and Jump Crypto. In January, it launched a $150 million fund, backed by high-profile crypto investors including Pantera Capital and Kraken Ventures, to boost the growth of decentralized finance.

Product designer-turned-entrepreneur Jorgan Singer founded Diagram, a startup that created web-based design tools dubbed "Magician" and "Genius" that used AI and text-based prompts to generate design ideas and suggest design recommendations. Diagram quickly gained steam among its 100,000 users before being acquired by $20 billion design company Figma in 2023. Before starting Diagram, Singer also designed Cash App for Square. He now works as a product designer at Figma building AI features and integrations for the platform.

As a college athlete who competed in Division I cross country and track and field, Katherine Watercutter often struggled to look put together while she juggled classes and practice. She started Gold Hinge in 2018, selling women's athleisure clothing like pleated tennis skirts, workout dresses and crop tops made with buttery-soft, heavy fabrics. The company expects revenue to triple to $16 million this year. It is sold in some Tilly's stores.

After conducting research on machine learning at Harvard, Kojin Oshiba cofounded Robust Intelligence in 2019 with professor and CEO Yaron Singer (above age 30) in an effort to mitigate security and operational risk posed by new AI systems. Companies like Deloitte, Paypal and Expedia have adopted Robust Intelligence to secure their open-source models and protect their generative AI-powered applications from potentially harmful inputs and outputs. The Sequoia-backed company is valued at more than $200 million, per PitchBook, and counts on Oshiba as a jack of all trades.

Kunal Chaudhary is the cofounder of Banner, which caters to institutional real estate owners. Historically, these organizations manage building acquisitions and construction through spreadsheets that track budgets, costs and projects, but Banner is attempting to modernize the workflow with a new automation-powered software offering. The 30-person startup, valued at $75 million, has signed on several of the large multi-family real estate funds in the United States, including Starwood, Morgan Properties and Blackstone, which is also an investor in the company.

After meeting in their freshman dorm at Stanford, Nicolas Machado, Robert Ross and Nebyou Zewde built an AI platform that automates building data integrations. The three cofounders, who have worked at Meta, Google and Opendoor said they bonded over their shared experiences as minorities and immigrants, and built the company while at Y Combinator earlier this year. The San Francisco-based company has since raised $4.2 million from Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst.

Delivery trucks spew a lot of CO2. Ang wants to clean up the logistics industry with his Toronto-based startup, GoBolt. To do so, Ang and his cofounder, Heindrik Bernabe, offer sustainable delivery and warehousing services for commercial customers such as IKEA. The company already has more than 100 electric trucks in operation and wants to have 90% of its deliveries made by EVs by the end of 2024. GoBolt's proprietary AI-powered software manages the fleet, keeping tabs on when trucks need to be charged and which vehicles are best for specific routes. Revenue should top $100 million this year, with more than $200 million in funding. "We are not grappling with retiring an old fleet," Ang says. "We are building from scratch--and have the software needed to support it."

Inspired by his parents, who cared for a relative with cancer, Max Mayblum launched Givers, a platform that helps caregivers enroll in existing programs that compensate them for such critical work. The app, which is used by 15,000 caregivers each month, receives money from both private and public entities for referring and enrolling caregivers into their own programs. The New York-based startup has raised $3.5 million from investors including CRV, Able Partners and AARP, as well as personal loans.

In December, Nate Schanker launched esports organization M80, announcing a $3 million seed funding round to accelerate efforts across web3 and the creator economy. The brand has an aggregate reach of 15 million followers across social platforms, and its teams have already achieved competitive success, including a runner-up finish at the Americas Valorant Challengers Ascension 2023 tournament, another runner-up at the $2 million Gamers8 2023 tournament, and donated $300,000 to charity by winning the international Gamers8 qualifier.

After a friend was roofied during a night out, brother and sister Shirah and Michael Benarde started NightCap, which sells scrunchies that turn into drink covers. They have sold them in bulk to nearly 150 colleges, the U.S. military and liquor brands like Bacardí, Patron and Grey Goose. They have also partnered with Bumble to distribute them to college students. Sales are projected to hit $2 million in 2023.

Brandon Duderstadt and Ukrainian immigrant Andriy Mulyar first met while working for an AI company that aimed to streamline the workload of radiologists, before leaving to build Nomic, a startup that helps clients curate unstructured datasets. As a free project, Nomic launched open-source language model GPT4All and used its software to curate the training data--a project that garnered 25,000 GitHub stars within two weeks. The cofounders have since raised $19 million from SV Angel and Coatue, among others.

Former Blackstone employees Brian McMahon and Julia O'Mara left the trillion-dollar asset manager to start Pickle, a peer-to-peer clothing rental app that allows users to rent out their closet to people who live nearby. It started in New York City in 2021, but now says that more than half of its new users come from other parts of the country. The company raised $8 million in funding from FirstMark, Craft Ventures and others in 2023, giving it a $30 million valuation. Pickle takes a 20% cut of each transaction.

A former cosmetician with degrees in chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences, Rachelle Seguin started Omy Laboratories with classmate Andrea Gomez, 31, to offer more personalized skincare. Customers submit a photo, answer a few questions and then the company suggests products formulated with ingredients tailored to them. For instance, it may include pitaya extract for customers who report dark spots or lemon myrtle leave extract to combat large pores. The B-Corp company packages its products, like night cream and facial serum, in refillable containers. It has raised $8 million in funding from Crédit Mutuel Capital, BDC Capital and others, and projects revenue will surpass $4 million this year.

Ramin Ahmari founded and launched AI-led fashion house Finesse in 2021. The company, which Ahmari describes as "Zara meets Netflix," uses advanced machine-learning techniques to examine trends and foresee consumer demand. Finesse has grown an average of ten times year-over-year since their launch two years ago, and has raised $56.4 million in funding to date.

Rani Mavram is cofounder of Complete, a platform for startups to manage and scale their compensation strategy, keeping cash bonuses and benefits front of mind. Other than helping companies nail down their philosophy, Complete's products include an interactive offer letter for potential candidates to best understand their compensation package, and similarly allows current employees to access the same kind of breakdown of their compensation. The platform has raised $4 million with Accel, Y Combinator and Housefund and is used by HR teams at companies including Roblox, Vercel and DataStax.

Remofirst is an HR platform that enables hiring remote employees around the world. The company mission is shaped by the experiences of the cofounders, both immigrants--Nurasyl Serik (from Kazakhstan) and Volodymyr Fedoriv (Ukraine)--who met in the U.K. at the University of Surrey and together started several remote-first startups prior to Remofirst. The company allows hiring in more than 160 countries and has worked with customers like Microsoft, BCG and Mastercard. Clients can use the platform to recruit, hire, pass audits and manage an international workforce all in one place. Remofirst has raised $14 million from investors like QED.

William Carney, Max Frost and Max Towey are the cofounders of RocaNews, a media company that aims to make staying informed about current affairs fun. Sharing digestible, enjoyable and engaging news has resulted in approximately 5 million followers across their company social media channels, including Instagram, TikTok and Youtube, and more than 200,000 newsletter subscribers. RocaNews has generated $5.36 million in investments and projects $350,000 in 2023 revenue. This year, the company also launched an app that gamifies the news, which is approaching 40,000 monthly active users.

When Savannah Azad was furnishing her Los Angeles apartment during the pandemic, she found herself wishing it was easier to find stylish furniture that wouldn't break the bank. She started Haute Home LA, sourcing affordable styles she liked from other vendors and curating them on her own online retail site. The company is on track to double revenue to $3 million this year.

Get paid in exchange for your location and purchasing data. That's the tagline for Pogo, an app that's used by 750,000 users who can save money and earn rewards through the app. As data privacy moves from opt-out to opt-in, brands are looking for consumer data and Pogo CTO Shikhar Mohan claims to have built one of the largest opt-in datasets of consumer data. The startup has raised $20 million in funding from entities including Buckley Ventures, Mantis VC, The Chainsmokers among others and claims to have booked $3 million in revenue in 2022.

After identifying staffing shortages as the largest problem in the childcare industry, Olivia Weinstock, McKenzie Kennelly, and Natalie Amling built Tandem to enable childcare workers more access to the gig economy. Tandem makes it possible for childcare centers to find on-demand coverage, while skilled childcare workers have the opportunity to pick when and where they work. Presently, it charges a 35% fee on top of workers' hourly rate. When they work at a childcare center, this additional fee is paid to Tandem for hours worked—the company claims carers on its platform have worked over 20,000 shifts and counting. Tandem is currently servicing 200 childcare centers in three states and plans to expand to five states by 2024. With a team of 20 employees, Tandem has raised $10 million from Drive Capital.

After dropping out of Harvard Business School, Nick Ornitz and Shannon Kay worked on a business idea in the home service industry (connecting homeowners and apartment tenants who need home maintenance support with professionals) and realized that AI could make lead generation platforms faster and cheaper. With that idea, they built Brooklyn-based Topline Pro and have raised $17 million from investors like Forerunner Ventures and BBG. The company, with its generative AI product, has served thousands of businesses in nearly all 50 states, most of them small blue-collar business owners.

Wells Douraghy founded July, a platform for creators that automates brand deals, in 2021 with the goal of helping creators achieve financial independence so they can focus on their content. The company has raised $2.3 million in a funding round led by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and his VC firm, Seven Seven Six.

With Web3 startup Adim, Spencer Marell and Chase Rosenblatt are building a place where creatives can develop and own tomorrow's leading characters in entertainment. Adim connects creators and writers to work on plots, characters and projects - and members get tokens to share in the ownership of the potential shows and movies that come out of this Web3 community. (IP is therefore owned by a broader network of creators, and a higher share of value is returned for their creative output, according to Marell and Rosenblatt.) Adim, co-founded with "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" creator Rob McElhenney, raised a $5.25 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz crypto general partner Chris Dixon. The company's board and advisors include Lions Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer; actors Ryan Reynolds and Kaitlin Olson; veteran TV producer Nick Frenkel; 01 Advisors co-founder Adam Bain; and entrepreneur Richard Rosenblatt.

In 2017, Jonathon Barkl, Chelsea Border and Scott Fitsimones cofounded AirGarage, a parking company that started as a way for students to cheaply rent out driveways. Backed by AI license plate recognition technology, AirGarage allows users to access a garage and park without needing a ticket. With a network of 30,000-plus parking spaces, users can also use real estate for events such as setting up a farmers market or a food truck park. About 800,000 people in 30 U.S. states and Canada have rented more than 1 million of the company's spaces in 2022. The company raised $16 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, among others.

"I love saving time. I love to optimize everything in my life and wanted to make it easy for anyone to do," says Du, who dropped out of Harvard to launch New York-based Alloy Automation in 2019. Du, with cofounder Gregg Mojica, has built a mission control for e-commerce-- a no-code interface to connect and automate sales-oriented tasks across hundreds of apps such as Shopify, Mailchimp, Shippo and Salesforce. Thousands of merchants, including Burberry and Brooklinen, use Alloy Automation to streamline shipping, billing, digital marketing and customer service. In February, Du raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz to grow her 30-person team and make Alloy Automation more user-friendly. "Many companies use software as a means to an end, but we think of it as a product people should love."

Caroline Spiegel founded Quinn, a subscription-based app for audio erotica, as a Stanford University senior recovering from an eating disorder. During her recovery, she struggled with sexual dysfunction. Frustrated with the dearth of sexual dysfunction solutions for women, she launched Quinn in 2021. Quinn audios are romantic novels condensed into 15 to 20-minute clips, allowing its 300,000 users to choose from a curated set of voices. Backed by TQ Ventures and Day One Ventures, Quinn raised $3.2 million in its seed round and has $5 million in annual recurring revenue.

Although he was born in Silicon Valley, David Hsu started Retool abroad, after graduating with a philosophy degree from Oxford. His startup, which makes the building blocks for developers to create their own internal software tools, has grown to a valuation of $3.2 billion after signing on a slew of big name customers like Amazon, DoorDash and the NFL. To program the Olympics on NBC, the TV company counted on Retool to build a scheduling tool.

Deniz Özgür is the cofounder of Space Runners, which wants to bring fashion brands into the metaverse. It sponsored Balmain's main event at Paris Fashion Week, and is working with the luxury brand to launch digital clothing and a virtual store. In 2021, it created a line of virtual sneakers with NBA players Kyle Kuzma and Nick Young, selling out all 10,000 pairs in nine minutes. Space Runners has raised $10 million in funding from Accel, Polychain Capital and others.

Anuj Mehta (left), Kushal Negi (right) and Akash Raju started Glimpse while students at Purdue University, looking to help brands reach customers in new ways at a time when social media ads have become less effective. It works with canned water startup Liquid Death, mattress company Purple and others to place their products in 15,000 vacation rentals, where guests can trial them in a real-world setting and scan a QR code to learn more. The company has raised $6.2 million from Y Combinator, GSR Ventures and others.

Harvard Business School classmates Sylvan Guo (center), Janvi Shah (left) and Nicole Clay, 30, started Hue to make it easier to buy makeup online. Shoppers take a one-minute quiz about their skin tone and complexion, then are given a recommendation for the right shade and matched to video and photo reviews from real customers with similar skin. Retailer Credo Beauty, plus brands Lawless and Exa, have introduced the tool for a limited number of products online. Hue has raised $2 million from NFX, Underscore VC and others.

The former CFO of social media unicorn Cameo wants to put access to the biggest names in showbiz in the palm of your hands. His Chicago-based startup, Protégé, lets aspiring actors and musicians pay up to $300 a minute-- nearly $18,000 an hour-- to share their work and get feedback from celebs like DJ Khaled and Jason Alexander. "Stars all remember when they were at the bottom and needed someone to take a shot on them," Jhin says. For some, it's money well spent-- Florida Georgia Line's Brian Kelley has signed a user he met on Protégé. Jhin and cofounder Michael Cruz have raised $8.5 million from Sequoia and celebs including Lionel Richie, Diplo and Will Smith.

Investment banker turned entrepreneur, James Connolly is the cofounder of a prefab housing company called Villa. Villa has built hundreds of homes and launched in hundreds of cities since its 2020 launch. Villa has raised $38 million in VC funding from investors including Atomic. The company booked $2 million in 2020, $19 million in 2021 and is on track for $40 million in 2022. Valued at $50 million, Villa has 60 employees and 1,000 customers.

In 2019, Jeremy Moser cofounded uSERP, a digital public relations agency and SEO link-building company that has worked with brands such as Freshworks, monday.com, Robinhood and Shopify. The 40-person agency said the company is on track to garner $3.3 million in revenue this year. Elsewhere, Moser has accumulated 90,000 Twitter followers, to whom he provides influencer marketing and SEO expertise to. The San Francisco native also co-owns Wordable, a Google Docs publishing app he acquired in 2020.

While working as a barber on his college campus, Jordan Christopher often heard students complain that clean hair care products were too expensive. He started playing with his own formulations, launching an inexpensive line of natural shampoos and conditioners in CVS stores in 2019. PureZero is now sold at Target, Kroger, Walgreens, RiteAid and Whole Foods, with sales on track to hit $12 million this year.

Mangel is a serial founder--Pipe is his third startup. He is cofounder and co-CEO of Pipe, a fintech company that lets other businesses sell their future recurring revenue for cash they can spend immediately. Pipe has roughly 22,000 customers, up from about 10,000 at the end of 2021. It facilitates hundreds of millions of dollars in loans quarterly. Pipe is not a lender--it charges transaction fees of roughly 1% to 2%. In mid-2021, it raised funding at a $2 billion valuation. In November 2022, he announced that he and two of his cofounders were stepping down from their executive roles at Pipe as the company searches for a CEO with more fintech operational experience. Once Pipe finds a new CEO, Mangel will become executive chairman.

Slime. That's what Jungmin Kang has been selling since she was 13 and discovered playing with the gooey substance was "oddly satisfying." With just $200 from her allowance, Kang launched an online slime business, catering to both kids looking for a creative outlet and adults looking for stress relief. The 18-year-old now employs 40 people and expects sales to hit $11 million in 2022.

Former clinical dietitian and nutritionist Kara Collier is a cofounder of Chicago-based Nutrisense, a start-up with 30,000 users and $31 million in investment and a valuation of $95 million. Founded in 2019, Nutrisense is a health monitoring app that provides users with personalized health and diet advice. The startup uses a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) program, which helps people monitor their blood glucose levels.

Sneh Parmar (left) was waiting for some charcoal toothpaste that he ordered from a brand's website when friends told him he could just buy it at the Target two blocks away. He started Lucky with friend Nafis Azad to help online brands tell shoppers whether their products were carried at any nearby stores. Sephora began using its technology this year. The company has raised $3.5 million in funding.

Lukas Czinger is cofounder and senior vice president of Los Angeles-based Czinger Vehicles and Divergent 3D. Divergent's manufacturing system uses AI-driven software to 3D print structures. It begins a production program with a top automaker this year. Czinger Vehicles is preparing to build 21C sports cars in 2023. The companies have raised $435 million.

Shensi Ding and Gil Feig, started Merge in 2020 and have accumulated more than 3,000 customers to their business, which connects together hundreds of different software tools together into a unified hub. Ramp and TripActions are among customers for the company, which is raised $75 million from investors, including Accel, NEA and Addition.

Having previously created the world's largest Minecraft server and a mobile payment processing app, Miguel Guerrero is no stranger to entrepreneurship and is currently the founder and CEO of his next venture, Otis AI. As the pandemic accelerated the need for small businesses to go digital in their advertising, Guerrero and his company are trying to help them navigate the world of digital advertising. Otis AI has raised $3.5 million in VC and angel investors.

A powerlifter in high school, Roc Pilon started Gymreapers in the back of his family's mobile home at the age of 19. The fitness brand, which sells weightlifting gear and equipment, is on track to nearly triple its revenue from last year to $30 million. His customers include professional bodybuilders and Olympians.

Matcha-filled Oreos from China? Tasmanian mint KitKats from Australia? Samer Abu Farha has built a business importing rare snacks from around the world and selling them online. He opened a storefront in Detroit this fall. Sales are expected to hit $5 million in 2022.

As a software engineer in Silicon Valley, Taylor Lint kept running into the same problem over and over: it was a headache to set up internal software tools like Salesforce. Lint started Swantide in March 2020 to fast track that setup process. The company most recently raised $8 million from Menlo Ventures. A career engineer in a male-dominated space herself, Lint has set a goal to maintain an engineering staff that is at least 50% women.

Tiffany Kelly is the founder and CEO of Curastory-an all-in-one platform for sports and fitness creators to build video content and monetize it. Since starting the New York-based company, the former ESPN analyst has raised over $3 million in funding-grabbing the attention of investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Techstars Investors, Mindspring Capital and Google-and is helping the company stay on track for a projected $9 million in revenue this year, and she's just getting started. "The disruptors that win in billion dollar exits are the ones that are young enough with the industry to not be clouded by old constructs, but old enough to learn the history of what works and doesn't in the industry," she says.

Vicente Zavarce runs a $204 million on-demand delivery service called Yummy. The super app began as the first food delivery app in Venezuela and expanded into other vertices like groceries, ridesharing and shopping. Based in San Francisco, Yummy now operates in four countries, has four million registered users, completes 800,000 orders a month and has 15,000 plus gig economy workers registered. Yummy raised $84 million in funding from Y Combinator and Anthos Capital among other venture groups and it booked $2.1 million in revenue in 2020, the year it was founded.

Daze is reinventing the everyday calendar to be more fun, expressive and social. Founder Willem Simons describes it as a place for friends to plan events and use creative tools to more vividly capture their time spent together. Daze, still pre-launch, has raised $4.25 million in funding from venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Kindred Ventures.

Ian Proulx and Nicholas Bagamian started 1047 Games in their Stanford dorm, turning a project demo with no funding into one of the fastest-growing gaming studios in the world. The startup's flagship game, Splitgate, has exploded in pre-launch popularity--it was downloaded more than 13 million times in beta--and has been compared to Halo 2. In September 2021, 1047 Games raised $100 million in Series A funding, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

A former Amazon employee, Aadil Kazmi started Swyft to offer fast shipping to businesses not on Amazon. Swyft utilizes an asset-free model: No trucks, drivers or warehouses. Instead, it taps mom-and-pop courier companies with idle trucks, giving them more volume and efficient routing technology to increase their capacity by up to 30%. Swyft has raised $20 million from Forerunner Ventures, Shopify and Inovia, and projects revenue of $7 million in 2021.

Akil Alvin is the CEO and global chief creative officer of Digital Detroit Media, a multimedia content creation company. Founded in 2013 by Alvin, the business has worked with clients such as McDonald’s, Bank of America, Ford Motor Company and Major League Baseball’s Detroit Tigers. Revenue for 2021 exceeded $2 million.

Alanah Pearce works as a writer at Sony's Santa Monica Studio, and in her free time has come to define the term multi-hyphenate: producing multiple podcasts, streaming on Twitch, building a large YouTube following around social issues in the gaming industry, and voice acting in games such as Gears 5 and Cyberpunk 77. She raised nearly $1 million dollars in 2020 in connection with her charity stream and runs the annual Video Game Accessibility Awards, honoring games and studios that did the most to make their games available to all types of players.

In 2017, after stints as a coder at Coinbase and Uber, Juliano started Dydx, a crypto derivatives trading platform that caters to professional traders outside the U.S. It averages roughly $2 billion in daily trading volume (Coinbase does about $5 billion). The 19-person startup brought in $75 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2021. It expects to reach $125 million in revenue for the full year and $80 million in net profit.

In 2020, at 17, Ben Botvinick started Hyper, a payment platform for entrepreneurs. Most of Hyper's customers' projects begin as side hustles: Hyper has helped turn more than 100 of those into businesses generating tens of thousands in annual revenue. In June, the company raised a $17.2 million Series A from General Catalyst and others.

The youngest honoree on this year's Social Impact list happens to be one of the highest funded. BRINC founder Blake Resnick has raised over $27 million from an impressive roster of investors including Index Ventures, Sam Altman, Figma's Dylan Field and Scale AI's Alexandr Wang. The Thiel Fellow aims to change the way the police and rescue teams operate during emergencies. And it's already in use: Hours after the catastrophic apartment collapse in Surfside Florida, Resnick hand-delivered his lidar-equipped reconnaissance drone that was used to assess stability in areas too dangerous for engineers.

When Bryant Ellis started The Adventure Challenge in 2018, he wanted to disconnect from tech and reconnect with loved ones. He created a book filled with scratch-off pages that reveal challenges, like baking a pie blindfolded or recreating your parents' first date. The books are available online and through QVC, plus a collaboration with Target is in the works. Sales should hit $85 million in 2021.

The talent crisis of the past year hasn't fazed 28-year-old Carly Mednick. A founding partner at Monday Talent, Mednick helps place executives at marketing, creative and communications firms. Her bootstrapped operation has thrived despite the pandemic: Started in 2020, they project revenue of $5 million in 2021.

The cofounders didn't foresee global supply chain chaos when they launched Dray Alliance in 2018, but this year's disruption has boosted business at the startup, whose software helps companies such as Mattel and Wayfair find truckers to transport containers from ports and railheads. The business is set to post $28 million in revenue this year, up from $11 million in 2020. CEO Steve Wen had the idea to modernize freight logistics while running a business that exported luxury goods. "In the shipping world, they were still faxing paperwork around," he says. "That made no sense to me."

College friends Dane Baker and Peter Twomey started EcoCart to tell shoppers the carbon footprint of their online purchases at checkout -- and let them offset it. It has inked partnerships with 2,000 retailers, plus offers a browser extension. Since its launch in 2020, users have helped offset over 30 million pounds of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of saving one million trees. EcoCart makes 15 cents on each transaction. It has raised $3 million in funding.

A former buyer for Bloomingdale's, Fenco Lin is now trying to build the next Shein. Launched in October 2020, the e-commerce brand sells colorful $14 tops, $28 jeans and $5 earrings to Gen-Z. To minimize waste, it works with a marketplace of Chinese factories to spin out small batches. It has two million followers on Instagram and 650,000 on TikTok, and has raised $180 million from Andreesen Horowitz and partners of DST Global at a $1 billion valuation.

During the pandemic, Helen Mayer, 25, lost childcare for her twins. She started building Otter, a platform that matches families who need childcare with stay-at-home parents who can care for their kids. Otter raised $27.8 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Abstract Ventures, Sequoia and Thrive Capital.

Kristie Kaiser, 29, cofounded Personal AI, an app that allows people to record their experiences to create a digital memory bank. Kaiser was issued a patent for creating an artificial intelligence-powered memory retention system. Personal AI has raised $5.9 million from investors including Jane Street Capital, GoodFriends, Beni Venture Capital and Warby Park cofounder David Gilboa.

LogicLoop's low-code software lets people create automated workflows for things such as detecting fraudulent transactions without needing much help from IT teams. Jesika Haria and Jackie Xu founded the company in 2021 and it has raised $4.5 million from Accel and First Round, among others. The cofounders are also angel investors, and Xu launched an investment syndicate of early employees from Stripe, where she once worked.

Shebat, 29, is trying to help solve the current staffing shortage while giving workers flexible, well-paying wages. Shebat, along with cofounder Akshay Buddiga, launched his mobile app Traba to let you pick up hourly shifts at warehouses, fulfillment centers and factories giving you the freedom of a gig, with pay and reliability of a job. This summer Traba raised $3.6 million from Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Village Global.

Buckland, 29, and cofounder Ellie Buckingham launched The Landing to let interior design influencers easily create slick?and shoppable'digital rooms and design boards. The Landing provides simple tools and personal pages that let anyone curate and show off their favorite clothes and furnishings. Viewers can buy goods straight from the pages. Buckland raised $3m in a seed round led by Aileen Lee at Cowboy Ventures.

After spending much of her childhood coping with chronic skin conditions like hyperpigmentation, Olamide Olowe launched Topicals, a skincare company with safe, effective products for all skin tones. Since its founding in August 2020, Topicals has raised $2.6 million in funding from Lerer Hippeau and Mucker Labs. In March 2021, it launched in Sephora and sold out in 48 hours.

Christina Gilbert and Andrew Luo built their company in a park with the goal that no human ever has to manually clean a spreadsheet again. OneSchema's platform allows users to easily rectify data, instantly check for errors and it suggests one-click data fixes for CSV files. The company has raised $4 million from General Catalyst, Sequoia, Y Combinator and Xoogler, among others.

Syrian immigrant entrepreneur, writer and business expert Pierre Subeh is the founder and CEO of X Network, his SEO marketing firm that has worked with clients like Apple Music, Haagen-Dazs and Pepsi. The company exceeded $500,000 in revenue last year and surpassed $1 million in revenue in 2021.

Isaac Pohl-Zaretsky knows how to engage people online, having created a hugely popular role-playing game within Microsoft's Minecraft. In 2021, he and Alexa Grabell launched Pocus, which helps sales teams track how customers are using software and spot opportunities to increase revenue, without the need for engineering support. Pocus has raised $3.7 million in funding from First Round, BoxGroup and angel investors.

Julianna Lamb's first job was as a professional figure skater and she's won U.S. national awards in the sport. Lamb and cofounder Reed Mc-Ginley Stempel are looking to win more business from companies with Stytch's service, which lets developers embed passwordless authentication methods in software applications. Stytch has raised $126 million in funding from investors including Coatue Management, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Thrive Capital.

At just 29 years old, serial entrepreneur Tim Lenardo has three companies under his belt. His latest, JetFuel, is a network that connects social media influencers with sponsors, usually campaigns for app installs. Since its formal founding in 2018, JetFuel has helped its clients hit 70 million downloads, and took in tens of millions in revenue this year. Vungle acquired the company earlier this year.

In January, Ada Yeo cofounded Shuffle, an app that allows users to create short video clips from longer podcasts and puts them into a feed, making it easier for people to share their favorite podcasts with potential new listeners. With Yeo as CEO, the company has raised $2 million in seed money from investors including First Round Capital.

Ahmed Elsamadisi is familiar with the rise-and-fall-and-rise nature of startups. After launching Narrator � a database analysis software company � the Egypt-born entrepreneur was forced to lay off half of his eight-person team when the product failed to take off. But after some rethinking and reworking, the company found success at Y Combinator and has since raised $7.4 million.

While studying at Baylor University, Le Roux had a hunch: "What if 3D printers were a lot bigger? What if we could use concrete?" Now he's the mastermind behind the Vulcan, a nearly 12-foot-tall 3D printer that can make a concrete house in 24 hours for up to 30% cheaper. His startup, Icon, which he founded with over-30-year-olds Evan Loomis and Jason Ballard, used the Vulcan to build America's first permitted compliant 3D-printed home in 2018. Since then it has built 16 more in Austin, Texas, and expanded into Mexico, where Icon is making the world's first 3D-printed community for low-income families. He has raised $44 million (including from the late Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital) and scored contracts to build barracks for the Defense Department. Icon recently received funding to help NASA figure out how to build structures on the moon.

Alexi Coffey is cultivating green thumbs and beautifying surroundings with plants. The 29-year-old cofounded Steward, a subscription service that gives data-driven advice on keeping plants alive. Launched in August, the company has roots at NASA's Ames Research Center. Stewards raised $500,000 from investors and expects $3 million in 2021 revenue.

Hired by Twitch in 2017 as a charity program associate, Sweetman has risen the ranks to become director of creator social impact. In her role, Sweetman has worked with the 1000 Dreams Fund to launch a program distributing $135,000 microgrants to over 100 women getting into streaming and content creation. She also headed up Twitch's Covid relief stream which raised over $2.5 million.

These friends started Branch Furniture in 2018 to offer high-quality, affordable office furniture to start-ups ready to graduate from WeWork. They had just closed their first seven-figure deal--installation of 900 workstations for TouchBistro in Toronto--when the pandemic hit. As offices emptied, they rushed to cater to the work-from-home set, convincing Facebook, Shopify, Salesforce and hundreds of other companies to offer a special employee discount. Sales are projected to hit $6 million in 2020, up from nearly $1 million in 2019. Branch has raised $3.9 million from RRE, Nine Four Ventures, Alate Partners and others.

Andrews is founder and CEO of Sirona Medical, an AI-powered workflow platform for radiologists. The company partners with radiology practice groups and charges a per-case fee for every case read on the platform. It has raised more than $20 million in funding.

Chai Mishra started The Essential (formerly called Move) in 2017 to let people order their groceries directly from the source. He has collaborated with over 60 Michelin-star chefs, celebrity bakers, creameries, farms and ranches to develop new products. Customers receive the products directly, and know exactly who the supplier is and how much money they made. The Essential has 5,000 members who pay $95 a year for the service, plus a waiting list of 135,000 people. It projects sales of $2.7 million in 2020, and has raised $3.5 million from Y Combinator, the Dorm Room Fund, the San Francisco 49ers, Joe Montana and others.

Alloy provides software to help banks and fintech companies make better identity and risk decisions using a single API service and SaaS platform. Cofounder and CTO Charles Hearn, 29, previously worked at Microsoft and then Knox Payments before launching Alloy in 2015. The New York-based company has since raised $56 million.

Tired of long wait times at the pharmacy, Kulkarni set out in 2017 to build a better drugstore along with a pair of second-generation pharmacy owners. "We realized how broken it was for millions of consumers, not just myself," says Kulkarni, now cofounder and CMO of Medly, which has raised $110 million for the online pharmacy. In addition to same-day prescription delivery, Medly's app connects customers with staff pharmacists who answer questions in a dozen languages. And while competitors like Capsule invest in hip branding to attract users, Kulkarni elected to pour marketing bucks into persuading doctors to refer patients to Medly. It's paid off: In July, Medly served 70,000 patients with more than 500,000 prescriptions, and the company is on track for $200 million in revenue this year.

Their Contra.com is a combination of things?an employment marketplace and social network for independent creatives. (Huffman likens it to a mix of LinkedIn and Shopify.) It launched in March and has had 60,000 users find work through the platform. It recently raised a $3 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures.

Since becoming the smart home fragrance startup's first marketing employee, Lacey has built a team of more than 20 while creating a strategy around 17 marketing channels. In the past two years, that plan has led to 100x growth with revenue growing by 10x for three years in a row. Pura now has more than 200,000 customers and earlier in 2020 raised $4.4 million in seed funding.

Sanket Saurav started writing code at age 10, and soon after, began building websites. Now, he and cofounder Jai Pradeesh are trying to solve bug fixing with DeepSource, a startup that provides software that uses algorithms and machine learning to automate the process. Since launching in 2018, it has raised $2.7 million from 645 Ventures and Y Combinator, and is being used by companies such as Slack and Intel.

Having launched three startups by age 18, Diane Keng went on to join Apple as one of the youngest software engineers focused on algorithms and Symantec as a lead software engineer. Between the two companies, she assessed more than 100 marketing automation tools, which led to the launch of Breinify, a plug-and-play AI platform for consumer enterprises to predict and act on an individual's personalized interests. In 2020, she raised a $5.5 million seed round led by Streamlined Ventures. Breinify's approach for individualized context predictions generate 51% year over year in online sales for retailers and 20x click rates for global consumer goods brands.

After graduating from Stanford in 2017, Davis cofounded a political-activism social network called Greo in Y-Combinator. It didn't live long, but her interest in its mission lived on. Now at Facebook, she has managed a group of 20-plus people to build a number of new tools. One was the business fundraiser feature that companies turned to at the start of the pandemic, raising millions of dollars. She also conceived and launched a Facebook campaign to fundraise for racial justice organizations around Juneteenth; the idea was to provide a small seed amount?$19?to any user who began a campaign on their own. It eventually raised over $12 million. Her next project is to onboard corporate brands to do similar seed fundraisers through Facebook.

Of all the creators on this list, Emma Chamberlain has one of the highest engagement rates with nearly 12% of her audience engaging with her content (that's extremely high for someone with 15 million Instagram followers). Chamberlain, who dropped out of high school before even tasting fame, is known for her wit and deadpan humor that's helped make her one of the most popular vloggers. She's also the founder of Chamberlain Coffee, a premium coffee and tea brand that also happens to sell a ton of merchandise and just raised a $7 million Series A. She's also done a major deal with Louis Vuitton.

As a kid, Chinese immigrant Liu didn't have pocket money to spend on a PlayStation, so he made do with free internet browser games. �That shaped the kind of games we're making today,� Liu says. End Game Interactive, which he cofounded with Luke Zbihlyj in 2018, creates simple but addictive online games. One of its early successes, a 2D multiplayer battle game developed in just four weeks, has attracted 65 million players and will earn over $4 million in revenue this year. End Game recently raised $3 million from high-profile investors like Unity Technologies cofounder David Helgason, Twitch cofounder Kevin Lin and talent manager Scooter Braun. Instead of spending �four or five years� on a single game, the company's 20-person team focuses on releasing simpler games faster. �It's just, keep having shots on goal,� Liu says.

Everest Munro-Zeisberger was once told to �stay in school.� After he and fellow students Sabera Hussain and Andrei Serban dropped out of the University of Waterloo in 2018 and launched Fuzzbuzz, he drums it up to the worst advice he's ever received. The trio's software company tests code for critical bugs and has raised $2.8 million.

Gaylor is the cofounder of VRChat, a social network that allows users to build virtual worlds to hang out in. Gaylor attended Vanderbilt and previously worked at Zynga before starting VRChat in 2015. It has over 9 million registered users and around 20,000 users online at all times. VRChat has 33 employees and has raised $20 million from backers such as Rothenberg Ventures, GFR Fund, and Makers Fund, among others.

Hersh Patel cofounded Hindsight in 2017 to help publications figure out how to effectively place ads as cookie-tracking is phased out by the major internet browsers. Its software is used by sites like FOCO and FanDuel to place ads based on the content of the article, rather than the reader's data history. With Patel as CEO, Hindsight has raised $1 million.

Sharon Pak and Jordynn Wynn became fast friends while interning at Los Angeles cosmetics company ColourPop. In 2018, they noticed celebrities were becoming increasingly transparent about wearing hair pieces. To bring the practice more into the mainstream, they launched INH Hair. Their core products: clip-in extensions, bangs and ponytails, as well as wigs. Revenue has surged over 500% to $20 million in 2020, as the online retailer benefited from pandemic lockdowns and increased experimentation among housebound consumers. Pak and Wynn plan to release hot tools and a haircare line in 2021.

Hwang and Cui built Jemi for celebs to sell virtual meetings, social media shout outs and merch to fans. Celebs have made $10,000 a month on the app. The pair have raised $2 million from General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and Liquid2 Ventures.

Led by CEO Nathaniel Barling, COO Alexandre Elkrief and CTO Dylan Rhodes, Knowhere is a strictly non-partisan, machine-learning-driven news platform with an audience of 540,000. Founded in 2015, Knowhere went through Stanford's StartX accelerator and has raised more than $7 million from investors including Struck Capital and Abstract Ventures.

Kyle Kuhns is the founder and CEO of XX Artists, a digital marketing agency he started in 2017. Revenue for 2019 totaled over $1 million. The company's portfolio includes names like Robinhood, Brie Larson and Jennifer Hudson as well as YouTube, Lilly Singh and NBCU. Kuhns has expanded XX Artists to include business verticals such as social marketing, creative services, talent partnerships and music digital.

Lyn Chen was a stranger to Colin Chartier when he pitched her on his idea: a bug-fixing software platform. Lyn agreed to lead sales for the idea, and the pair launched LayerCI in 2019, which ensures consumer-facing software buttons like "add to cart" and "run payroll" work reliably. The Toronto-based company has raised $1 million and is backed by Y Combinator, Funders Club and Soma Capital.

Massi Tirocchi cofounded Shapermint in 2018 to make it easier for women to shop for shapewear from a range of brands, including Hanes, Maidenform and Bali. As chief marketing officer, Tirocchi has emphasized body positivity in the company's social media ads; $5 million in monthly spend has helped it attract four million customers, nearly half of whom had never purchased shapewear before. Shapermint has also launched its own brands, which will bring in 55% of its revenue in 2020, projected to be over $150 million.

Raised in Bangladesh and Kuwait, Nabeel Alamgir moved to Queens as a teenager and started his career as a busboy at the original Bareburger restaurant. A few years later, he returned to Bareburge, this time in the C-suite as its chief marketing officer. Inspired by his firsthand experiences from the front to the back of the restaurant, Alamgir, who learned English from watching Martin Scorsese films, launched Lunchbox Technologies in 2019. The startup provides multi-unit restaurants with an online ordering system and marketing engine and has raised $22 million from investors like Coatue Management and Primary Ventures.

Intellectual property management is a tedious task for businesses big and small, and one that Brainbase offers to solve with an end-to-end platform. At the age of 19, cofounder and CEO Nate Cavanaugh started the company from his college dorm room at Indiana University Bloomington before dropping out. Since it launched in 2017, the Los Angeles-based company has raised $12 million.

In 2016, Nick Chen cofounded Pico, a startup that designs software to allow publications to manage signups and subscription payments. Its tools have been used by outlets like the Colorado Sun and Defector, and with Chen as CEO, the company has raised $4.5 million from backers including Stripe, Bloomberg Beta and Axel Springer Digital Ventures.

Sophia Edelstein and Nathan Kondamuri were seniors at Stanford when Kondamuri's younger brother got his first pair of glasses. The process hadn't changed much over the years?there were still only a handful of boring, expensive options that ran upwards of $200. In 2017, they launched Pair Eyewear to make wearing glasses fun and unintimidating for kids and affordable for parents. After interviewing 400 families and partnering with Warby Parker's former head of product, they introduced a line of glasses starting at $60, plus customizable, rotating frames that could be changed in seconds starting at $25. The average customer owns one pair of glasses and five frames. Since appearing on Shark Tank in 2020, the cofounders have inked licensing partnerships with Harry Potter, Marvel and NBALab. They recently brought manufacturing in-house, allowing them to churn out limited-edition frames in just two weeks. The company has raised $4.5 million in funding from Norwest Venture Partners, Precursor Ventures, Bolt, Alpaca VC and others. It is projecting revenue of $3.1 million in 2020 and $20 million in 2021.

Pamela Valdes serves as CEO of Beek, a subscription service for audiobooks for Spanish speakers?an underserved market. Beek, part of Y Combinator's winter 2017 class, has raised $7 million from investors including Greylock Partners and Accel Partners and has 8,000 subscribers. The startup now launches more than 60 Beek Originals per month. Valdes was a 2016 Thiel Fellow.

Brandon Foo and Ishmael Samuel have built Paragon, a company that sells software to developers to better integrate their products with other apps. The Los Angeles-based company has raised $2.5 million from Y Combinator, Village Global and Soma Capital. For Samuel, who was born in Khartoum, Sudan, and Foo, who grew up in Minnesota, Paragon is their second stint as company founders.

Paul Suhey, 29, is cofounder of moped rental service Revel Transit. After moped-involved injuries and deaths, changes, like a 30-mph speed throttle and training, have been put in place. The mopeds could be a boon for public transit-wary riders looking to social distance. Revel Transit has raised $38 million in VC.

Shah and his cofounders are taking on part of the shopping experience stuck in the dark ages: product warranties. They launched Extend in 2019 to make it easier for merchants to offer extended warranties and protection plans online, and have signed on 100-plus customers like Peloton, iRobot, Logitech, Harman and Advance Auto Parts. Consumers can easily file their claim online and get it approved in seconds. Extend makes a cut on each warranty sale and has raised $56 million in funding from PayPal Ventures, Meritech Capital, Pritzker Group Ventures and others.

In 2019, Qu's mother, a doctor in China, attended her first international medical conference in Chicago. The connections she made at the event were invaluable, but what it took just to get there - three flights and a lengthy visa process - was expensive and complicated. So Qu, a Facebook alum, and Xuan Jiang launched Run The World, an online venue for professional events. Her timing was unexpectedly (and unfortunately) perfect. In March, just one month after the platform's official launch, live events shut down worldwide. Run The World has grown from five employees to 45 and hosted 10,000 virtual events for clients such as OpenTable and Andreessen Horowitz. The most popular feature? A virtual cocktail party in which attendees are matched for five-minute one-on-ones in what passes for schmoozing in the pandemic era. It has raised $15 million from investors including Founders Fund and actor Will Smith's Dreamers VC.

In 2019, Apoorva Dornadula and Michelle Lu cofounded Viralspace, which started as a class project between the two and their third cofounder, Hiro Tien. Viralspace uses AI to help marketers make data-driven decisions about their images and videos. The trio have raised $1.7 million in funding. Clients include Ogilvy, Minted, and TechStyle.

Wilbur You launched Youtech, an integrated marketing and development agency, in 2012. The company, which was bootstrapped with an investment of $600, is valued at $25 million and raked in more than $5 million in revenue in 2019. Youtech has 1,000-plus clients and is planning to open a third office location in 2021 in Texas.

Driven by their experiences as product developers Microsoft and Lockheed Martin, Gautam Kanumuru and Chad Becker started Yogi. The software compiles the giant barrage of metrics, ratings and comments that developers receive from their customers, then uses AI and natural language processing to pinpoint commonly encountered feedback that can be addressed by product development. After bootstrapping the company for years, Kanumuru and Becker raised $2.4 million at the start of 2020 from investors including RTP and the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, helping it to later close deals with Nestle and Johnson & Johnson.

When Aakash Kumar worked at Google, he saw the challenges of managing contract workers firsthand. Enter Shiftsmart, a marketplace that lets employers manage schedules and workers pick up shifts, which Kumar runs with cofounders Pavan Patel and Patrick Brandt (over 30). The company has raised $20 million and companies like HP, Airbnb, and yes, Google, use its platform, which has more than 100,000 workers on board.

When a quick trip to Zara turned into a 30-minute ordeal thanks to a long checkout line, Lindon Gao figured there had to be a more efficient way to pay. In January 2019, he and his cofounders Ahmed Beshry, Yilin Huang and York Yang launched Caper to build the world's first shopping cart powered by artificial intelligence. The idea: Carts automatically detect items as they are added. They're not there yet, but are marketing a smart cart that allows customers to scan their items as they go and skip the line by paying directly from their carts. Canadian grocery store Sobeys is conducting a pilot and Caper will do $1 million in revenue in 2019. It's raised $13 million in funding from the likes of Lux Capital, First Round Capital and Instacart cofounder Max Mullen.

Growing up in South Korea, Allison Lee thought that on-site alterations were a normal part of the shopping experience. So when she moved to the U.S. and discovered that most stores offered a limited number of sizes and sent customers away without offering to tailor the item, the culture shock and frustration set in. "Why are we okay with that?" asks Lee. She started Hemster in 2016 to bring a "made-to-measure experience" to more retailers. Today, customers can receive free tailoring at 50 retailers like DVF, Outdoor Voices and Reformation. Measurements are taken in-store and local tailors then alter the garments in as little as 48 hours, with the retailer picking up the tab. In 2019, Hemster customized 50,000 items. The company charges a set-up fee, plus takes a cut on each alteration, which should drive revenue of $19 million in 2020. Lee raised $4 million this summer.

Kyle Carberry, John Entwistle and Ammar Bandukwala met online and started building game servers together before they entered high school. Post-high school graduation, they began working on the developer tool that they wished they had: Coder aims to make software development more efficient. They have 6 million downloads of their open-source software and $14 million in funding.

Impira's 'asset intelligence platform' is like an AI-powered search and analytics engine for its customers' unstructured data, which includes photos, videos and PDFs. The company's founder and CEO Ankur Goyal, who previously worked at MemSQL, says that since the company launched in 2019 it's raised $32 million, bringing it to a $100 million-plus valuation with customers like Goop, The RealReal and StitchFix.

CodeSignal cofounder Aram Shatakhsyan wants to help hiring managers 'go beyond resumes' when evaluating mostly technical candidates. Formerly called CodeFights, the platform has raised $12.5 million and sells tests and interviewing tools to help assess engineers and has launched a 'Coding Score,' which it describes as the 'credit score equivalent for the technical recruiting market.' Thousands of customers like Uber, Quora and Postmates have used the service.

Synapse Technology Corporation combines computer vision with X-ray machines at security checkpoints to better identify weapons and other prohibited items. Bruno Faviero and Simanta Gautam, first-generation immigrants from Brazil and Nepal respectively, started the company in 2016 with third cofounder Ian Cinnamon (who made the Under 30 list in 2015 for a different company). The team of 14 has raised $6 million to-date and their software, which retrofits onto existing machines, is deployed at airports, courthouses, and military bases.

Sisters Taran and Bunny Ghatrora started Blume in 2018 with a set of products geared toward teenage girls with changing bodies: all-natural pads, tampons, deodorant, face wash and acne treatment. In April 2019, they raised $3.3 million in a round led by Felicis Ventures and project sales of $7 million in 2020.

Drew D'Agostino and Greg Skloot started Crystal after they were fired from their first venture-backed tech company for what they describe as "miscommunication." Their new app, Crystal, aims to help others avoid similar situations by using personality data to improve daily communication in areas like negotiating and writing emails. The company has raised $7 million from Salesforce, HubSpot, and others and has 3,000 corporate customers.

After struggling to get their green pea cookies into grocery stores, Larissa Russell and Fiona Lee launched Pod Foods in 2017 to help emerging food and beverage brands get on shelves. They operate a marketplace that helps grocery stores discover and connect with brands. Pod Foods also helps place orders, process payments and get inventory into stores by leveraging its own distribution hubs in cities like San Francisco, New York and Chicago. The company has raised $3.3 million from M12 (Microsoft's venture arm) and others.

Franky Bernstein is the founder and CEO of Markett, which he started as a college brand ambassador for Uber before building it into a word-of-mouth marketing startup with thousands of ambassadors across the U.S. The 10-person company, founded in 2016, has raised $2 million from investors like KEC Ventures and Wavemaker VC and worked with brands including Airbnb, Walmart, Unilever and MGM.

Most erotic content is created by and intended for men; Gutierrez and Keegan want to fix that. In 2018, they founded Dipsea, which produces short, erotic audio stories made with female listeners in mind. Dipsea has raised $5.5 million from investors including Thrive Capital and Maveron. The New Yorker hailed Dipsea as "the audio app that's transforming erotica," praising the authenticity and production quality of its stories. Subscribers pay $48 a year or $9 monthly for access to Dipsea's library of 100-plus recordings; the app has 325,000 downloads to date. Gutierrez and Keegan serve as CEO and CTO, respectively.

Snackpass is a food app that focuses on takeout rather than delivery. Kevin Tan started working on the app while he was a student at Yale and recruited cofounders Jonathan Cameron and Thiel Fellow Jamie Marshall to help him build the company. Within a few months of launch, Snackpass had over 80% of Yale using the app. Two years later, Snackpass has raised more than $23 million in funding and is being used at 11 campuses, generating over $10 million in gross merchandise volume. Many of their users - perhaps because they're college students - use Snackpass to order multiple meals per day.

Jeremy Cai is the founder of Italic, an online retailer that sells luxury goods without the brand names -- or the corresponding markup. Instead, the company designs its own products and then taps the same manufacturers used by high-end labels like Alexander Wang, Burberry and Prada to spin out brandless versions. The manufacturer sets the price and splits the profits with Italic. Italic sells 100 products, ranging from cashmere sweaters to leather wallets to 400 thread-count sheets, with plans to double its assortment by 2020. It raised $13 million in funding in November 2018.

While most cell phones are going for as much gadgetry as they can pack, Joe Hollier's taking the opposite approach: as basic a phone he can make. The first Light Phone raised over $400,000 on Kickstarter in 2015 and attracted over 3,000 backers. The Light Phone II, launched in 2019, raised $3.5 million on Indiegogo and expanded from basic calling into a phone that also has texting, an alarm clock and a mobile hotspot. Its simplicity also attracted over $8.4 million in venture funding from Foxconn and others.

Shortly after moving to San Francisco for a job, Jordan Jones realized the Silicon Valley startup scene wasn't for her. She dreamed one night that she threw herself a pity party -- and with that the idea for Packed Party was born. With $2.75 million in funding from Capstar Partners and others, she started selling boxes filled with supplies for a party of one. She now designs and manufactures a range of brightly colored party products that are sold in the aisles of Whole Foods, Neiman Marcus and Paper Source. Jones expects revenue of $20 million in 2020.

Website-makers like Wix and Squarespace have been around for 15 years, but Universe thinks it has a shot at disrupting the industry by focusing on what incumbents have so-far largely ignored: mobile browsing. Serial entrepreneur Joseph Cohen launched Universe as a no-code, mobile-only website builder to help nearly 400,000 people easily build websites via its grid editor on the go. A graduate of Y Combinator's Winter 2018 class, Cohen raised $7.2 million from firms like Box Group and General Catalyst.

Justin Effron and his cofounders started Alice in 2013 to serve as a room and guest service app for travelers. But today, over 2,000 hotels--including properties from Hilton and Marriott--use the tool to help workers communicate, serve guests and more efficiently dole out tasks. The company raised over $50 million so far.

Not all heroes wear capes. The protagonist of Justin Stander's hit action game Katana ZERO is a bathrobe-wearing samurai with a penchant for synth-driven '80s music. Stander's highly rated independent game has, in less than a year, sold 500,000 copies, generating $5 million in sales - a blockbuster in the indie market where the average game makes around $16,000. For a 26-year-old, Stander has been at this for a long time. The Delmar, New York, native designed games in middle school and by 16 had released a free Web game, Tower of Heaven. Stander started to develop Katana as a student at McGill University, taking on freelance game development projects to fund what he thought would be a two-year project. Instead it took five years. "There were an innumerable amount of days that I woke up, worked, went to sleep and that was it," Stander says. Katana is available for PC, Mac and Nintendo Switch, and Stander is developing new story lines, game levels and other add-ons to keep it current - and selling.

"We're trying to democratize access to talent," says Kanjun Qiu. "Otherwise, big companies with big resources are always going to win the talent war." Qiu's recruitment company Sourceress provides companies with the recruiting tech once only available to firms with massive HR budgets. Its AI scours the Web, job sites and social media for top recruits, and then a team of copywriters pen personal introduction notes to top candidates. Sourceress works with firms like Medium, Cruise Automation and Ginkgo Bioworks. Qiu saw the fight for tech talent firsthand at Dropbox as chief of staff to company cofounder Drew Houston, where she helped the now-publicly traded cloud storage company grow from 200 to 1,200 employees. Her 30-person company has raised $13 million from backers like Y Combinator and Dropbox cofounders Houston and Arash Ferdowsi.

Michael Patton started Fetch Package in 2016 after experiencing firsthand just how ill-equipped many apartment buildings are to handle the growing volume of e-commerce deliveries. He charges large buildings a monthly fee to handle delivery. When shopping online, customers have their packages sent to the nearest Fetch warehouse, rather than their own address. The company processes the shipments and notifies customers when their packages are ready so that they can arrange a convenient delivery time. Fetch operates in 15 cities, including Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver and Phoenix. With $14 million in funding from Signal Peak Ventures, Silverton Partners and others, Fetch expects revenue of $13 million in 2020.

Born out of cofounder Mason Spector's struggles with depression, Los Angeles streetwear brand Madhappy is trying to reduce the stigma around mental health one hoodie at a time. Its colorful pieces exude positivity, with words and phrases like "optimism" and "log off" stitched across the front. To promote a sense of wellbeing and community among its mostly young customers, Madhappy has opened 10 pop-up stores in cities like New York and Los Angeles. In August 2019, Madhappy raised $1.8 million in funding from LVMH Luxury Ventures, designer Tommy Hilfiger and the founders of Sweetgreen.

Saumya Bhatnagar and Gaurav Bhattacharya first teamed up while in New Dehli, India on a software that utilized machine learning to identify risk markers that someone might abort their baby based on gender (which is illegal in India). The government eventually distributed their software to ultrasound specialists, Bhatnagar says. After higher education in the States, they launched InvolveSoft in 2016, which helps companies communicate with and engage their distributed (or deskless) workers and understand company reputation. It's raised $2.5 million.

Sur founded The Juggernaut, a site and newsletter dedicated to South Asian news, out of frustration with the lack of media coverage. She serves as CEO and has raised $1 million from investors including Y Combinator and 8VC's Bhaskar Ghosh. The Juggernaut's subjects range from Kashmiri American activism to the legacy of India's first female pilot.

Supergreat is a beauty review app that allows anyone to view or create reviews for thousands of the best makeup, hair care and skin care products. Fans also create videos in exchange for supercoins a digital currency that can be used to purchase products from participating brands. In March, the company raised $2.5 million in funding, and has a network of more than 60,000 beauty fans. Before starting Supergreat, cofounder Tyler Faux studied computer science in undergrad at Harvard and helped build safety app Citizen and Tictail (now part of Shopify).

Wes Schroll wondered why grocery loyalty programs rewarded people for being loyal to a store and not the brands they were buying. Today, over two million people use Fetch's app to scan their receipts and receive points from purchasing brand partners' products (the points can be converted into gift cards). Schroll met his cofounder Tyler Kennedy in college and Schroll dropped out of the University of Wisconsin, Madison to build Fetch in 2013. The company remains headquartered in Wisconsin and has raised $39 million in funding.

Akash Nigam's parents gave him an ultimatum: Raise $3 million or stay in school. He chose to drop out and raised the money instead. His first venture, alongside cofounder Evan Rosenbaum and a third cofounder, was Blend, a group messaging app. It didn't gain traction, but Nigam says he ignored an acquisition offer instead to focus on Genies - their version of a Bitmoji killer. An early beta picked up a million users and another two million on the waitlist. In November, Genies will publicly release its new app with Gucci as its first advertiser, providing in-app clothing for the avatars. The app launch coincides with new funding. Genies has raised a total of $25 million from investors including NEA, Foundation Capital, Russell Westbrook, and Cameron Dallas.

CEO Alejandro Dinsmore, CTO Casey Hancock, head of BD Harris Gordon and CCO Matthew Griffiths started eevo in 2014 as a Kickstarter project with the goal of making it easier for anyone to make VR content. Since then, they have worked with companies including Felix & Paul Studios, the BBC, WeWork and McKinsey and raised $2.3 million in funding.

Ordermark is a platform that provide technology to simplify restaurant operations, as well as consulting and support to make it foolproof for restaurants to embrace online ordering. Canter (CEO) is the fourth generation operator of Canter's Deli, a landmark restaurant in Los Angeles. He started the business during the recession of 2008 when, Canter's struggled to stay afloat, so he signed up for 14 different online ordering services which quickly became a third of the business. The company has completed a Series A and so far raised a total of $12.6 million.

With Andy Sparks as CEO, Holloway, which produces comprehensive guides on topics such as equity finance and buying a home, has raised $4.6 million in funding from NEA, South Park Commons, Comcast Ventures and The New York Times. In 2012, Sparks cofounded Mattermark, a site that provided startup and private company data.

Identical twins Brandon and Bradley Deyo started making basketball highlight reels while still in high school. Realizing high school sports coverage was lacking, they launched a production studio in 2010. Mars Reel, with Brandon as CEO and Bradley as COO, now has more than 30 million monthly viewers on social media, and it has raised $4.7 million from investors including LeBron James and Drake and inked content deals with USA Today and James' digital media company, Uninterrupted.

Henry Shi cofounded SnapTravel in 2016 to make booking the perfect hotel room as easy as chatting with a friend over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack or Amazon Alexa. So far it's working: 1.7 million people have used SnapTravel and over 94% of bookings are completed without any human involvement. SnapTravel has raised over $9 million from investors. Despite his age, Shi has already started to give back and created two fellowships for students of Georgia Tech's online Master of Science in Computer science program, the first gift of its kind in the program's history.

Taiwan-born Kevin Chiu (COO), along with his brother Edward, 31(CEO) cofounded Catalyst Software in 2017. The customer success platform integrates major SaaS services, including such as Salesforce, Zendesk and Mixpanel, to create a unified dashboard and eliminate the need for managers to perform advanced data analytics. Previously, the brothers worked together at Digital Ocean, where they tested their work compatibility. Catalyst Software raised $5.4M from True Ventures, Work-Bench, Compound and Ludlow Ventures, among others.

In 2010, Kevin Schlenker started Skar Audio from his college dorm at the University of Central Florida. The 10-employee company makes high-end speakers and amplifiers for cars and boats, selling direct-to-consumers online, as well as through a network of dealers. Schlenker—who looks to his step-uncle, Jet.com cofounder Marc Lore, for inspiration—expects revenue to exceed $11.5 million this year.

Nick Bushak (CTO) and his cofounder were inspired to launch ZenSourcer when, as engineers at Facebook and Dropbox respectively, the founding existing recruiting software inadequate for how they were recruiting talent. The ZenSourcer CRM enables companies to build long-term relationships with talent. The ZenSourcer CRM enables recruiters to build lists of people to reach out to, find email, and automate followups. ZenSourcer saves time, doubles response rate, and gives visibility into what's working. Teams use ZenSourcer to collaborate on candidates, discover best practices, and never reach out to the same person twice. ZenSourcer has over 50 companies as customers, including Dropbox, Pinterest and Slack. The MIT grad and his co-founder have raised $2 million from Accel and YCombinator.

Rob Lehman joined Compass as one of its first 30 employees and has been promoted five times to now hold the title of Chief Growth Officer. Today, Lehman runs all expansion, sales, M&A and strategy for Compass, the real estate company valued at over $4 billion. Revenue under Lehman's leadership is expected to double again in 2018, and he's also driven its geographic expansion: the company is now in over 100 cities around the country and has completed over 20 M&A transactions.

Siqi Mou is the cofounder and CEO of HelloAva, an AI powered personal skincare consultant that customizes a routine of curated products, which has raised $1.5 million. Mou has proven to be a modern day renaissance woman, with her resume including roles at Morgan Stanley, the Federal Reserve and Bloomberg TV Indonesia. Currently, she serves as a Music Ambassador for the Carnegie Hall as a seasoned concert pianist.

Y Combinator-backed Bulletin takes vacant, marked-down real estate and offers online retailers a physical space to rent -- like coworking spaces, but for bringing small vendors together in one storefront. The company charges $300 to $2,000 a month and takes 30% of sales. Kriegsman and CEO Alana Branston have raised $2.2 million in VC funding to date.

Lucid created the first ?VR180 3D? camera for consumers, making it easy for people to create virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) content in 3D with a few clicks. (Google, Lenovo and LG are expected to launch VR180 cameras in 2018). Han Jin, who was born in China and raised in Germany, started his career at SanDisk then founded a series of AR/VR, artificial intelligence and robotics startups, earning an Edison Award in 2017. Lucid has raised $2.8 million to date.

Joseph Fasone was 16 when he decided to skip his senior year of high school and become IT director at WeWork, then a freshly launched New York City co-working space startup. Seven years later, he's the founder and CEO of his own promising startup, Pilot, a fiber-optic internet service provider for businesses across New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Boston. And just as WeWork built a company on empty real estate, Pilot takes advantage of the unused fiber optic cables already under a city. “The infrastructure was there, but there wasn't the right service provider,” Fasone says. Pilot has raised $32.3 million to build a service that’s faster than its competitors by orders of magnitude. Typical Internet speed is around 18.7 megabits per second. Pilot’s slowest service is 100 megabits per second, and offers two more tiers—one 10 times faster, another 100 times faster and a third 1000 times faster. Its nearest competitor is Verizon Fios, which is speedier than Pilot’s base option but slower than its others. "We built the entire business from the ground up, thinking, How do we reinvent this experience?” Fasone says. Given telcom's consolidation craze, Pilot looks ripe for acquisition, but Fasone claims he isn’t interested. “We're really looking forward to having the ability to bring this service to dozens of cities around the globe and build a freestanding organization where we control our own destiny.”

Pinch, founded in April 2016, has raised about $1 million from venture firms such as Homebrew and Collaborative Fund to help millennials use rent payments to build their credit scores. Before cofounding Pinch, Maia Bittner was cofounder and CTO at Rocksbox, a designer jewelry subscription service. Maia, a Bellingham, Wash. native, was featured in the book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.”

Marah Lidey's service Shine, which launched in 2016, aims to turn self-help on its head by offering millennials a personalized messaging experience to help them achieve self-care. More than half a million people now use Shine in 165 countries, and 93% of users say that the service has helped them improve their wellbeing. Lidey was inspired to cofound Shine while she was working as the director of mobile product and messaging at DoSomething.org and felt burned out. Lidey was the first in her family to go to college, and Shine has raised more than $3 million to date.

EatStreet's Matt Howard and Alex Wyler, along with a third cofounder, met in their freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and launched its first food delivery website called BadgerBites.com. Seven years later, the now-renamed EatStreet has raised over $37 million, launched in 250 markets and now delivers to more than 1.7 million customers as it moves to dominate delivery in mid-level markets.

Vishnevskiy is the CTO of Discord, a popular chat service for gamers with a massive daily active user base. He helped conceive of, design and create the platform with cofounder and CEO Jason Citron. Discord is currently valued at $770 million. Previously, Vishnevskiy developed tools for MMOs including Final Fantasy XI.

As a Swiss immigrant studying at the University of Albany, Stephan Goss lived off money from affiliate marketing: He’d advertise companies’ products across the internet, and they’d give him a commission every time he sent them a paying customer. In 2011, a health care client led him to a lucrative insight. If he could identify high-value Web visitors, such as diabetics, the client would be willing to pay him six times more, or $8 per lead, as opposed to the usual $1.25. So he started showing visitors a one-question survey that simply asked whether they were diabetic. If users said yes, Goss would show them relevant ads immediately after. That strategy became the basis for Zeeto, which has bootstrapped its way to 80 employees and projects revenue climbing 27% to $43 million this year. Today Goss has about 25 engineers and 7 data scientists working at his San Diego-based company on thorny math problems, such as determining the series of survey questions that generate the most ad revenue. “I have never had a boss,” he says. “I’ve never had a job, actually. I was really able to develop everything from scratch.”

In 2013, Slack, from Evanston, Illinois, and Liu, from Zhengzhou, China cofounded Sourcegraph, which makes code intelligence software to help developers be more productive. Sourcegraph, which has been billed the "Google for code," has raised more than $20 million in funding to date and has grown to 25 employees. Sourcegraph has 300,000 product users, and 800 million people use products that have been built using the service.

Maddern, from London, England, cofounded Button in 2014 with Michael Jaconi, Mike Dudas,Tanner Hackett, Stephen Milbank and Siddhartha Dabral. The team launched Button with the goal of contextually networking an app's functionality into other apps, the features of which have been chosen by companies like Uber, Groupon and Cond� Nast. So far, Button has raised $15 million in funding from investors such as Redpoint, Greycroft Partners and Slow Ventures. The startup has grown to 38 employees with about 100 partners and tens of millions of users.

Levy is the COO and cofounder One, Inc., the company behind After School, an anonymous social network that allows teens to share news, secrets and compliments. The company has raised $18 million of outside capital from General Catalyst, Charles River Ventures and Ron Conway. He is also the founder of Internapalooza, a tech conference for college students and interns.

Three years after graduating from Western Kentucky University, Houghton took the helm of the now 44-year-old travel brand, Lonely Planet, in 2013. One of his first tasks? Laying off 75 people, one-fifth of the company's employees, many of whom worked on LP's free-spirited print guidebooks. Industrywide, guidebook sales plummeted 40% from 2007 through 2012, so Houghton decided LP had to focus on digital to survive. One year after he took over, digital accounted for 30% of LP's revenue, and print sales also rebounded, up 27% since 2013. After college Houghton started his own production company, Houghton Multimedia, which got the attention of tobacco billionaire Brad Kelley. The two created NC2 Media, through which Kelley acquired LP for $77 million. "You have to be respectful of [the] past while trying to plow into the future," says Houghton. That future is filled with a flagship "Guides" app (nearly a million downloads in the last year) and partnerships with companies like Samsung. LP is the largest guidebook player, according to Nielsen, owning 25% of the nearly $90 million guidebook market.

Rashwan, a Cairo, Egypt native, built the first in-stream social commerce "buy buttons" on Twitter and Facebook through his startup Ribbon in 2012. He later left Columbia University to found his second startup Payout.com, whose payouts, disbursements and compliance API are used by top online lenders, such as LendUp and Prosper. The five-person startup completed AngelPad's accelerator program and has raised $4.75 million, led by Tim Draper of Draper Associates. Payout moved more than $50 million in loans over the past year.

As hackers, Abma and Prins were frustrated by how difficult and risky it was to tell a company about a security vulnerability. In 2011, the pair launched HackerOne, creating a platform where friendly hackers and security teams at organizations from startups to the U.S. Department of Defense partner to fix security issues. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company has raised $34 million in funding from investors such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and has paid hackers about $12 million in bug bounties.

Collin, a Parisian, cofounded Front App three years ago to create a collaborative inbox for businesses. Front, a Y Combinator alum, has raised $15 million to date from investors such as Social Capital, SoftTech VC, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Path cofounder David Morin. The San Francisco, Calif.-based service is intended to make external discussions seamless through email integration and partnerships with more than 20 companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and Instagram. More than 1,500 companies pay anywhere from $16 to $49 per user per month for Front.

El-Hage is CEO at Massdrop, a hobbyist platform that allows users to connect with other people with like-minded passions and buy goods like auto parts or headphones as a group. With input from users, San Francisco-based company also works with manufacturers to create custom products tailored to certain communities. The company has raised nearly $48 million from outside investors.

The Mexico-born entrepreneur started her own company after turning down offers from big tech giants. Sonant AI bills itself as an "AI receptionist for insurance agencies." Today, its AI system handles incoming calls (in multiple languages), books appointments and helps with quote requests. With $4.7 million in funding led by Pear VC, the startup is now serving more than 100 agencies across North America and Europe.

Jones joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2018, shortly after graduating college, just as Ethereum's biggest challenge--scalability--came into focus. The blockchain couldn't hope to replace the internet until transactions became far cheaper and faster. So Jones and a small group of developers launched Optimism (then known as Plasma Group) to tackle the problem. What began as a nonprofit focused on researching and developing scalability solutions has since grown into a company behind one of the most widely adopted approaches to speeding up blockchains. Today, Optimism's core software, the OP Stack, powers major platforms including Coinbase, Kraken and Sony, and secures more than $6 billion in assets.

Brandon Edelman, known as Bran Flakezz, is a Philadelphia-based comedy and lifestyle creator, podcast host, and entertainment personality with over 1 million followers across platforms. His humor-driven "TikTok Transparency" series explores influencer marketing and the creator economy.

Brooke McGee is founder of Studio June, a digital marketing agency focused on social media management, creative direction, influencer management and community building strategies for clients. She founded the company in 2019 and focuses on fashion, food and spirits, wellness and hospitality. The company has worked with more than 75 brands, such as EP Jewels. Studio June has managed socials for brands like Parke, for which they created a viral launch around the mockneck; Parke scaled $15 million in under two years amid Studio June's consistent monthly launches and strategic creative/marketing direction.

Cecilia Shen cofounded Utopai Studios (formerly Cybever AI) in 2022 after working as a data scientist and AI solutions engineer at Google X. Originally launched as a startup that generated 3D worlds for film and television, the company rebranded in August. Training its own AI models, today, Utopai partners with directors, studios and filmmakers to produce multi-shot scene sequences, using its technology to create realistic, flexible worlds and characters that come fully licensed and ready for filmmakers to use on set. The studio forms joint ventures to co-produce projects. The first two projects include a sci-fi series called Project 'Space' and two-film series Cortés, which are estimated to generate over $100 million in revenue.

Christian Perry is the cofounder and CEO of Undetectable AI and TruthScan. Undetectable AI builds tools to detect and rewrite AI-generated content to make it sound more human and natural, and bypass AI detectors. On the contrary, TruthScan offers software that can help enterprises identify content that was likely created with AI including fake receipts, deepfake audio and video clips and email scams. The two companies now collectively have 20 million users and more than 70 employees.

Selin Kocalar and Karun Kaushik launched Delve out of an MIT dorm room in 2023. The initial idea was to build an AI-based medical scribe to automate clinical note-taking, until they realized how complicated compliance was. They decided to pivot and today Delve helps some 500 companies including AI coding upstart Lovable automate compliance, saving both time and money. The startup recently closed a $32 million funding round at a $300 million valuation led by Insight Partners. Before launching Delve, Kocalar conducted research at MIT and Stanford, published 8 papers by age 20, and sent an experiment to the International Space Station as a high schooler.

Ed Elson is a writer, analyst and cohost on entrepreneur Scott Galloway's daily podcast, "Prof G Markets," which breaks down the news "moving the capital markets." Elson's 26-year-old perspective paired with Galloway's experience has attracted more than 10 million downloads for the podcast in its first year, and consistently lands the pair atop the business charts. A longtime fan of the show, Elson started as an intern with Galloway in 2020 and now serves as the solo host for most of the week to meet the demand from the quickly growing audience. He also hosts the First Time Founders podcast.

Emily "Emiru" Schunk has been playing dress-up since she was a little girl pretending to be different Disney princesses, but now Twitch's cosplay queen draws a million views a day to her livestreams, and it's video game producers who approach her to play their titles or wear the elaborate costumes of their characters at conventions. Forbes estimates the 27 year old earned around $1.5 million in the past year, not only from being the most-watched female streamer on Twitch, but expanding her content offerings beyond gaming to include a podcast and a YouTube variety series sponsored by AT&T. In addition, she runs a cosplay contest for her fans with a $100,000 purse, sponsored by Marvel Rivals, and has served as a co-owner of the content creators network One True King since 2022. In August, she even signed as an official Red Bull-sponsored "athlete," though by her own admission her athletic achievements don't go far beyond throwing out a first pitch at an MLB game this season. "Streaming started as people mostly playing video games, but now when you look at the top streamers, they're just straight up entertainers," Schunk says, citing the unique relationship streamers have with their fans. "On stream it's just you there for hours. People will see everything and eventually feel like they get to know you because, I mean, you can't fake a personality for 12 hours a day every single day for years."

Emily Sorger leads 50+ developers across live operations, features and gameplay for the game "Cookie Jam," a Match 3 franchise with 1.5 million monthly active users. Her team has shipped 100+ updates since launch, reduced crash rates by 50%, and doubled capacity for live A/B testing. She's taken on technical responsibilities traditionally owned by engineers like build & branch management, tech health, and releases while building new LiveOps and Production pipelines. In college, she co-launched a $1.2 million NSF-funded program ("Code Queens") mentoring high school girls in game and web development, and later mentored top teams at her college's Women's Hackathons. She was also captain of her college cheer team, which she says gave her invaluable leadership skills.

Eric Sedeño is a comedian, actor, and content creator with more than 1 million followers across platforms. Featured by Vogue as TikTok's Favorite Bestie, he co-hosted TikTok's first global music event, In the Mix, and cofounded the GLAAD Award-nominated podcast Gay and Afraid. He made his acting debut in Peacock's "Based on a True Story" and launched the Wild Wild Web podcast in September, a deep dive into internet trends past and present. Sedeño has also collaborated with brands including Spotify, Google Pixel, Calvin Klein, and Amazon.

Georgia Austin is the Founder and CEO of Wordbrew, a content agency that blends human creativity with AI efficiency to deliver authentic, on-brand writing at scale. Founded in 2022, Wordbrew hires real writers to ensure originality while using AI to streamline editing, maintain consistency, and match each client's voice and style. The company is projected to earn $1.2 million in revenue this year. Austin began her journey during the pandemic on Fiverr, quickly becoming the platform's top copywriter, after leaving her full-time job in 2019 to freelance, a bold move that sparked Wordbrew's rapid growth and success

Hailey Sani is a New York-based creator, writer, director, and on-camera personality with 2.7M followers across platforms. Her Dior Beauty campaign went viral with 8M organic views, and she has collaborated with Uniqlo, Dove, and Orebella. She has also hosted press junket interviews with stars including Jennifer Lopez, Millie Bobby Brown, and Chris Pratt.

As a child in Hong Kong, Heidi Wong taught herself English by devouring horror fiction. Today, she's known as the "Horror Queen", a screenwriter, artist, poet, and creator whose videos reach 60 to 70 million viewers each month. Her work has fueled partnerships with Netflix, Sony, Universal, 20th Century Studios, Paramount, and AMC. Wong is also a nationally recognized poet and visual artist with an MFA from NYU, and a nominee for the Dylan Thomas and Pushcart Prizes. She is currently developing her first horror feature film, podcast, and novel.

Jess Judith, as she is known to her followers, is a bilingual creator and on-air personality. She has amassed over 5 million followers across platforms and led major campaigns with Spotify, Red Bull, COVERGIRL, Neutrogena, T-Mobile, Dove, Lancôme, and Pandora Jewelry. As an interviewer, she has spoken with top artists including Bad Bunny, Shakira, Becky G, Rauw Alejandro, Young Miko, and Álvaro Díaz, and has covered the Grammys, Latin Grammys, Latin Billboard Awards, and Latin American Music Awards. Most recently, she served as the Live Announcer for Premios Tu Música Urbano.

Joe Mele is a Long Island based comedic content creator with over 45 million followers across platforms, including 32 million on TikTok and more than 1.6 billion likes, ranking among the app's top 50 creators. He rose to fame in 2020 with a viral TikTok of his father impersonating Anton Ego from Ratatouille and has built a global audience through family-driven comedic content. Mele has partnered with leading brands, including Gillette Labs, and is expanding into acting, long-form storytelling, and consumer products, with a CPG brand launching in 2026.

Jonathan Peter is a South African-born creator, video producer and has over 23 million followers. A comedian and actor, he is producing a feature film with Jamie Foxx, finalizing a seven-figure casino deal, and launching a luxury streetwear brand, BYE by Jonathan.

AI unicorns such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion aren't competitors many would dare to go up against. But Victor Perez thinks he has a chance to stand out with his $83 million-backed, one-stop-shop visual tool, Krea. Launched in 2022 with cofounder Diego Rodriguez Prado, Krea makes it easy to generate and edit images and videos. Marketers, photographers, game developers and architects pay between $10 and $60 a month to turn their rough sketches into photorealistic images--think transforming a simple white triangle into a mountaintop. But in the crowded market of AI image generation, Krea takes it one step further with customization. Enterprise clients including Shopify and Perplexity train and fine-tune their own Krea models to fit their taste and preferences. That way, any time they want to generate an image or render a new product, Krea knows their aesthetic and implements it into the results. "The novelty that comes out of creating with AI is not just empowering people who are already creatives," Perez says, "but enabling people who didn't think of themselves as creatives to express their ideas in a much easier way."

Leana Deeb is a content creator and entrepreneur with over 18 million followers across platforms. What started as fitness-focused content evolved into Uplift You, a fitness and personal growth app that explores modesty, faith, and women's empowerment. Currently, she serves as creative director for her modest activewear line in collaboration with Gymshark.

Leilani Green has over 11 million followers across social media and is known for high-definition makeup transformations and her "big sis" persona. She co-developed a custom cream lip stain with Sephora Collection, the brand's first-ever licensing project with a creator.

Rohit Rustogi is a Stanford medical school dropout who received a Fulbright award to research brain injuries. Will Yin is a Stanford mathematics and computer science dropout. The two started Mandolin in 2024 to help provide insurance for those with specialty diseases like cancer, immune disorders and Alzheimer's. The startup has raised $40 million.

Olivia Ferney is CMO at Top Tier Travel, a luxury travel company that accommodates celebrities, executives and the ultra-wealthy. Ferney has also become a Tik Tok star, with nearly half a million followers and hundreds of viral videos known for staying "cool" while talking to high net worth clients on their travel demands. The company provides access to exclusive accommodations like suites, villas and private penthouses. In her first four months, Ferney designed a marketing strategy that generated more than 100M views and created more than $4M in added sales. She built out social media programs, structured corporate partnerships, increased company efficiency and scaled the company's affiliate sales network to more than 1,500 partners.

Onanma Okeke is the founder and CEO of Corvane, an AI-powered customer research platform helping retail and consumer goods brands transform CRM data and shopper panels into actionable insights. Launched this year, Corvane is projecting to reach $1 million in revenue, thanks to work with with Pampers, Vaseline and Colgate, among others. Okeke previously cofounded Lanor, a venture-backed product operations platform serving over 5,000 brands and is the founder of Tent, a nonprofit distributing 4,000 educational booklets to Nigerian orphanages. She is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and a recognized speaker in youth leadership and entrepreneurship.

Owen Lawrie is founder of Uplift Hospice, which has grown from one location with 30 patients and 10 employees to a regional provider in three states with more than 600 patients and 260 employees. Uplift Hospice focuses on company culture and employee satisfaction. Its revenue has grown from $7 million in 2022 to a projected $40.8 million in 2025.

Peter Goldsborough began coding at 14 and in high school started doing university-level research. After interning at Google, Bloomberg and Facebook, he dropped out of college for a full time job at Facebook AI Research at age 19. In July 2024, he cofounded Rune Technologies, which builds AI software called TyrOS that predicts military supply chain gaps (think fuel and medical supplies). With $30 million in funding, the nascent startup has quickly gained traction in defense and military logistics and is now used by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in active duty.

Sam Eckholm is a U.S. Air Force veteran and founder of SE Media, a content company with over 2.5 million followers and 500 million views. The company partners with the Pentagon, Secret Service, and defense contractors, creating content that celebrates veterans and inspires young people to serve. Eckholm documented a multi-national anti-submarine exercise in strategic North Atlantic waters and was awarded an Air Force Commendation Medal for his work supporting the Air Force Storytelling Mission. He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Beauty influencer Sarah Cheung has leveraged her social media following to cofound SACHEU Beauty, maker of the first stainless steel gua sha and facial roller to bring a more hygienic and sustainable alternative to those on the market. Beyond Cheung's own social media following (over 600,000 across TikTok and Instagram) driving sales, SACHEU's products can be found on its website and across Ulta, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus. The company has received $15 million in funding so far, from funders like Gloss Ventures, an investment fund for creator-fueled brands, and private equity firm Peterson Partners.

Before leaving the company this fall to start an MBA program at Stanford, Spencer Ma was the youngest director (and only leader under 30) for Carry1st, Africa's leading mobile games publisher. He launched and scaled a payments solution that enables game publishers to accept local methods in Africa--where 95% of people lack Visa/Mastercard access that platforms such as Google Play Store and Apple App Store require. He helped secure partnerships with Activision, Tencent, EA, Supercell, and Riot Games, growing Pay1st to $20 million in annual transactions and $2 million in profit, boosting partner revenue in Africa by 5x on average and unlocking millions of new players. He also drove the launch of dedicated servers for several popular titles, cutting latency for 5 million daily players who previously relied on Europe's servers. His "Call of Duty" campaign was so impactful that Activision added Africa to its global championship for the first time, with Carry1st as tournament organizer.

Stephanie Devli has turned a pandemic-era tie-dye craze into a $10 million (2025 projected revenue) business, all with no outside funding. The founder and CEO of Happy Camp3r rooted the brand's mission in mental health awareness, inspired by Devli's first goal of becoming a therapist. Known for its pastel-colored sweat suits, its products can be found on its website online and at a number of retailers, including Nordstrom. The brand also counts wholesale and private-label operations to supplement growth.

SwiftSku helps convenience store owners compete with large chains that are driving family-owned companies out of business. Founded by Mit Patel and Daniel Mazur, both children of immigrants, SwiftSku has built out a point-of-sale system, back-office applications and even more for companies, providing them the tools to add 10% to their profit margin and save more than 15 hours a week in manual tasks that are now automated. It's a personal mission for Patel, who grew up at his parent's gas station. "Most kids learned math in school, I learned it by counting 10-packs from a carton of cigarettes," he says. SwiftSku has over 3,000 convenience stores across the U.S., and the company has raised $4.7 million in funding from The Dorm Fund, Eppes Creek Ventures, CEAS Investments and Y Combinator.

Sylvester Brewster, known as Sly Huncho, is a creator, barber, and entrepreneur who rose to fame for his haircuts, gaining over 6 million followers across platforms in under a year. From working at Wendy's and experiencing homelessness during the pandemic, Brewster launched the grooming brand Head Huncho and its signature product, the Spiceball Blaster.

Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel cofounded The Interaction Company, which started Poke, a personal assistant that connects to your email, calendar and files. Poke handles everyday tasks like drafting replies, paying or flagging invoices, rescheduling meetings, and booking travel--all from iMessage, where it lives. All that's needed is a short prompt via text. So far, Poke has been used by 6,000 beta testers from employees at companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. The Palo Alto-based startup has raised a $15 million seed round at a $100 million valuation led by General Catalyst, with participation from angels from Stripe, Google and OpenAI.

Xyla Foxlin is a mechatronics engineer, pilot, and creator whose social media channels teach her more than 1 million followers about high-powered rockets, boatbuilding, composite fabrication, math, physics, and more. Her nonprofit, Beauty and the Bolt, was absorbed by Reinvented in 2020. Together they've gone on to teach more than 20,000 kids to use their first tool. In August 2024, Foxlin successfully completed a transcontinental solo flight in her 1946 Cessna 140. She was also crowned Miss Greater Cleveland 2018 in the Miss America program.

Amanda Diaz is a Cuban-American beauty creator who has amassed over 6 million followers and done campaigns with top brands including Dior, Ralph Lauren, YSL, and Garnier. She's also been central to CoverGirl's inaugural #BEACOVERGIRL contest, serving on the board of trustees. Outside of content creation, Diaz has become an activist and social justice advocate-herself a former political refugee who fled Havana, Cuba, for the U.S. with her family at age five. To that end, she has visited the White House with Poderistas, a nonprofit organization founded to celebrate Latina culture and empower the Latina community, to discuss voting with Vice President Kamala Harris. Diaz has also traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border to support asylum seekers with the nonprofit This Is About Humanity. Recently, she was named to Forbes' Top Creators Fashion 50 list.

AI-based events planner Nowadays claims to have booked events for tech giants like Google, Amazon and Notion. CEO Anna Sun says users input details about an event, and an AI bot contacts venues and deals with negotiations on their behalf. Customers confirm and pay for their bookings through Nowadays, which charges an annual subscription fee or a 5% sourcing fee per event and additionally receives between 7-10% commission from hotels on confirmed bookings. The Y Combinator company claims to have $1.8 million in funding, and $2 million in events were booked on the platform last year.

Audrey Djiya is the cofounder and CEO of Zimi, a cross-border commerce company that works with international businesses to revolutionize global trade. Cross-border businesses face challenges like high shipping costs (sometimes 50% or more of order value), long delivery times, unreliable postal services, and inefficient payments. Zimi, which receives merchandise ahead of time and takes care of logistics, shipping, and cross-border payments is set to handle over $2 million in international orders within months of its launch and close a $2.5 million seed round from investors including Y Combinator. The company has partnered with major U.S. retailers like Nordstrom and Shopbop.

Latino creator Carlos Eduardo Espina has amassed more than 10 million followers for his Spanish content online. Dubbed "A One-Man Telemundo on TikTok" by the New York Times, his informational content informs for U.S. Latino community and has led him to collaborate with the Biden White House and a recent broadcast from the Democratic National Convention. In 2022, he founded Migrantes Unidos, a nonprofit that supports immigrants by providing free citizenship classes, English courses, college workshops and other services. Up Next: Espina aims to devote even more time to his nonprofit and establish a community center in Texas.

Chelsea Parke Kramer first launched her eponymous brand, Parke, in 2022 with repurposed recycled denim. Since then, the brand has expanded to include t-shirts, in-house made jeans and denim jackets and sweatshirts. The company, which is self-funded by Kramer, projects to make over $13 million in revenue this year. Rapid growth has been in part fueled by the brand's NYC pop-ups, which doubled sales, all while not spending a single dollar in advertising, according to Kramer. The company is purely DTC and has no retail partners.

Sisters Nikhara and Kiara Nirghin are the cofounders of Chima, a company building "human reasoning" AI systems for enterprise functions. Chima's systems are designed to handle everyday business scenarios like automating repetitive tasks. The company has received $5 million in total funding from investors such as Elad Gil, General Catalyst and Y Combinator. Nikhara has a background in mathematical statistics and actuarial science, and obtained an MBA from London Business School. Kiara is a Thiel Fellow and fellow of Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian's 776 Foundation.

Chloe Xiang is the founder and editor-in-chief of Keke Magazine, a not-for-profit publication focused on the intersection of feminism, politics, and media with 15 contributors globally and readers in more than 200 countries. She founded the company in 2017 and typically publishes more than 100 stories each year. Along with her entrepreneurial work, Xiang is also a social media manager at The New Yorker where she runs the magazine's presence across all social media platforms (26 million followers). She's spearheaded their #BookTok content, launched The New Yorker on Apple Maps, showcasing staff-recommended bookstores. She's also covered the National Book Awards and launched #BookTok social media collaborations with award-winning writers like Leslie Jamison and Lauren Groff.

Leow left Malaysia at 18 for San Francisco to attend Minerva University, where she discovered crypto trading. This led her from investing with Softbank Ventures Korea and Ideate Investments in Shanghai to cofounding a $30 million hedge fund by 21. In 2021, she launched Drift, now one of the largest platforms for perpetual futures and borrow-lending on the Solana blockchain with $50 billion in cumulative trading volume and $500 million in deposits across 200,000 users. Backed by $52.5 million from investors including Polychain Capital and Multicoin Capital, Drift aims to become the "Robinhood of crypto".

Sarah Nesheim and Todd Baldwin cofounded Crafted in 2021. The company helps consumer brands use digital marketing to drive in-store sales, especially small businesses expanding to physical stores for the first time. They do this by working with influencers--whether local or celebrity--to feature the product in partnership deals, and user generated content. While Crafted's major clients include brands like Jack Daniel's, Cinnabon and Michelin, the company is also focused on smaller brands like Scotch Boyz, Soom, and Hella Cocktail Co. The company has secured $1 million in total funding from backers like Third Kind Ventures and Jon Oringer (the founder of Shutterstock).

Danielle Spencer is founder and CEO of Some Creative Agency, which she launched in 2022. Some Creative Agency helps businesses with tasks like marketing and brand strategy, creative design, data research, and diversity, equity and inclusion--working with companies to tailor practices from hiring to staff training. The company's primary client base is small businesses as they scale and refine their brand messaging. Spencer's projects include marketing Canada's $160 million Black Entrepreneurs Loan Fund, and developing programs that generated more than $14 million for Black entrepreneurship organizations.

Known for her offbeat laugh and women-focused content, TikTok creator Afualo earned an estimated $2.9 million last year from a mix of brand deals and her two podcasts: The Comment Section, a weekly show on which guests like actor Rainn Wilson and singer-songwriter Kehlani talk about how to deal with internet hate, and Two Idiot Girls, where she and her sister, Deison, share embarrassing stories and funny life experiences. With a 9 million strong audience consisting mostly of women under 35, Afualo's social platforms appeal to sponsors like Elf Cosmetics and the NBA. In April 2023, she signed a two-year deal with Spotify, which Forbes estimates earns her $450,000 a year. Fresh off the success of LOUD, her best-selling memoir, Afualo is setting her focus on mainstream media. "Traditional Hollywood now must be a lot more open to the idea of including internet people," she says. "TV and movies-that's my new venture."

Eli Cohen is the founder of OSMOS, a marketing company that helps founders of early-stage startups reach long-term goals and generate funding. Their revenue comes from project-based fees for software development and creative projects. They also have monthly retainer options ($20,000 on average) for go-to-market strategies, creative development, and product iteration that requires longer-term work. Clients include cannabis app XSHACK, mental health platform Cocoon, and AI app Crawler. Osmos also takes equity in some early-stage startups they service in exchange for discounted fees and advisory. Two clients in their portfolio have exceeded $5 million valuations this year. They have 25 employees across the U.S., Italy and Philippines and have won awards from the CSS Design Awards, OPL, and Awwwards.com.

Soon after Jamaican biologist Eric Delapenha started Strands Hair Care, a customizable hair products line, he realized that customizable products were not accessible to every-day consumers. So in 2022 he partnered with Walmart to create The Hair Lab by Strands, a retailer-friendly hair care line that allows customers to purchase "base" products and add in oils for their specific needs. It is now sold at over 2,300 Walmart stores and over 100 CVS locations. Strands has $10 million in funding from KarpReilly among others, and launched a new personalized bodycare line this summer--The Body Lab. It is projected to make $8.2 million in revenue this year.

Ian Boggs is a Japan-born creator and actor whose videos have earned him a global audience of more than 37 million followers. He has worked with, directed projects, or acted for brands and streamers including Netflix, Google, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and National Geographic. He recently hosted the world premiere for FX's popular new series Shōgun, set in 1600s Japan. Boggs' work, which includes comedic skits, TikTok reviews, and lifestyle blogs, has landed him invites to The Oscars and the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Jessamine Burgum founded Pinky Promise, a Los Angeles-based film and production studio, in November 2020. It's built on a private equity-style model to mitigate financial risk: High net worth individuals, institutional investors, and friends and family have invested into two funds that underwrite film production. The all-female team has raised $27 million in funding and has developed a 14-film roster. Burgum debuted "Honk for Jesus, Save your Soul" in 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival, followed by screenings at other notable film festivals such as Cannes and SXSW. "The Starling Girl" (featuring Eliza Scanlen and Lewis Pullman) garnered an Indie Spirit Award nomination, "I Don't Understand You" (featuring Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells and Amanda Seyfried) won the Variety Comedy Duo Award at SXSW 2024. Burgum's company also developed, produced and financed Scarlett Johansson's directorial debut, "Eleanor the Great."

Joe Ando's passion for fashion has landed him more than 7 million followers and opportunities to design dresses from scratch for major public figures, celebrities and creatives. The Japanese-American creator found himself making custom dresses out of his own atelier for top musicians and actresses-including Dakota Johnson, Keke Palmer, Mille Bobby-Brown and others. This past summer, Ando made the dress worn by Ella Emhoff on stage with stepmother and presidential candidate Kamala Harris as she accepted the nomination for the Democratic party (which he says is his greatest achievement to date). He was an honoree on Meta's first-ever Creators of Tomorrow list, and was a guest speaker at YouTube Brandcast 2024.

Fourth-year med school student Joel Bervell, known online as the "Medical Mythbuster," is a Ghanaian-American creator who uses social media to educate his 1 million followers about racial disparities in medicine. In 2023, he was a TED Fellow, honoree on the Forbes 30 Under 30 local list for Seattle and recipient of a TikTok Changemaker Award. In 2023, Bervell was named to the UN-recognized Most Influential People of African Descent list for health and wellness. He has spoken with the Today Show and Good Morning America; been called a "revolutionary" by Scientific American; and published commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine, NPR, the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, and the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Known as "Jordan The Stallion" across social media platforms, the now-viral creator Jordan Howlett overcame homelessness and depression to become Division I baseball player before starting his social media career. He has since raked in billions of views and drawn over 29 million followers across platforms--including 13 million on TikTok--sharing videos of his lifestyle, opinions, jokes, reactions, go-to recipes, hot takes about the fast food industry and latest trends. Recognizable for his speaking-to-himself-in-the-bathroom-mirror videos, Howlett was recently included on the 2024 Forbes Top Creators list.

Justin Chae is Cofounder and CEO of Meridian Strategies, a New York public affairs firm that is projected to earn $4.5 million in revenue this year. Chae started out in New York City politics before realizing he wanted to start his own PR firm to help others navigate his hometown's political system, so he cofounded the company in 2020. Now the sole cofounder at the startup, Chae crafts successful political campaigns for government candidates, elected officials, and organizations like the NYC Department of Sanitation, NYC Health and Hospitals, unions and real estate developers. Services include fundraising, hiring canvassers, phone banking, creating visual and email marketing campaigns, and conducting research.

Logan Simmons is cofounder and CMO at TRNDY Social, which specializes in providing small and mid-tier direct-to-consumer brands with media campaigns involving globally recognized athletes and celebrities. These partnerships and promotions help athletes tell their stories outside of their sport or specialty, and help smaller companies get high-level placement for their products. TRNDY Social negotiates brand partnerships, produces TV commercials, places Times Square billboards and manages large-scale media buys in relation to these campaigns. The company launched in 2022 and is expected to earn $6.2 million in revenue this year. The company has 26 full time employees and has worked with more than 300 brands like MUD/WTR, Ecobee, Clearly Canadian and SaunaFin; and they've booked talent including Howie Mandel and Donovan McNabb, among others.

Alongside a team of machine-learning engineers, Matt Bogoroch with over-30 cofounders Adam Bogoroch and Shardul Frey launched Birdseye in 2022. Their vision was simple: to build an autonomous and hyper-personalized email marketing platform. Birdseye's proprietary software uses AI to tailor content and promotions to each recipient, including product recommendations based on predicted color, style, and sizing preferences. It has processed more than 3 million transactions for retailers across North America. The company charges a performance fee based on the revenue it generates for its customers. Birdseye has secured $3.5 million in funding from investors like Drive Capital.

Meredith Duxbury is a New York-based content creator and model with over 20 million followers who has walked the runway at Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks most notably walking the DIESEL FW'24 Show. She has served as a model and ambassador for brands such as Tory Burch, Charlotte Tilbury, Prada Beauty, BOSS, L'Oréal, YSL Beauty, e.l.f., Dior Beauty, Valentino Beauty, Armani Beauty and many more. Last year, she parlayed her TikTok stardom into a global makeup line with Morphe Cosmetics and was named to Forbes' Top Creators in Fashion list.

Nikan Shahidi is the cofounder and CEO of Webstacks, a digital agency that develops websites for B2B technology companies. Inspired by his work as a former consultant, Shahidi realized that his consulting clients were struggling to find momentum with their websites. So he and his brother launched Webstacks in January 2020 to offer web design, web development, search engine optimization, web-page strategy, email marketing design, and more. The startup is self-funded and in their first year did about $1.2 million in revenue. By 2023 they hit nearly $10 million in annual revenue and had grown the team to 60 employees (50 full-time). Today, their clients are some of the fastest growing companies in the B2B technology space, including ServiceTitan, Motive, VCockroach Labs, and Calendly.

Nischal Nadhamuni cofounded Klarity as CTO, an AI startup aimed at automating document and data review for other companies. Nadhamuni met his cofounder Andrew Antos in an entrepreneur class at MIT and the two enrolled Klarity in Y Combinator in 2018. The startup closed a $70 million Series B round in June, bringing total funding to $90 million. It's backed by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, with participation from Scale Venture Partners, Tola Capital, and others. Customers include OpenAI, Zoom, Cloudflare and Intercom.

Using a process called enhanced rock weathering (ERW), Terradot applies crushed silicate rock powder to agricultural fields, removing carbon from the atmosphere for 10,000-plus years, Munukutla says, and improving soil health to boost farmers' yields. With his cofounder, prior Under 30 listmaker James Kanoff, Munukutla raised $5.2 million in venture funding from investors that include Floodgate, John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins and Sheryl Sandberg. He is finalizing a Series A and received $500,000 in grants from organizations like Stanford's TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy and 776 Foundation.

At 26, Coplan is redefining how we predict the future. During Covid, the NYU dropout launched Polymarket, a blockchain-based platform that allows users to bet on the outcome of events. It received $74 million from the likes of Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Vitalik Buterin and processed over $3.5 billion in 2024 alone. Its crowd-driven forecasts even outperformed national polls, correctly predicting Donald Trump's presidential win. A week after the election, the FBI stormed Coplan's residence and seized devices amid reported allegations that the platform allowed users in the United States to place bets in violation of its 2022 settlement with the U.S. government.

Dr. Tamara Zubatiy Nelson is cofounder and CEO of Barometer, which consumes premium media, like podcasts, and vets it with AI. This helps companies looking to advertise go beyond SEO keywords to confirm a podcast's topic, tone, target audience and more to make sure it's an appropriate match to advertise on. With a PhD in human-centered AI, Nelson works with groups like Horizon Media, BetterHelp and SiriusXM. She said Barometer has routed more than $100 million in global ad spend to tens of thousands of creators in multiple languages. Her awards include a Cynopsis Top Women in Media in 2023 and AdTech Innovator Honoree in 2023 as well as SXSW Pitch Winner of FastPitch in AI category.

Tinashe Chaponda is the founder of Sosani Studios, which works with Gen Z and millennial talent and clients including Sony, Lexus and Amazon. Chaponda charges an agency fee of 20% to 70%, depending on the project, for services like creating brand strategy and full-service influencer campaign management. Since its founding in 2020, Sosani has executed approximately $3 million worth of campaigns and consulted on an additional $2 million of creator deals. Advertising campaigns have featured talent such as Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Khaby Lame, Alicia Keys, and over 2,000 other creators. Originally from Zimbabwe, Chaponda calls himself "the Mayor of Influencer Marketing."

Trevor Carlson is a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who began the plastic-crate company Sidio five years ago as a side hustle, making milk crate dividers to keep television and movie production crew equipment organized. When Hollywood shut down during the pandemic, he pivoted to crates for camping and outdoor gear organization, but quickly expanded. Now, Sidio is used by students moving and large tech companies--it counts Apple, Anduril, and Tesla as clients which order as much as $15,000 of crates at a time. The company's revenue has grown to an expected $6 million by the end of 2024.

In 2019, when Alexander Isaacson and cofounder Nikhil Bharadwaj, both now 28, started selling commercial electric vehicle chargers -- the sort you see at airports and in shopping mall parking lots -- the problems started almost immediately. If the devices lost internet connection or a server went out, they couldn't process payments, and drivers were stranded. Irate customers sent hate mail: " 'I hope your CEO dies, I hope your company goes bankrupt,' " Isaacson recalls. In response, the Penn State alums built a payment system that bypasses the internet, letting drivers use a cryptography-powered smartphone app to tap and pay at the charger. It has enabled them to place chargers in places with poor Wi-Fi connectivity, like large apartment buildings and campus housing. Backed by $54 million from investors, Xeal is building a network of more than 10,000 chargers in 60-plus metro areas, forging partnerships with real estate developers including Brookfield, AvalonBay and Harrison Street.

Keila and Abraham Shaheen are cofounders at Zenfulnote, a mindfulness app built to help users track emotional triggers, note their moods and find prompts for journaling. The married couple started the company on the heels of Keila's self-published book called "The Shadow Work Journal." The book went viral on TikTok in 2023, initially selling more than 600,000 copies, until she partnered with Simon & Schuster (which paid her a multi-million dollar deal for "The Shadow Work Journal" and two more that are forthcoming), and ultimately hit one million books sold in less than one year. The journal outsold releases from Oprah and Elon Musk, and hit Amazon's number one spot four times with more than 1.3 million copies sold. Since founding the app in 2021, the cofounders' aim for Zenfulnote is to help individuals build awareness around the inner world, allowing them to transform and improve mental health and build resilience.

Akshaya Dinesh, a Thiel Fellow, left Stanford to cofound her first startup Ladder (now known as Nova) at age 19 and served as CEO of the consumer-oriented Gen Z community platform for a year before leaving. Two months later, in 2021, she launched Spellbound based on the lessons she'd learned about the underutilization of email marketing in retaining customers. Spellbound allows brands to embed actions like surveys, signup forms and shopping carts directly within their email marketing. The goal is to increase direct engagement for DTC brands by reducing friction for consumers to take action with brands. Spellbound has sent over 45 million emails for its enterprise customers who pay a monthly subscription fee, including Mr. Beast's Feastables, Recess, and OLIPOP. Spellbound has accumulated $5.5 million in funding from investors including Craft Ventures and Neo.

Creator Alan 'Chikin' Chow began his career in Hollywood, with acting roles in shows including ABC's "Grey's Anatomy." Now, having amassed an audience of more than 45 million in the two short years since launching his social media career, Chow has at times surpassed Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson in traffic and says he continues to grow his channel by more than 1.5 million subscribers each month--earning him recognition from YouTube as its No. 1 Shorts Creator.

Alexandra Griffon started BlueCargo five years ago with cofounder Laura Theveniau to streamline container transportation through maritime ports. Backed with $15 million from investors including Y Combinator and Soma Capital, the software aims to assist customers in picking up and returning their containers efficiently and more cost-effectively. Some 1,800 businesses, including GE, Samsung, Flexport and J.B. Hunt are customers which use BlueCargo's services across 63 ports and terminals in the United States. The startup is now moving into providing similar services at railyards, then plans to expand to Europe and Asia.

Ukrainian founder Anna Believantseva has a bold idea: better prosthetics and not only for people who have medical necessities. To get started, Esper Bionics has raised $2 million from NewLab Fund, Alchemist Accelerator, and others. Esper Bionics claims its prosthesis is a smart, self-learning system that can adjust itself based on the user's behavior. The startup has worked with soldiers injured during the Ukrainian-Russian war, providing more than 15 prosthetic hands to Ukrainian soldiers.

Barbara DelleMonache is the founder of Curls Monthly, a subscription service geared toward curly-haired women who want to test new haircare products before committing to full-size bottles. She has leveraged her popularity on TikTok (followers: 900,000) to grow the company to projected revenues of $1.2 million in 2023.

In 2020, Emily Yuan dropped out of Stanford to build Picnic, a social media app targeted toward building communities for Gen Z'ers. Yuan says her 13-year-old sister was among the first users of the app. Yuan met her cofounder Nico Laqua in college and claims that Picnic, which pivoted to Basket Entertainment, has over 35 games and 150 million monthly users. The San Francisco-based duo claim to have worked with brands like Barbie and Marvel and reported $6 million in year-to-date revenue in 2023.

This former Shopify web developer is applying the e-commerce playbook to climate change. In 2020, Spellacy cofounded Patch, a climate-tech platform that enables do-gooder companies to browse and buy carbon credits from more than 50 project developers that list their climate projects--everything from ocean carbon removal to forest protection--on the site. He has secured $84 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and counts more than 400 companies as customers, including software business AutoDesk. In April, San Francisco-based Patch launched an operating system for carbon credit suppliers to easily manage their inventory, logging sales without time-consuming paperwork. Some 440 million tons of credits are currently managed on the platform. Says Spellacy, "I'm a really big believer that markets got us into this problem and are what's going to drive us out of this problem."

Miami-born Victoriano wants to update telenovelas, those old-school Latin American TV soap operas, for the 21st century through her podcast company, Sonoro. Launched in 2020, Los Angeles-based Sonoro partners with more than 300 Latino storytellers to develop podcast series in English, Spanish and Spanglish. "We felt the telenovela was due for a bit of a refresh," says Victoriano, who previously helped launch the popular "Dirty John" podcast at the Los Angeles Times. It seems to be working: Sonoro's 172 titles, which include hits like "Princess of South Beach" and "Tejana," average more than 31 million monthly downloads. Their next venture: the big screen. Backed by $13 million in funding, Sonoro has secured deals with Paramount+ and Netflix and now has a half-dozen podcasts being adapted for TV and film. "The toughest part is sometimes Latinos are still seen as niche, but there's 60 million in the U.S., 660 million around the world," Victoriano says. "So for us... the mission can be the revenue."

As the founder of Strap Technologies, Diego Roel created ARA, a wearable assistive technology for people who are visually impaired, a device that aims to replace the traditional white cane. ARA uses sonar and lidar sensors to provide haptic feedback whenever a person is near an object to alert them to recourse their path. Launched in 2020, the Austin, Texas-based company has raised $3.5 million in angel and VC funding.

The actress and LGBTQ+ activist gained viral fame with her "Days of Girlhood" TikTok series, which documented her gender transition and drew more than 1 billion views. "Whether somebody's trans or not, I just hope they can watch my videos and feel inspired to unlock a new part of themselves," she says. Mulvaney, who was named a 2023 Forbes Top Creator and raked in an estimated $2 million in earnings last year, found herself at the center of an unexpected political crossfire after Bud Light paid her to post a video featuring a custom beer with her face on the can, sparking a widespread boycott of the brand. Nevertheless, she's landed partnerships with companies like Nike and MAC, and she has urged brands to go beyond "just inclusive marketing" to stand up for what's right. Last year, she sat down with President Joe Biden to discuss trans rights and this year, she won Breakout Creator of the Year at the Streamy Awards, the Oscars of the Internet. "I always want my followers to know it's because of them that I'm in those rooms," says Mulvaney, who is now represented by CAA.

Out of his Princeton dorm room, Edward Tian built GPTZero, a tool that for the most part accurately detects whether a text was written by a human or generated by popular artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Llama. Alexander Cui dropped out of university to join Tian. With $3.5 million in seed funding from Altman Capital, Uncork Capital, Neo and Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, GPTZero has 1.5 million registered users and 6,000 paying customers ranging from teachers to journalists.

After Lyme disease derailed Hannah Olson's first post-grad job at a design firm, she was inspired to create workplaces that don't discriminate based on disability. First, she co-launched Chronically Capable in 2019, now one of the largest disability-oriented recruiting platforms in the world. Next, she cofounded Disclo, an HR tech software startup helping employees to safely disclose and ask for accommodations at work. Disclo supports some 30,000 workers with job accommodations at companies as large as Kraft Heinz. It claims that while the typical disability disclosure rate at companies hovers at 3-4%, companies using Disclo see 20% of their employees enrolled in their platform. Disclo has accumulated $6.8 million in funding from investors like Y Combinator, Bain Capital Ventures and General Catalyst.

Harrison Chase only cofounded LangChain in late 2022, but the company caught instant attention for enabling anyone to build apps powered by large language models like GPT-4 in as little as two dozen lines of code. Its free tool now has more than 20 million installations. Benchmark led a $10 million seed investment in March, and Sequoia is reported to have invested in a $20 million round just weeks later. The capital will power LangChain's long-term mission to make it as easy as possible to build LLM applications. In July, it launched a new platform for debugging and testing such apps.

Jade Watson is the founder and executive producer of SickBird Productions, a full-service production company that makes digital and unscripted content. After starting her career developing content for VC backed companies, she realized the lack of diverse leadership and founded SickBird to empower women and people of color through storytelling. The company's podcast, "Petty Crimes," has generated more than 1.5 million downloads and was recognized by the "New York Times." Entirely self-funded, SickBird generated seven figures in 2022 revenue and projects seven figures in 2023.

Rootly was the result of two Instacart employees, JJ Tang and cofounder Quentin Rousseau (above age 30), combining forces from opposite ends of a problem. Tang worked on the enterprise product side, while Rousseau was a site reliability engineer. The duo developed incident automation software to increase uptime, then founded Rootly after realizing this same premise was essential for other companies?as well as critical services like 911 call centers and suicide hotlines. Today, companies like Cisco, Nvidia, and Shell are among the biggest clients that use Rootly to manage a collective 60,000 incidents per year. Rootly was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2021 batch and has amassed $15 million from investors including Gradient Ventures.

After founding Ascend Agency in 2020, Jonathan Jadali has built the public relations company to 20 employees and more than 20,000 clients. Jadali says they are anticipated to reach an annual revenue of $12 million for the current fiscal year. During the pandemic, the company launched the Ascend Gives Back initiative to provide nonprofits with free PR services.

Started as a class project at Boston College, Katie Diasti is the founder of period care company Viv. She sells a line of eco-friendly products, like organic cotton tampons and bamboo panty liners. Her products are sold in over 2,000 stores, including CVS, Wegmans and Stop & Shop. Viv has received $1 million in funding.

Twins Matthew and Michael Vega-Sanz dropped out of Babson College in 2018 to build a car-sharing app--then Covid-19 totaled it. "We had negative $2,800 in the bank and a dead startup. We felt like absolute failures," says Matthew, the startup's CEO. But the setback was just a detour to a bigger business. Their new startup, Lula, helps almost 5,000 logistics and car rental companies build flexible insurance packages to reduce premiums, such as offering pay-per-day insurance for trucking fleets, car sharing and daily rentals. Coming soon: AI to sell the insurance. They count Flexport, the unicorn shipping company, among their customers and have $45 million in funding from folks like Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. The first- generation Americans see it as their duty to take big risks. "Founders, especially here in the United States, have the privilege to be crazy," Matthew says. "I think about our family in Cuba, where being crazy gets you locked up as a political prisoner."

Unable to find a swimsuit she liked for an upcoming vacation, Riss Barlow started sketching her own designs on sticky notes. She launched Nani Swimwear while in college, naming the company after the Hawaiian word for beautiful, and selling swimsuits with more coverage and support for active women. Her swimsuits are now sold by REI and Dick's Sporting Goods. The bootstrapped company expects to hit $7.5 million in revenue in 2023.

One More Multiverse is a platform to play tabletop roleplaying games online with your friends. Since 2019, OMM has garnered 20 million views on TikTok, $17.5 million raised, and a discord that's 45,000 members strong. Founder Sara Alfageeh says she identifies as an artist before an entrepreneur, doing artwork for clients like Hank Green, Scholastic, Disney, Google, Lucasfilm, Nickelodeon, and more. She's also written an award-winning and bestselling graphic novel Squire, produced a short film on Muslim Futurism, Alhamdu, that was selected for the Tribeca Film Festival, lead mentorship programs for Muslim creatives at Mipsterz, and gone viral for designing new Marvel superheroes.

A decade ago, Serena Kerrigan created what she describes as her online alter-ego -- "SFK" or "Serena F*cking Kerrigan" -- to project confidence through her bouts of insecurity. Years later, the Latina entrepreneur has turned that persona into a sprawling brand. During Covid lockdowns she launched "Let's F*cking Date," a series of card games aimed at helping players take on the world of dating. (She says the cards, available through fashion hub Revolve and elsewhere online, have done more than $1 million in sales, and the latest iteration of the game, "Let's F*cking Go," just launched this month.) Beyond the card biz, Kerrigan has landed brand partnerships with giants from Nike and H&M to Bumble and created products with STUDS and Joe & the Juice, which she says led to her first-ever billboard in New York City. Most recently, Kerrigan has been edging onto the big-stage and big-screen: She's performed a dozen live, one-woman comedy shows (including at the Gramercy Theater), and NBCUniversal named her to its first NBCU Creator Accelerator Cohort, where honorees will create their own TV show for Peacock. Clearly, she tells Forbes, she's turned that early online alter-ego "into a profitable business that empowers people to be the main character."

Sikander "Sonny" Khan is responsible for creating and executing marketing strategies for Microsoft's Bing, an AI-powered search engine and chatbot. His work has helped Bing climb to 100 million daily active users. As a side project, Khan also founded the Paani Project, a social enterprise that aims to end water scarcity in Pakistan. After collecting $5 million in funds, Paani has built over 15,000 wells, benefiting over 1 million women and children.

Sophie Jamison started her TikTok channel, posting two videos per day, in mid-2019. By the end of 2020, she had gained 2 million followers. That's when Nerf hired her as the first-ever chief TikTok officer. In 16 months, she built Nerf's TikTok following from scratch. Now, Jamison is chief TikTok officer at kitchenware brand Made By Gather where she leads influencer marketing, content creation and paid social.

Stan is an SaaS platform and "all-in-one Creator Store" that helps creators monetize their work by selling their own courses, memberships, eBooks, webinars and other digital products. Cofounder John Hu, a queer immigrant from China raised by a single mom, had been a creator focused on helping minorities land their dream jobs when he realized "it was insanely difficult to make money." That problem inspired Hu, who has an MBA from Stanford, to start Stan with Vitalii Dodonov in 2021. Since then, they say they've scaled to more than 20,000 customers across the globe who've earned over $50 million annually on the platform and that Stan became profitable this past June with a single round of funding. Its 20-person team has "built a product that provides a meaningful source of income to people," says Dodonov, a first-generation immigrant from Russia who lives in Canada. "Some of our customers have quit their jobs because of Stan to focus on content full-time." Their goal, he added, is for the product to be used by all types of people who want to work for themselves, not just creators.

Steven He is a Chinese-Irish actor and comedy sketch creator who started acting at 13 and when the pandemic hit, began creating comedic skits on YouTube. His sketches represent Asian immigrant culture in media, He says, generating over 2 billion views on his YouTube channel that has almost 11 million subscribers.

Video is great for advertising. But studio-grade commercials cost a lot of time and money. Enter artificial intelligence. Raza, with cofounder Quinn Favret, 23, launched Tavus to let sales folks at outfits like Meta and Salesforce create hundreds of personalized videos for their offerings in seconds. With Tavus' tech, you record your voice and face once, and the company's AI will clone the content into thousands of custom videos that can be tailored to specific customers and products; food delivery startup Wonder records videos of their chefs thanking each customer by name for dining with them. The idea is to build loyalty and to make cold sales calls feel less "cold." "Relevancy comes through personalization," Raza says. "We live in an economy where our attention is our most scarce and most valuable resource." Launched in 2021, the company has secured $25 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and others.

Brothers Alexander Whatley and Daniel Whatley started Vividly in 2017 with a software product that aims to automate the consumer packaged goods industry with an operating system to streamline data entry. Historically, CPG companies have had to employ dedicated data-entry teams to handle the large corpus of data. Vividly's software addresses this, and now also has features to forecast sales needs and pricing/margins. Customers include more than 100 brands, including Liquid Death, Health-Ade Kombucha, and Waterloo. Alexander was the company's initial CEO but stepped back in favor of longtime software operator Jonathan Hodge in July. Vividly employs 50 people and projects $7.5 million in revenue in 2023.

From a background of homelessness and poverty, immigrating to Canada from Kuwait, Ahmed El Dani started Carte Blanche Studio, a Toronto-based advertising, creative agency, in 2019. The company has worked with brands such as Nike and Four Seasons Hotel. The company expects to hit $3.5 million in revenue this year.

Low-cost subscriptions to services like Netflix, Spotify and Xbox Live can help boost credit scores for folks with little or poor credit history. Altro issues a no-fee payment card to fund them. When customers pay their Altro bill, the company alerts top credit bureaus including TransUnion, Equifax and Experian to beef up their scores. Altro makes its money by charging the services a small transaction fee. "We serve people who have never been exposed to the credit system before," Broughton says. In 2020, he and cofounder Ayush Jain, who met as undergrads at USC, raised $250,000 from Jay-Z's Marcy Ventures, dropped out of school and joined Y Combinator. They have since raised $18 million.

Amelie Zilber is a vlogger and activist who describes her work as "beauty and fashion with a socially conscious twist." With almost 10 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, she's used her platform for progressive causes. That includes interviewing Pete Buttigieg about the Biden administration's infrastructure bill and partnering with the Biden-Harris campaign on its #TeamJoeTalks initiative during the 2020 election. Last year, Zilber launched a roundtable talk show on Facebook called "Don't @ Me," where she discusses issues relevant to Gen Z, like climate change and voting rights.

With 1.1 million followers on Twitch and 860K on YouTube, it's fair to say Alexandra and Andrea Botez are two of the most popular chess players in the world. A former U.S. Girls Chess National champion at age 15, Alexandra attended Stanford University where she launched an online streaming career and was president of the Stanford University Chess Club. The sisters signed as inaugural members of entertainment and esports group Envy's content creator network in 2020 and joined OpTic Gaming as premiere female streamers in 2022. Having experienced sexist remarks and behavior firsthand in the competitive chess world, they regularly speak out against toxicity among viewers on Twitch.

Puerto Rico residents Emmanuel Oquendo Rosa and Israel Figueroa launched BrainHi in the wake of 2017's Hurricane Maria, which wiped out electric power. The hurricane also exacerbated the conditions of hospitals, an issue that BrainHi is tackling through the development of AI-powered receptionists that schedule appointments for patients. The startup is on track to make $3 million in 2022.

Los Angeles native Carina Chaz is the founder of DedCool, a unisex perfume brand geared toward Gen Z and millennials. She has turned her most popular scents into laundry detergent, air freshener and travel spray, and launched in Sephora stores this year. The company has raised $2 million in funding.

Dillon Rosenblatt is CEO at Autograph, the sports NFT behemoth cofounded by Tom Brady. The company has raised $205 million since its founding in early 2021, including a $170 million round in January 2022, and has partnered with high-profile athletes like Simone Biles, Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter.

Bobby Pinckney and Michelle Yin are cofounders of New York City-based Discz Music, a song recommendation app that is targeted at Gen Z. Launched in June 2020, the app rewards those who recommend unique songs saved by others. Some 1.5 million users in 200 countries have created more than 40 million song saves since it was launched. The duo has raised capital from Y Combinator, Greycroft, and Goodwater.

Elizabeth Coulombe is the CEO and cofounder of Tero, an appliance company that recycles food waste into reusable fertilizer within hours. She began working on Tero in 2018 with an aim to address food waste management. Today, more than 8,500 people have purchased Tero devices, which have saved 832,000 liters of waste from landfill sites. The company has raised $4.5 million in funding and booked $2 million in revenue in 2022.

Laine Bruzek and Priyanka Jain created Evvy to close the gender health gap by researching women and people with vaginas. Evvy studies previously-overlooked female biomarkers, including the vaginal microbiome. In July 2021, it launched the first at-home vaginal microbiome test. The 28-year-olds lead a team of 10 and have snagged $6.5 million in funding from General Catalyst and G9 Ventures, among others. With revenue projections of $2 million in 2022 and 10,000 users, the startup's home tests have created the largest dataset on the vaginal biome.

Nigerian American best friends David Iya and Joshua Nzewi launched Eze in 2020 as a B2B wholesale marketplace for used smartphones and other electronics. The startup validates the quality of products for buyers, countering the common issue of fraud in used electronics. Eze has been used in 10 countries and is on track to make $2.3 million in 2022.

Rice University friends Kunal Rai (left) and Samuel Spitz started Gently during their senior year to centralize secondhand shopping in one place. Their site, previously called Wearloom, lets shoppers simultaneously search for items across resale sites like Poshmark, ThredUp and eBay. Shoppers can also set up alerts for items they are interested in. Gently, which takes a cut on each sale it facilitates, has raised $2 million in funding.

Joe Viola is the cofounder of consumer tech company 9 Count Inc., whose friend-discovery app, Wink, and dating app, Summer, are designed to bring Gen Zers together. Wink has created more than 800 million connections and is the top social networking app in 11 countries. Founded in December 2018, 9Count has brought in $27.5 million in funding from Redpoint, GGV Capital, Greycroft, and other venture capital firms. It plans to book $5 million in revenue from in-app purchases and advertising this year.

As a Harvard undergrad, Kimiloluwa Fafowora helped the admission's office recruit more diverse students. Now she runs Gander, which works with brands to display user-generated videos on their websites so shoppers can visualize products used by a variety of people in real life. The company has raised $4.2 million in funding from Harlem Capital, Crossbeam Venture Partners and others.

Texas-based filmmaker, creator, entrepreneur and mom-of-two Kristy Scott, along with her husband Desmond (known together as "The Scotts"), creates content focused on fun with her kids, pranks, and home design and renovation. She has amassed 11 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and landed partnerships with brands including Estee Lauder, Hilton and Google.

Lacey Kaelani is the cofounder of Metaintro, her second startup in the human resources tech space. Metaintro is a professional resume wallet for Web3, containing proof of employment, proof of skill and proof of education--replacing the PDF resume. Users can also create a professional avatar. Adjacent to the site itself is the Discord community Metaintro maintains, where about 4,000 Web3 jobs a month are posted, which is more than Indeed and LinkedIn combined. Metaintro received $5.6 million in funding from sources including NEAR Blockchain, Aave and Druid Ventures.

Matthew Monrean is the founder and CEO of Moonbeam Media, a digital advertising company specializing in podcast monetization. The business hired its first employee, Matthew's mom, two weeks ago to help with accounting. In its first full year of business, Moonbeam Media did roughly $3 million in revenue. For 2022, the company is projecting around $5 million in revenue. Before bringing on his mom to assist in the finance department, Matthew single-handedly managed every aspect of the business. "I'm beyond grateful for the direction this thing has gone thus far," he says.

Frustrated by how expensive dirt biking was, Ryan Amoils (center), Andrew Samole (left) and Nick Tomasunas created MX Locker, an online marketplace for new and used dirt bikes, bike parts and riding gear. The retailer, which launched in 2020, is on track to surpass $3 million in sales this year. Tomasunas is a professional motocross racer.

Neel Yalamarthy leads strategy at Mythical, the media company founded by creators Rhett and Link. The company owns Good Mythical Morning, the popular daily show hosted by the pair, with 17.9 million subscribers. At Mythical, Yalamarthy oversees M&A, venture investments and new business launches. Before he joined the company, he cut his teeth at Google, where he helped YouTube score an exclusive live game-streaming partnership with the MLB.

Noah Elion launched Lovd in New York City in 2022 to correct what he saw as problems with Facebook Marketplace: having to ship products or meet strangers. Lovd is a used-goods marketplace for NYC that offers pickup and delivery. After the first eight months, the service had already gained more than 70,000 users. The Tufts University graduate received $4.5 million in funding from Y Combinator, BoxGroup, Fuel Capital and other venture firms. It's booked $200,000 this year so far from the marketplace.

Here's a cool idea: Use hot rocks to fight global warming. Heirloom superheats limestone to extract its CO2 and stores the gas far underground. The treated mineral then acts like a wrung-out sponge, reabsorbing greenhouse gases from the air. "We give rocks superpowers to scrub CO2 out of our atmosphere," says McQueen, who earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. McQueen and cofounder Shashank Samala have raised a $53 million round and signed carbon offset deals with tech giants Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify.

Although Remi Bader, a curve model, didn't start TikToking full-time until March of 2021, she's quickly accumulated 2.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. Her posts highlight looks and trends from major fashion lines while also critiquing size discrepancies between the brands. In her short time as a creator, Bader has launched a collection with Revolve and landed partnerships with Victoria's Secret, Walmart and L'Oreal, all the while advocating for size inclusivity. Bader was ranked No. 48 on the inaugural Forbes Top Creators List in 2022.

After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori Dunlap quit her marketing job and started 'Her First $100k,' a brand producing educational materials to fight financial inequality by empowering women to negotiate salary, pay off debt, build savings and invest. Her podcast 'Financial Feminist' has earned the top spot in Spotify's business category and has over 8 million downloads, averaging 800,000 downloads a month. Plus, she's releasing a book by the same name in December and has a following of 3.5 million across TikTok and Instagram.

A first-generation immigrant from Nigeria, Valentine Nwachukwu started programming at the age of 12 when his dad decided to teach him C++ instead of buying him a PlayStation 2. He started Zaden in 2020, a combination of his prior experiences working in the defense sector and at Amazon as a program manager. The bootstrapped, Alabama-based company helps defense firms to set up their software infrastructure more quickly. Thanks to customers like Boeing and Northrop Grumman, it's made more than $2 million in revenue in 2022.

Tech junkie Veeraj Chugh is a cofounder of Opal Camera, which produces webcams that use ML and hardware to improve sound and image quality for video meetings and recordings. The company has more than 62,000 customers and $12.4 million in investment from Founders Fund, Slack and Alexis Ohanian, as well as cofounders of Airbnb, Instagram, Shopify, YouTube and Twitch. The company's customer base ranges from teachers to designers to yoga instructors. Its 2022 revenue (so far) is $3.2 million.

Vivian Wang launched Landed, a recruiting tool for blue collar workers in industries like food and service, at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. Braving the initial economic disruption, Landed has now helped tens of thousands of workers get jobs, and counts Taco Bell, Jersey Mike's and Panera Bread among its customers. With backers like Lightspeed and Javelin Venture Partners, the startup has raised $11.4 million.

Yousef Abdelfattah joined FaZe Clan in 2011 at age 14, and is considered one of the cofounders who took the original YouTube channel and created a business, which in August of this year went public at a $725 million valuation. He runs FaZe's team YouTube channel and serves as an executive in brand meetings, in addition to being a content creator himself. The son of immigrant parents from Palestine, his father bought him an HDTV at age 13 with what little money he had and he started making YouTube gaming videos.

As head of advertising partnerships at Sprinklr, 28-year-old Alexandra Osten has helped the $3.3 billion market cap enterprise software company manage partnerships with platforms including Facebook to Pinterest. Osten and her team have helped the company's revenue grow from 19% to 27% in the first six months of 2021. Osten's work doesn't end at Sprinklr: She also runs her late father's $15 million trucking business.

Tan describes Ladder as "the anti-LinkedIn professional platform for the next generation." The app had been invite-only until October but has nonetheless secured 50,000 active users across 1,000 different schools--and $3.7 million in funding from Forerunner Ventures, Alexis Ohanian and additional investors. One big difference between Ladder and LinkedIn: No connection requests from strangers. On Ladder, those connections come via communities on the app built around careers and personal interests.

When Bianca Padilla was tasked with helping care for her grandmother after hip surgery, she realized she had no idea what to do. She wasn't alone: There are 53 million inexperienced, family caregivers in the U.S. In 2017, she and her husband started Carewell, selling walkers, adult diapers, grab bars and other items to caregivers. Customer service reps receive three weeks of training. Carewell has raised $30 million in funding.

Fueled by the thesis that crypto would become a legitimate asset class, Michael Ippolito and Jason Yanowitz launched Blockworks, a news site for investors in digital assets that they call "the Bloomberg for crypto." Since launching in 2018, they've expanded to run one of the largest crypto podcast networks in the world, as well as global conferences and a daily newsletter. They've bootstrapped the entire business and are expecting $10 million in revenue this year.

A former McKinsey consultant who worked with companies like Walmart and P&G, Brenton Howland is the cofounder and co-CEO of Forum Brands, an Amazon aggregator that acquires and scales third-party sellers. His growing portfolio includes pet products, eco-friendly baby items and other consumer goods. He has raised $127 million from Norwest Venture Partners, NFX and others.

Durve and her (over 30) cofounder Kelsie Kitchener's high-end events management company, VIPER by KCH ("VIP Event Relations"), helps curate "bespoke" parties for organizations and individuals from the Los Angeles Rams to Drake. Their efforts have paid off, and their service is now valued at $5 million. Owned and operated by women, VIPER has also launched #LASTCALL, an initiative to end nightlife culture that results in women being drugged.

Copysmith AI uses AI and machine learning to write copy for web assets. Capabilities include understanding human text and identifying plagiarism, as well as a built-in character counter for advertising copy. The company was founded during the pandemic and is fully remote,with team members in Canada, the US, Mexico, and Europe. It has $10 million in funding.

Their Fanhouse offers a premise similar to OnlyFans, where influencers set up a subscription-based paywall around their content. Unlike OnlyFans, Fanhouse is PG 13 only. No nudes allowed. (For context: The adult content on OnlyFans could make it hard for it to achieve a broader reach or bring on more investors. Fanhouse, by contrast, has quickly gotten $1.3 million in funding from investors like Chapter One Ventures.) And unlike OnlyFans' reputation for leaving influencers on their own to deal with any problems, Fanhouse has emphasized a white glove approach, including one-on-one support for creators who receive abuse from fans. Nguyen herself saw the potential--and drawbacks--around OnlyFans when she had her own account there, which she started to support herself and her family after losing a University of Penn work-study gig.

When Hunter Morris and his partner were shopping for a sexual wellness product, they came to an impasse. Big-box retailers were impersonal and smaller sex shops felt sketchy. Morris cofounded Hello Cake to design sex toys and lubricants with feedback from real couples. They recently launched in select Walmart stores, and have raised $5.7 million in funding from Lerer Hippeau and others.

Tromba is bringing machine learning to the masses. A former AI expert at Slack, she and cofounder David Yamnitsky started Tangram to let programmers?professional and moonlighters alike?give their code the powers of predictive machine learning. The basic service is free. Users pay up for more functions like custom apps, customer service and more. Tromba has $5.75 million from Kleiner Perkins.

John Lim created the best-selling Asian American card game AZN FLUSH and Puff Puff Pass for cannabis users as part of UGLY LLC, an indie game studio producing card games for underrepresented communities. He bootstrapped AZN Flush with $500 and made $440,000 in year one before eclipsing $1.2 million in revenue in year two. In total, his games have cumulatively made over $3 million. He also started the fundraising project "Stay The F*ck Inside," which raised over $50,000 for Covid-19 relief.

Databand.ai is a data observability platform that lets engineers check if data is available, accurate and usable. The business, which employs 35 people, has $15 million in funding from Accel Partners, Blumberg Capital and Bessemer Venture Capital. CEO and founder Josh Benamram is a second-generation immigrant whose first job was stacking shelves in a grocery store.

In 2018, when Conlow was 22, he talked his father into investing $50,000 of his retirement savings in an affordable electric bicycle he was designing. Though his first iteration flopped because of factors like range and speed, and "potentially screwed up [Dad's] retirement," Conlow quickly retooled and created Lectric's $1,000 XP model (a typical e-bike costs more than $2,000), which he started selling in 2019. To date, Conlow has sold more than 100,000 bikes; the company is on track to book $85 million in revenue this year. Most importantly, his father got his retirement savings made flush again."We got my old man paid back, and he's happy with the investment now," Conlow says.

A first-generation Filipina, Liv Portio started making necklaces on her bedroom floor at 16 to help her family pay the bills. She's found an audience on TikTok, after a video on the saga of a customer who had been cheated on went viral, helping her gain two million followers. Portio projects revenue will more than triple to $10 million in 2022.

Jacob Braunstein, 27, and Noah Johnson, 28, built a video production crew in a box. LiveControl sells robotic cameras controlled by a remote team of video producers. The duo raised $33 million from Coatue and First Round Capital and produces thousands of events each month.

Encamp, which CEO Luke Jacobs cofounded in 2017, helps customers such as Bunzl, Southern States and FirstEnergy generate and file reports showing compliance with environmental regulations. The startup has $17.2 million of funding from OpenView, High Alpha Capital and Allos Ventures, among others. For every report filed using its software, Encamp partners with a charity to plant a tree and has already paid for over 11,000 of them.

Lunchbox's ordering platform offers restaurants an alternative to third-party apps like Grubhub via native ordering apps, websites, catering, loyalty and marketing solutions. Along with online ordering, which has saved restaurants $21 million, the cofounders launched helpmainstreet.com which helps restaurants sell gift cards, giving them a cash infusion during the pandemic. The company has $22 million in funding.

Maneet Khaira founded Backbone in 2018, his senior year at Columbia University, raising $1 million in investment that included Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures and gaming creators Nadeshot, MrBeast, and Preston. The company launched at the end of 2020 and now its core product, an attachable gaming controller for iPhones that requires no charging, is the top selling product in its category on Amazon. In June, Backbone integrated its software product to Xbox for use on Xbox Game Pass on iOS.

In 2019, the trio launched livestream platform Moment House to connect artists and their core fans for global, elevated ticketed experiences, such as concerts, interviews and poetry readings. They've hosted elevated live-streamed events with celebrities like St. Vincent, Halsey, and Brockhampton, as well as overseeing the ticketing for Justin Bieber's New Year's Eve livestream. Moment House has secured $13.5 million in funding from investors including Scooter Braun, Jared Leto and Halsey.

Using machine learning and human metadata to identify global shifts early and throughout the trend lifecycle, nwo.ai enables corporations and governments to get insights on sectors ranging from consumer products to global war. Low, a Westpac Bank Trust Scholar, ran SAP's Machine Learning efforts in APAC at age 17. Jaiswal, a drone pioneer and serial entrepreneur, developed geopolitical trading signals for hedge funds. The company has $3.5 million in seed funding.

Acquco is one of the largest and fastest-growing aggregators of companies that sell on Amazon. Nirmal has raised $160 million to acquire businesses that will generate some $250 million in revenue this year. "I've been living and breathing Amazon," says Nirmal, who worked as an analyst at Amazon right out of college and started several Amazon companies himself. Now he's scaling others' products (household items like shower curtains, bug zappers and milk frothers), a process that includes expanding beyond Amazon to sites such as Walmart, Target and Best Buy. "We think the potential isn't just getting a bunch of brands on Amazon. We think the true potential is turning these brands into true omnichannel brands," says Nirmal, a Sikh who emigrated from India when he was seven years old. He has given away Teslas for leads on deals in the white-hot space and is in the process of raising another $400 million.

The pair originally saw their Realtime app as a way for college students to connect in person. But they shifted course during the pandemic, refocusing it as a social network that works a little like speed dating: It matches users based on interests for video-chat conversations. Realtime has caught the attention of Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian; his venture firm Seven Seven Six and others have put $4 million into Realtime. "Realtime is like an intimate happy hour, where you're able to have conversations with people," Coleman told Forbes in 2020. "And we're talking about actual conversations."

Juggling multiple lab tests is a pain for patients and doctors. Rosa Hamalainen, 25, and Ben Easton, 27, built Rupa Health to be a one-stop shop for ordering, paying for, and viewing results for lab work across 20 different providers. The pair have raised $6 million from First Round Capital, Lachy Groom, Floodgate, SV Angel, plus celebs the Chainsmokers and Jared Leto.

Hotels can be impersonal. Home rentals are inconsistent. Canaley, 29, and Karimov, 28, launched Sextant Stays to combine the best of both hospitality worlds. The founders have raised $45 million from Vigo Capital, RL Capital, Ildar Venture Capital to operate entire buildings with the design and authentic experience of a rental with the efficiency and ease of a top hotel.

For early stage startup, hiring an in-house marketer means a loss of equity, while large firms are unlikely to pay much attention. Trevor Sookraj, the 24-year-old founder of Divisional, is hoping that his "marketer-first" agency can solve this dilemma by providing startups a full growth team of Divisional employees at a fraction of the traditional cost. Their outsourcing model has been lucrative, with revenue growing 240% this year to $1.5 million.

UtilizeCore's cofounders, all University of Michigan alumni, launched their company in 2016 to help people find snow clearing and landscaping services online, and then transformed it into an AI-powered marketplace that matches companies with repair and maintenance subcontractors. The business has $6.1 million in funding from investors including Boldstart Ventures, Mantis Ventures and S12F, and has seen contracts worth a total of over $1 billion sealed on its platform.

Owning a home might exemplify the American Dream, but paying your mortgage can be a nightmare. Wang and Hsu, both 29, launched Valon to make paying off life's biggest purchase a bit easier by automating payments, giving a clear view of one's balance and educating borrowers about loans. The pair have raised a $50 million series A from Andreessen Horowitz, the family office of WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann, and others to go after incumbents like Black Knight, the $11 billion leader in the space.

Brandon Hill, whose family has been in the grocery industry for over 40 years, and Tremaine Kirkman built a platform that enables supermarkets to order from wholesalers by scanning barcodes, item code or universal product code instead of using fax machines. Vori leverages data science to intelligently predict what grocers should order from their wholesale suppliers.The company has $5.7 million in funding from YCombinator, Greylock Partners and South Park Commons, among others.

They hope to combine two popular pastimes connected to sports: gambling and smack-talking with Wagr. The sports-better app combines elements of Draft Kings and Twitter. You can trade messages with friends while Wagr matches your bets against friends who'll take the opposing position; there's a $500 limit on those posits. (That's a distinctly different process than if someone walked into a casino or logged onto DraftKings. Eskinazi and Malave hope the limits they've set encourage users to spend time on their app without abetting any harmful gambling.) The app is still in beta but has drawn $4.3 million funding from Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Greycroft and Pear VC.

American Express has its platinum card, Mastercard a gold version. Karat has its black card. That's the principal offering from Kim and cofounder Eric Wei, who want Karat to become a principal bank for the creator economy. Kim, a former Goldman Sachs analyst, and Wei, a former Instagram product manager, founded Karat in 2019, reasoning that traditional finance institutions might be slow to understand--and lend to--influencers. Karat, by contrast, will do things like adjust a line of credit as a creator's following on apps like Instagram or YouTube increases. It has over $30 million in funding from investors such as Union Square Ventures and GGV Capital.

Alyssa Petersel is the founder and CEO of MyWellbeing, a platform that connects people to therapists. She herself is a licensed social worker. The company, based in New York City, has received $1 million in funding and reports that it has more than 100,000 customers.

Cofounded Applecart, a platform with $12.5 million in funding and more than $30 million in revenue, that enables advertisers to reach high-value business decision-makers. The platform uses publicly available data to map out the closest personal and professional relationships--the influencers--of those decision-makers that advertiser clients, such as KKR and Boeing, then market to with highly targeted messaging. Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel is a board member.

Born and raised in Brownsburg, Indiana, Gregg originally started on social media after a back injury ended her training as a gymnast. She's now famous for her vlogs and makeup TikToks, which have attracted more 26 million followers. She has gotten brand sponsorships with D&G, Hugo Boss, L'Oreal and Marc Jacobs, among others. And Gregg has a new role on the Brat TV series "Chicken Girls."

When brothers Alex and Sam Lewkowict took a sales gig at a local skincare company, they thought they could leverage their own struggles with razor burn and ingrown hairs to make a successful sales pitch. However, nobody wanted the pungent, plainly packaged products. In 2018, they started Black Wolf, which sells a line of men's skincare products that addresses everyday problems like dry skin and comes in sleek, all-black packaging. They have raised $1.8 million from family, friends and angel investors and are on track to do $6 million in revenue in 2020.

Brothers Brandon, Dylan and Elliot Kim started direct-to-consumer backpack company Brevite as a side hustle in college. At first, they catered to photographers, creating a stylish bag that could easily fit a professional camera and its accessories. They have since begun catering to a wider audience and now sell five styles of backpacks, ranging in price from $95 to $219. The bootstrapped company expects revenue to surpass $3 million in 2020.

When Emily Stallings kept breaking her phone case, her brother Mark came up with the idea for a phone case subscription service. In 2017, the siblings launched Casely. Since then, the bootstrapped brand has evolved, with 99% of its business now coming from one-off purchases. Casely launches two designs every month and says a fifth of its 800,000 customers order a second case within one year. The Stallings sell their cases online and at Free People stores, and are on track to make $25 million in revenue in 2020.

After hearing about his girlfriend's time spent studying abroad in China, Eli Zauner wanted to make experiencing new cultures more accessible to the masses. In 2014, he and Monique, 31, launched Universal Yums, an international snack subscription service that sends treats from countries like Austria, Colombia, Egypt and Thailand right to a customer's door. Today, the husband-and-wife duo have 200,000 subscribers and expect to generate $37 million in revenue in 2020. They launched Yum Shop in October 2020, letting customers purchase 150 snacks like Italian canestrelli cookies, Russian boiled milk and chocolate cakes and Taiwanese bubble tea popcorn a la carte.

Emily Hochman is the founder of Wellory, an app that helps people make healthier eating choices. Rather than crash diets, the company offers one-on-one nutrition coaching that shuns calorie counting and dieting. Wellory has received $1.2 million in funding.

Imagine not needing to hire engineers to build your company's backend dashboard. That's the no-code product behind Index, a San Francisco-based company launched in 2020 by Xavier Pladevall and Eduardo Portet. The young entrepreneurs, both 24, grew up together in the Dominican Republic before moving to the United States to go to college, and have already raised $2.8 million this year.

Jamika Martin always struggled with breakouts. There were so many brands in the beauty aisle to choose from, but it seemed like the acne segment was stuck in the '90s. While studying business at UCLA, she launched Rosen Skincare with a line of products that used natural ingredients to help clear skin and reduce dark spots and scarring. Aimed at Millennials and Gen-Z, she leverages fun, holographic packaging and micro-influencer marketing. Martin expects $1.5 million in revenue in 2020, with a growing portion of sales coming from Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, FabFitFun and GlossyBox.

With $3.6 million in funding from Homebrew and Ludlow Ventures, Albanese's Stir is working on tools and software for influencers to run their businesses. Stir has released a number of one-off software products, too, such as Presubscribe.me, which helps a creator build a fanbase before going independent, and OnlyTweet, which builds a paywall-protected Twitter account. Prior to cofounding Stir, Albanese was on the founding team of Yik Yak and then went to work at Facebook as a product designer.

Lyman is the CEO of Enlitic, an artificial intelligence company that helps doctors read and interpret x-rays, CT scans and MRIs faster. He took over as CEO in 2018, after joining the company as an entry-level engineer, and has since raised more than $40 million, including a Department of Defense contract.

Cavallero is the founder of HopFrog, where he launched his game Forager in 2019. After dropping out of college four years prior to pursue a career in games, he won the best game award at gaming conference EVA 2016 in his native Argentina. It came with a free pass for the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, where he secured a publishing deal with Humble Bundle. The journey has paid off, with Forager already selling 900,000 units and grossing $10 million�a big payoff for Cavallero who bootstrapped Forager's development with his own money and some more from his mom's life savings.

Levine's Amp Studios manages influencers and acts as an incubator for digital creators as they start out. For instance, Amp helped Brent Rivera grow to 73 million followers across social media; across all of Amp's clients, the company generates 1 billion views per month on social media. He was previously the cofounder of Community, the text-message marketing app used by celebrities and brands.

When McKenzie Bauer's boyfriend lost his wallet, he struggled to replace it�everything was big, bulky or boring. After marrying in 2015, they raised some $60,000 from Kickstarter and launched Thread Wallets with a line of slim, stylish wallets that can be attached to a keychain, lanyard or phone. They've since expanded into other accessories, like lip balm holders and crossbody bags. They sell their products in 600 stores like Zumiez and Scheels, plus create corporate swag for Coca-Cola and Qualtrics. Revenue is projected to hit $12.6 million in 2020 and $18 million in 2021.

If you need your hip replaced, which kind of artificial hip should your surgeon implant? George Kramb and Patrick Frank started PatientPartner (formerly called Rightdevice) to help educate and guide patients through medical decisions. Think of it like a combination of Yelp and a support group, but for patients undergoing surgeries. Since launching in March 2017, Right Devices has raised $2 million from Alethea Capital.

Known commonly by his online aliases "Preston" or "PrestonPlayz", Arsement is a popular vlogger also known for his Minecraft gameplay, which has helped him amass 32 million YouTube subscribers across his four channels. Forbes ranked him the sixth highest-earning YouTuber in 2019 with $14 million in estimated earnings, driven primarily through the Minecraft servers he runs.

Techstars alum Renji Bijoy, 29, is the founder of Immersed, which partnered with Facebook to build virtual reality offices. The company has raised $3.5 million in venture backing for the tool and is eyeing growth as remote teams become more common..

Wesley Eames founded Trace.com, connecting users to professional genealogists in 90 counties. The service starts at $150 and can help clients research their family trees and discover living relatives. The company raised $2 million from investors including, the former CEO & Chairman of Ancestry.com.

Frustrated by the dominance of cheap, throwaway furniture, Alex O'Dell cofounded Floyd in 2014 to offer furniture that is designed to last. "Ikea, in part, has created a culture of disposable consumption. You buy a table and you throw it away the next time you move," says O'Dell. The Detroit-based company makes furniture that can evolve with its owner. For instance, a twin bed can be turned into a king bed by adding additional slats. A small shelving unit can be reconfigured and expanded. To help pieces survive a move, everything has a minimal number of parts and can be disassembled and reassembled quickly. Floyd has raised $10 million from La-Z-Boy, Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia and others.

Barrett Glasauer and Andr�s Green teamed up with a friend to create WanderJaunt, a startup building Airbnb-style rentals. The goal is a more reliable experience with cleaning and mini toiletries akin to staying in a hotel, but with the advantages of living like a local in a neighborhood. Since it launched in December 2016, over 60,000 people have stayed in the 500 properties WanderJaunt manages. WanderJaunt has raised over $27 million from investors like Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures.

Distru's four cofounders started building supply chain software for the cannabis industry after the passage of the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act in 2015. Distru helps keep the flood of new cannabis companies in full compliance, with tools to manage orders, inventory and logistics. With $3 million in funding, the platform hit over $650 million in transactions in California.

While he worked at Google, David Kolodny realized that startups were using a very manual approach to build a company. So he built Wilbur Labs, a startup studio that automated most business practices, allowing him and his cofounder to spin up new ideas (and kill bad ones) quickly. Bootstrapped since 2016, Wilbur Labs has launched Nomad, an automated inventory management software, and Vitabox, a subscription box for everyday essentials. Kolodny's biggest success has been VacationRenter, a vacation rental aggregator used by tens of millions of people that's on track to process nearly $600 million in gross bookings this year.

Lunchclub uses Al technology to create in-person lunch and coffee meetings to boost networking opportunities for the world's professionals. The invite-only service exists in various cities including the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Los Angeles and London, and has helped thousands of people get new jobs, meet investors and find a cofounder. Founded by Hayley Leibson, the founder of Lady in Tech, and Scott Wu, a former engineer at Addepar, Lunchclub has raised $5 million from investors like Andreessen Horowitz.

Plastic bags are quickly falling out of fashion as more people go green and states like California and New York enact outright bans. Isaac Schwerd and Ikey Bensimhon caught on to the trend early and started Sacatelle in 2015 to make reusable, custom shopping bags for retailers. Among their creations: Lululemon's totes and Allbirds's cardboard carriers. To date, the pair have sold millions of bags and will generate $30 million in sales in 2019.

Venrock and Uber alums Isaac Madan and Rohan Sathe started (previously called Watchtower) to help businesses protect the sensitive data they have stored in multiple formats across multiple platforms. The company uses machine learning to discover, classify and protect sensitive data from leakage, exfiltration and compliance risks. Its over $20.3 million in funding and has scored customers like The RealReal, Ellucian, Clinc and others.

Frustrated by the dearth of athleisure options for men, Jay Barton started ASRV Sportswear in 2014 with a slim-fit jogging pant. Sales topped $750,000 in the first year. Now he has a full line of performance athletic apparel with a streetwear aesthetic, which has attracted a cult following (Instagram followers: 1 million and counting) and is expected to drive sales of $18 million in 2020.

In high school, Jessica Assaf helped lobby for a piece of legislation in California that required cosmetics makers to disclose the use of carcinogens. Now, she is working to bring rigor to the cannabis industry, in partnership with Christopher Gavigan, the cofounder of The Honest Company, and Laurel Angelica Myers, another Honest alum. The trio launched Prima, a CBD wellness and beauty brand, in June 2019 with eight doctor-formulated serums and supplements. Prima raised $3.25 million in funding from Lerer Hippeau and Greycroft, the largest seed round for a CBD company.

Moawia Eldeeb dropped out of school in the sixth grade to support his family who had immigrated from Egypt and, after an explosion in their apartment building, ended up homeless. Through tutoring, weekend classes and Khan Academy videos, Eldeeb eventually enrolled in Queen's College and transferred to Columbia University, where he met cofounder Josh Augustin. The two were accepted to Y Combinator and with their seed funding built a successful B2B forerunner called SmartSpot, which they sold to hundreds of gyms around the world generating over $1 million in revenue. With the closing of a $17 million Series A this past July, Pivot expects to launch a consumer version next year.

As someone who has been plus-size since she was 10, Lauren Haber Jonas remembers buying her eighth grade graduation dress in the maternity section. She started Part & Parcel to offer clothing and shoes designed by and for plus-size women. Her own customers double as sales agents and her models are part of a new plus-size modeling agency she launched in November 2019. Jonas, who previously worked at Poshmark, raised $4 million while pregnant in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. She expects $5 million in sales in 2020.

Warner is the creator and director of editorial video for BuzzFeed's first travel franchise, "Bring Me!" The franchise has more than 3.3 billion views across platforms, with 4.7 million subscribers on Facebook. Warner says she aims to make viral content that focuses on underreported topics, like suicide prevention.

Nick Cherukuri wasn't deterred by the failed consumer roll-out of Google Glass: He believes that augmented reality glasses can "have a life changing impact on the way workers go about their everyday tasks." ThirdEye has launched several different models of its smart glasses with features like live video streaming and 3D modeling, and has racked up $5 million in paid contracts, with over 500 apps for its platform.

Few things are more annoying than getting a parking ticket. WinIt founder Ouriel Lemmel knows this better than anyone. After incurring multiple parking tickets, he decided in 2015 to build an app that would make it easier for people to challenge them. WinIt has been downloaded more than half a million times and processed over 700,000 tickets, saving over $10 million worth of tickets on behalf of its users. Without raising a single VC dollar, WinIt has grown to millions in revenue in four years.

Geosite founder and CEO Rachel Olney describes her company as the "Google Drive, or Switzerland, of geospatial." The company combines satellite, drone and IoT data into one marketplace, giving commercial and government clients access for a subscription fee. To date, Geosite boasts $1.6 million in contracts with the U.S. Air Force, with $10 million total revenue expected next year. Running Geosite isn't the only thing that keeps Olney busy: "I run a Y Combinator-backed enterprise SaaS company, am completing my PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford, and most importantly, raising two incredible kids," she says.

Rob Gurzeev and Dima Potekhin (not under 30) both did stints in national security before cofounding CyCognito, with Gurzeev spending five years in the Israeli Intelligence Corps. That experience taught them how attackers could exploit security blindspots so they built CyCognito to perform continuous attack simulations that help organizations understand areas of weakness. The 50-person company has raised $23 million.

A first-generation Indian-American, Rooshy Roy used to make skincare at home with her mother using ingredients like turmeric and almond oil. She started Aavrani in 2017 to offer clean, effective cosmetics rooted in ancient beauty rituals, like a $55 softening hydra-whip formulated with coconut milk, rosehip seed oil and shea nut. Roy has raised $1.7 million from First Round Capital and General Catalyst.

After enough five-star reviews convinced him to buy a nutritional supplement on Amazon, Kuwaiti immigrant Saoud Khalifah was disappointed when a flimsy package filled with dust-coated capsules arrived at his door. Determined never to be deceived again, he started Fakespot, a site that uses artificial intelligence to analyze millions of reviews and detect signs that reviews or reviewers might be biased or unreliable. Since 2016, 15 million people have used the free service to analyze reviews on Amazon, Best Buy, Sephora, Walmart and Yelp. Khalifah recently introduced another service, Sentinel, to help enterprise clients identify counterfeit concerns and fake reviews. Fakespot has raised $1.3 million from SRI Capital and Faith Capital.

Those magazine editorial looking Instagrams you see? Chances are Unfold is behind it. The design-driven app was founded in 2018 by Alfonso Cobo, an international designer and architect, and Andy McCune, founder of travel media brand Earth. The two teamed up to build easy-to-use templates for Unfold's 9 million users to seamlessly share meaningful stories with their social media connections.

HYPR is a provider of decentralized authentication with a mission to eliminate fraud, enhance user experience, and enable password-less security. Co-founded by Georgian immigrant Avetisov (CEO) , who wanted to fix the problem of companies often storing user credentials in a centralized database targeted by hackers, HYPR has raised $15 million.

Disheartened by the hypersexualized nature of the lingerie market, Jenna Kerner wanted an intimates option that more accurately reflected her wants and needs. So in 2017 she and cofounder Jane Fisher launched Harper Wilde, a bra brand that "takes the B.S. out of bra shopping" with benefits like free home try-ons. The duo has raised $3.6 million from backers including Charles River Ventures and M Ventures.

Joe Davy (CEO and Chairman) founded Banzai, an event-marketing platform, in 2016, and has grown it from 2 people to more than 50 with no outside capital. Banzai counts customers such as Microsoft, Dell, and Adobe and expects to reach approximately $10 million in revenue in 2019.

Since launching Betches in 2011 as a WordPress blog, CEO Aleen Kuperman, COO Samantha Fishbein and CCO Jordana Abraham have turned the women's lifestyle and entertainment site into a full-fledged multimedia company, expanding into podcasts, live events, newsletters and books, with two New York Times bestsellers. In 2017, Betches' revenue exceeded $5 million, Forbes estimates.

Keith Ryu (CEO) is cofounder of Fountain, a hiring platform for hourly workers which processes over 700,000 applicants and helps make 80,000 hires monthly for companies that include Uber, Safeway, Deliveroo, Lime and Grubhub. His company has $10.9 million in Series A funding.

What do actor Dwayne Johnson, singer Tim McGraw and NBA player Dwanye Wade have in common? Look down at their feet. All three celebrities are big enthusiasts of the high-end footwear from Taft Clothing. Taft was launched by Kory Stevens and his wife Mallory, 26, in 2014—originally as a sock company. They switched to shoes a year later, making colorful twists on classic kicks like oxfords and lace-up boots. "Companies keep designing the same shoes over, and over, and over. There's an underserved market of men who want to stand out," says Stevens. Taft's footwear start at $235 and go up from there. Many come in playful two-tone versions. And there have also been gold-floral-print boots and ones with snake-skin-like detailing. Kory, a Brigham Young grad who once dreamed about becoming a consultant, handles product design and operations. Mallory runs the marketing strategy. They brought it in outside money for the first time this year—$5 million from several angel funds, as well as uber fan Dwayne Wade.

After realizing an opportunity to streamline the logistics and fulfillment experience for retailers, Michael Krakaris launched Deliverr in 2017 to provide fast, affordable fulfillment for leading merchants on eBay, Walmart and Shopify. He and his cofounder, Harish Abbot, have raised $7.1 million in funding from firms such as 8VC and individuals including Zola CEO Shan-Lyn Ma.

Ryan Delk is currently Chief Operating Officer of Omni, a rentals and item management company that's raised $35 million from investors like 8VC and Highland Capital. Delk joined Omni in 2015 as VP of Growth & Business Development. A year later, he became Head of Product and launched Omni's search and rentals features, which turned the business from a storage company into also a rentals network. Originally from Atlanta, Delk considers his greatest achievement his family, including his wife Tori and 9-month-old son Wes.

Brud made headlines in April 2018 when it was revealed that the tech startup was behind the Instagram character Miquela (@lilmiquela) - a robot model and musician that has amassed over 1.5 million followers and was named one of Time's Most Influential People on the Internet in 2018. Miquela, and Brud's other robots Blawko and Bermuda, are the brainchild of Sara DeCou and her cofounder Trevor McFedries. Its robot characters have released viral pop songs, appeared on magazine covers, and created real-world impact, including raising money for Black Girls Code and victims of the California wildfires.

At 17, while studying Fine Arts in Florence, Sascha Scheider started an online community to help artists monetize their work. After moving back to the U.S., she cofounded Plotagraph, Inc. in 2016 with partner, Troy Christopher Plota. It has since expanded to Plotaverse, a suite of five motion photo editing apps that has gained over 6 million downloads and is used by notable names including Ariana Grande, GoPro, Kim Kardashian and even PhotoShop.

Hoping to simplify her own haircare routine with easy-to-use, toxin-free products, former Vogue stylist Shelby Wild started her own natural haircare line, Playa, in 2017. The Venice-based brand, which is sold by Sephora, Net-A-Porter and Revolve, among other retailers around the world, generated $1 million in revenue in its first year in business.

When The Outline launched in 2016 to much fanfare--and $5 million in VC funding--founder Joshua Topolsky called on Edwards to be one of three original editors on the new site now known for its graphics and interactive content. Before The Outline, Edwards was part of the BuzzFeed News app's founding team, worked as a news producer for Digital First Media and was a James Reston Reporting Fellow for The New York Times.

Noon Home aims to bring smart, layered lighting to the masses through technology that customizes lighting to every fixture, bulb, room size and activity to help eliminate headaches and stress. The startup, which has raised $50 million in venture funding from firms such as Shasta Ventures and Lux Capital, started selling its $399.99 starter kit in October. Annie Cheung, a Salt Lake City native, worked at Cisco as a product manager and as a General Assembly instructor in Hong Kong before founding Noon with former executives from Nest and August two years ago.

After realizing the untapped potential of 3D interior design, Fischel-Bock started Hutch (then ZOOM Interiors and Homee) during her senior year at George Washington University. The app and website -- which allow users to upload photos of their rooms, virtually redecorate and purchase pieces to make the look a reality -- earned her $1 million in revenue before graduation day.

Cofounded Uru, a company that uses computer vision and artificial intelligence technology to make video ads more relevant and engaging with nearly $1 million in funding. Uru-created ads were cited as being 81% more effective for brand recall than standard digital ads in an NYU Center for Behavioral Research study. Attorre and cofounder Bill Marino were first team out of the Cornell Tech startup studio class to raise institutional funding.

Modern Fertility, launched in early 2017 and has raised $1 million in venture funding to help women understand their fertility earlier in life, particularly given that women are waiting longer to have children. The startup says it takes the same lab tests offered by fertility clinics and makes them more affordable and easier to understand and track over time. Modern Fertility is Afton Vechery’s fourth startup, while Carly Leahy most recently worked at Uber, where she led creative strategy for products such as UberEats and UberHealth.

Christina and Rocco Baldassarre cofounded Miami-based search-engine and social-media advertising agency Zebra Advertisement, which has $1 million in revenue. The company's proprietary API enables clients to follow their target audience from first click across multiple devices, online and offline. Named to the 2016 Entrepreneur 360 list. Clients include Microsoft and State Farm. A Google Partners All-Star Award winner.

Cofounder of Popular Pays, a Chicago-based startup that connects brands and content creators via an online marketplace. Their 37-person team recently completed a Series A fundraise, with a total raise of over $6 million to date. Popular Pays graduated from Y Combinator in the winter 2015 batch and was recently named a Facebook Marketing Partner. Clients include Google, Macy’s, Amazon, Samsung and Coca-Cola.

Less than two years ago, Daria Rose Evdokimova and Ethan Barhyd launched VoiceOps as a simple sales and support service on Excel spreadsheets. The AI-powered voice analysis platform now services some of the largest sales teams in the U.S. and has more than $2 million in funding.

A decade ago Taylor was homeless and almost dropped out of high school. Last year he founded social media marketing software company PopSocial, which in its first year reported more than $2 million in revenue. Clients include Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft and Hint Water. Also has served as CMO of rental-car delivery startup Skurt and is founder of marketing agency MilliSense, with clients such as Microsoft, NASA and Miller Lite.

While Airbnb proved that people don’t mind staying in apartments, many also miss the conveniences of a hotel, including a concierge at their finger tips, shampoo in the bathrooms, and guaranteed fresh sheets. That’s where Sonder fits in. The company rents out entire floors or entire apartment buildings and turns them into rentable apartments for travelers and short-term stays. Francis Davidson started renting out his apartment in college in Montreal in 2012, and after meeting Lucas Pellan, decided to turn it into a business. Sonder has since raised over $46 million from venture capitalists.

Matus started early on Teal Drones, launching the company in 2014 when he was only a sophomore in high school. His company, Teal, now has 30 employees and has raised more than $16 million in venture funding. Teal’s drones are among the fastest in the market, going up to 70 miles per hour, but Matus’ belief is that drones can be much more than flying cameras and should be accessible to everyone.

Coy founded Coy +, an agency that helps marketers with digital strategy, creative development and event management. Past and current clients include RCA Records, Procter & Gamble, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the State Department. With no outside funding, she led Coy + to grow to nearly $1 million in revenue last year and has built a team of 16 employees.

The brand he cofounded competes with traditional retailers and bespoke companies by cutting out the middleman and going directly to the consumer with high-end, made-to-order dress shirts, suits and jackets. Miller is also the founder of Alteration Specialists of NY, a full-service, experiential tailoring platform. Together, the two companies project 2017 revenues of $7 million.

What started as a hobby building machine-learning models for Phillips Exeter Academy seniors Jon Goldsmith and Nikolas Liolio is now the $1.5 million-funded Tetra, a mobile app which transcribes phone conversations into searchable transcripts. Asset managers, journalists and recruiters are Tetra's primary customers, but the team sees video conferencing and in-person meetings in its future.

Cofounder of Strike Social, a company with more than $46 million in revenue that uses artificial intelligence to help agencies and brands build YouTube and social media advertising. In 2017, named the No. 17 fastest-growing private company in the U.S.—No. 3 in the marketing and advertising category—by Inc.

Yuan Gao is the cofounder of Mavrx, an AgTech platform that analyzes aerial data collected by drones and provides actionable insights to farmers through web and mobile platforms. With $22 million in funding, Mavrx combines computer vision algorithms and machine learning to detect and predict changes in conditions before they would become visible.

In 2014, she launched LIKEtoKNOW.it, the only ready-to-shop consumer service on Instagram. It allows browsers to click through from the app to e-commerce sites, buying clothes worn by favorite celebs or from a retailer's curated feed. Like To Know It generates over $150 million in retail sales annually. Prior to that, in 2011, aged 23, Texas-based Box founded RewardStyle, a platform allowing "Influencers" to make cash from their social media content.

Launched the company, which connects brands with its network of Snapchat influencers and stars and develops campaigns for them, out of the Disney Accelerator program in 2014. Counts Coca-Cola, Disney, Target and Fox, among others, as clients. Has raised $3.5 million to date from investors including Techstars and Disney.

Rust was employee 25 at Lyft, the $5.5 billion ridesharing startup chasing Uber. He launched the service in Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and Boston before taking over as head of the driver experience team. Now the Stanford grad is working on Lyft's future as it focuses on becoming a platform for self-driving cars.

Founded the company as Mashwork in 2009 and launched as Canvs in 2014. Canvs, which counts entertainment marketers such as Sony Entertainment, NBC Universal, Viacom and HBO, as well as media agencies such as Starcom Mediavest and IPG as clients, offers software that tracks the mentions of and emotions around TV and entertainment content on social media. Total funding from sources such as Gary Vaynerchuck and Ludlow Ventures is $5.6 million.

Ross is a cofounder of Opendoor, an online service trying to streamline the process of selling a home. The company offers a quick payday to homeowners and then tries to flip those assets using technology to assess value and risk. The company, which is operating in Las Vegas and Phoenix, closed a $210 million funding round in December.

Founded the profitable influencer-marketing platform with a daily reach of more than 500 million in 2013. You & Mr. Jones, a brand-technology company founded by former Havas CEO David Jones, acquired a majority stake in 2016. Clients include Coty, Nestle, Taco Bell, Ford Motor Co. and Unilever. The tech platform enables brands to work seamlessly with content creators all around the world.

Wetherill cofounded uBreakiFix in 2009 as a 21-year-old after dropping and breaking a brand new iPhone 3G. Now as CEO, he oversees a tech repair chain that has more than 250 corporate and franchise locations across North America with system-wide annual revenue of about $140 million.

Rinaudo is the CEO of Zipline, a startup that builds drones and uses them to deliver medical supplies in places like Rwanda. The company raised $25 million in a Nov. 2016 Series B round and is already airdropping blood bags and other medical necessities with drones it calls "Zips."

Gadea, who was born in Romania and grew up in Ottawa, Canada, founded Envoy in 2013 in a shared work space. His goal? Replace paper sign-in books with a modern and efficient iPad-based experience -- and over the long-term, improve visitor and host experiences in the workplace. Under Gadea, a former Twitter infrastructure engineer, Envoy has garnered 3,500 weekly active users and raised more than $16 million in funding, winning the backing of early investors such as Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Wu, from Bonn, Germany, cofounded Shippo with Kreuz, from Nuremberg, Germany, in 2014. Shippo, which has raised $9 million in funding, has built an API that makes shipping easy and affordable for small businesses, provides access to both domestic and international carriers and allows businesses to print labels and compare shipping rates. Shippo has grown to 45 employees, and about 10,000 merchants use the service.

Former ClassPass division director Kassan launched all-women social club and coworking space The Wing in New York in 2016, raising $2.4m from investors. Next up: she and cofounder Audrey Gelman, an U30 alum, hope to take their idea to other cities.

In 2014, Candito and Clarence Wooten founded Progressly in order to centralize and streamline the entirety of a business' operations, regardless of the type of company. Progressly also provides its own business process strategies for its clients to study, use and share. Since founding, Progressly has raised $11 million in funding and has grown to 31 employees. Candito was inspired to become an entrepreneur largely because of his grandfather, a successful manager. Candito started building Progressly the same month his grandfather passed away.

A Kenyan-turned-New Yorker, Achieng Agutu started making videos from her college dorm room after failing to find women who looked like her in the fashion and beauty industry. Agutu, with more than 1.9 million social media followers and a passionate focus on body positivity, is now the face of Shea Moisture, a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Rookie and the first bald Kenyan woman to model for the magazine. She co-hosts the Gen-Z talk show "The Influence" on Amazon Prime, and has an MBA from the Hult International Business School.

Ajar Rajbhandary operates a portfolio of brands on Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other major marketplaces through his company Herd. In just over a year, Herd has grown to $15 million in revenue, earning thousands of five-star reviews and reaching millions of customers. The company owns three brands, like electronics seller Mini Mic Pro and beauty seller Trancend, and is on track to expand to five new brands this year ranging from electric dog collars to car adapters. Mini Mic Pro is consistently an Amazon best-seller mic, outperforming products from Logitech, RODE and DJI, according to Rajbhandary.

Alex Ojeda is a first-generation Mexican-American creator and entrepreneur with an audience of 14 million across all platforms. His travel and attractions content generates over 1 billion organic impressions annually and has led to partnerships with brands including Royal Caribbean, Atlantis Dubai, Formula 1, and Experience Abu Dhabi.

Arya Keshavarzian is the cofounder of LuxConcierge, a premium automotive and lifestyle concierge service transforming how people access and negotiate luxury vehicles. The company specializes in white-glove sourcing, delivery, and deal structuring for exotic and high-end cars--serving everyone from athletes and entertainers, to first-time buyers, students, and hardworking professionals looking to step into the luxury space. Since launching in 2023, they've received $15 million in funding and revenue has grown 400% year-over-year, with more than half the business driven by repeat and referral clients. They're now a top-performing seller for Mercedes-Benz and a high-volume partner for BMW, Porsche, Audi, Acura, and Bentley.

Gabriele Corso was a computer science PhD student at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where his research focused on the intersection of machine learning and molecular biology. His cofounder Saro Passaro was also a research scientist at MIT and previously worked at Meta. The two have trained AI models for predicting biomolecular structures and how molecules interact within the body, which could eventually help with drug discovery. Used by thousands of global organizations and downloaded more than 1M times, these open source models are the basis for Boltz, a company Corso and Passaro cofounded with Jeremy Wohlwend to improve therapeutic design using AI.

Brent Liang leads the New Media team at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, where he's responsible for content, growth and building "the A24 of a16z." His role is to tell stories about the firm and its portfolio companies, primarily through X, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Many of the a16z new media originals have reached 500K-1M+ views (with budgets up to $200,000). Before a16z, he was the head of growth at tech show TBPN, where he built operations to grow the show on X.

Dubbed the "Gen Z Carrie Bradshaw," Eli Rallo is an author and content creator with a following of over 1.3 million across TikTok and Instagram. She published her debut book, "I Didn't Know I Needed This," a collection of personal essays released by Harper Collins, in December 2023. Her sophomore book, "Does Anyone Else Feel This Way?" hit shelves in October 2025, with her upcoming debut fiction novel to be published by Hachette. A graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Rallo also founded Prose Hoes Literary Salon, a popular literary membership community spanning a book club and podcast.

Evangelina Petrakis is the founder, CEO and designer of EP Jewels, a global jewelry brand she launched at 17. The company has shipped over 50,000 orders to 90+ countries and built a social following of 2.4M across platforms. Known for bold, personalized designs, Evangelina continues to expand the brand globally while empowering self-expression and modern luxury.

Gabriela Nguyen is the founder of Appstinence, a Gen Z-led movement that has reached more than 1 million people, offering science-backed strategies to help people unplug from social media. Developed at the Harvard Innovation Labs, the platform's signature Appstinence Academy and 5D Method blend behavior-change research with Gen Z's lived experiences to help people achieve "appstinence". Nguyen recently spoke at the NYT Well Festival, will give a TEDx talk in November, and is currently writing a book.

Henry Kornaros is a photographer, director, and the cofounder of Public Opinion, a New York-based media company. What began as a short-form trivia series has evolved into a flagship show exploring the hidden systems and stories of NYC. Episodes like "What Happens When You Flush the Toilet" and "Tracing NYC's 30-Year-Old Water Problem to the Source" have earned the series more than 400 million views. In 2023, his team launched Track Star, a music trivia show that has generated over 1 billion views, featuring guests such as Elmo, Kamala Harris, Olivia Rodrigo, and Jimmy Fallon. Kornaros has also directed campaigns for Ralph Lauren, Nike, and Jean Paul Gaultier. "

Jen Yuan is the cofounder of View Source, a Brooklyn-based creative and technology studio building scalable brand systems with clarity and traction. The studio has worked with over 25 growth-stage brands in food, fashion, wellness, and media, leading Bandit Running's full rebrand and e-commerce relaunch and shaping Aura Bora's digital presence before its 2024 exit. Yuan began creating digital experiences at 16 and now View Source unites brand strategy, design and development globally with teams in Paris and Taipei. View Source is expected to generate revenue in the multimillion range this year.

JohnGabriel Nguyen-Truong is founder and CEO of XPHERA Inc., whose product, xEarth, is an alternative to GPS. xEarth helps travelers confidently navigate unfamiliar spaces. The technology fuses information and wayfinding tools while highlighting the stories of women, minority artists, and community histories in various places on its maps. Clients include airports, subways and transportation hubs, as well as a partnership with the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC). The company recently received a contract to enable indoor geolocation for more than 10 million annual travelers at Indianapolis International Airport.

Leah Kateb is an internet personality focused on fashion, beauty, and lifestyle, with a following of more than 10 million across platforms. Kateb is a re-founder and CCO of Skylar, a clean fragrance brand offering natural, hypoallergenic, California-inspired scents.

Molly Hall is the Founder and CEO of VAN ETTEN, a boutique PR agency she launched in 2023 to help emerging, female-led fashion brands scale globally. In its first full year, VAN ETTEN generated nearly $1 million in revenue and partnered with labels such as Heaven Mayhem, Freja New York, EB Denim and Almada Label. A Texas native based between London and New York, Hall brings experience from both luxury fashion houses and startups, combining creative strategy and editorial expertise to deliver bold, relationship-driven storytelling for a new generation of fashion talent.

Amelia Montooth (CEO), Roman Papademetrou (COO) and Emmet Sandberg (CRO) cofounded production company Mutuals Media in February 2024. Built with a mission to reimagine TV for short-form, social-first platforms, the startup currently produces three shows: "Gaydar," "Girl's Girl," and "Tapped In." Flagship show "Gaydar" now counts more than 200 million views and more than 700,000 followers across platforms. They've booked guests like musician Reneé Rapp, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Chappell Roan, and more. Along with original content for their own pages, Mutuals Media also works with outside brands to produce white labelled series by and for Gen Z.

Ruth Sack flipped the distribution playbook to revitalize her family leather accessories company. Streets Ahead was established in the 1980s rooted in California's fashion heritage, selling its luxury leather goods wholesale. But it wasn't until after 2020, when Sack joined the team, that the brand started offering direct-to-consumer purchases. That's led to brand presence at major retailers, where its belts can be found at Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman's and Revolve, among others. Influencer and stylist collaborations, including Beyoncé wearing a Streets Ahead belt during her Cowboy Carter tour, have boosted visibility. The brand is projected to generate $3.2 million in revenue this year.

Stephen "SpringSims" Works is one of the top streamers of "Sims," with 1.72 million unique Twitch viewers and over 13 million minutes watched in 2024. His brand collaborations with EA Sports, Twitch, Xbox, AT&T, Fidelity, and Logitech have generated millions of impressions. His advocacy earned him LGBTQ Streamer of the Year at the Gayming Awards 2024 and was selected from a pool of thousands to be one of 20 recipients of StreamElements' Creator Diversity Program. Works has also raised over $246,000 for nonprofits like Hope for Haiti, St. Jude, The Trevor Project, and Make-A-Wish. His annual charity birthday streams, month-long fundraising drives, and collaborations with 50+ creators reflect a long-term commitment to social good rooted in joy, authenticity, and representation.

Friends Val Parker and Andrea Popova created their comedy show, Ask a F*ckboy, to put a live studio audience between comedians and their biggest dating regrets. The format is simple: the women take the stage to present their most unhinged dating stories, while a panel of self-proclaimed "f*ckboys" weigh-in. The show has sold out every performance since its inception less than two years ago, and has gained over 25,000 followers across social media. Since launch, a multi-pronged business has been built around the show. Popova, who writes an 11,000-subscriber newsletter called CPDG (which stands for Consumer Packaged Goods Directory), brings on brand partners. And, their umbrella creative agency, STFU, is hired by brands to create buzzy content perfect for the social age.

Jade Beguelin, a former derivatives trader, and Sabrina Sadeghian, a Georgetown University medical school student, bonded over their love of skincare and in 2021, launched 4 AM SKIN--what they call an "anti-wellness skincare brand" that specializes in all-in-one products. "We lead with the unapologetic message that you don't have to be perfect to take care of your skin," says Beguelin. Partnerships with Patrón, appearances in Netflix's "Too Hot To Handle" and its 8 million views on TikTok drive the majority of 4 AM SKIN's sales. The DTC brand is now focused on expanding its presence at major U.S. retailers--it recently launched in Bloomingdale's. The company is projected to hit nearly $1 million in revenue this year.

While cofounder Griffin DiStefano graduated from Boston University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 2019, he spent the following year developing his passion for video production, working with his friend and cofounder Patrick Koitzsch (who was working at Snapchat) to make $500 music videos and capturing and editing footage for concerts and festivals. By 2022, the pair had moved to Los Angeles and launched 6Degrees Films. Today the company provides clients with creative and production services, leveraging cutting edge technology and virtual production offerings. In 2023, the company partnered with Inter Miami CF, creating the soccer club's branding and design in anticipation of Messi's arrival. The campaign generated more than 50 million views across social media. 6Degrees has also brokered relationships with Chelsea FC, Adidas, Puma, and Taylor Swift.

April Lockhart is a content creator who shares her experiences living with a limb difference under the self-given nickname "Disabled Fashun Girlie." With over 3 million likes on TikTok, she shares fashion and lifestyle videos with her 300,000 followers. She has hosted pop-up events at New York Fashion Week, served as a brand spokesperson at SXSW, and contributed to the launch of Anthropologie's Adaptive line, aimed at better serving the disabled community.

Caitlyn Kumi is founder of Miss EmpowHer, a digital media company that generates more than 1 million monthly impressions from young women through online content and community events. The startup has collaborated with brands like Dove, SoFi, Clinique, Jergens, Poppi and Kendra Scott. And Kumi counts more than 180,000 social media followers across Miss EmpowHer platforms. Along with Miss EmpowHer, Kumi is a full-time integrated marketing manager for brand activation and engagement at Google.

Christian Dwarica is the Latino founder and CEO of The Film Zone, a platform across social media that offers movie recommendations, shares behind-the-scenes content, and publishes Q&As with directors and actors. With more than 4.5 million global Instagram followers across handles like @TheFilmZone, as well as additional pages specific to countries like Brazil and Turkey, and communities like Spanish speakers, the four-year-old startup has partnered with Netflix and Warner Brothers to promote their newest releases, streaming specials and shows. The Film Zone also now offers social media agency services, like creating content and campaigns and managing social media communities, to retainer clients like Prime Video, Tubi and Disney to help grow their social media presence.

Mary Ralph Lawson Bradley and Kennedy Crichlow started Daily Drills, a leisurewear company, in the midst of the pandemic to provide another alternative to athleticwear. Operating on a drop-based model, with a new collection of pieces launching every other Wednesday at 10am PST, the company has expanded to include resort, sport and mens lines. This year they did their first in-person pop up in NYC and are on track to make $21 million in revenue, more than double last year's. The company has been fully bootstrapped by Chrichlow and Bradley with an initial investment of $10,000 each, and has no outside funding.

Enola Bedard is a creator and choreographer with an audience of 24 million who is known for her masterful, high-energy dance routines in iconic locations across California and around the world. Her viral videos have drawn the attention of A-list artists, landing her gigs dancing alongside Jennifer Lopez and Usher and choreographing for Shania Twain, to name just a few. The 24-year-old, won a Streamy Award two years in a row in the dance category and has supported herself in part through collaborations with Garnier Fructis, L'Oreal Paris, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Amazon and other major brands.

Erin McGoff has built an online audience of more than 5 million doling out career and life advice to Gen Z and millennials. The former journalist and filmmaker educates her followers on critical life skills that aren't taught in school--like writing resumes, how credit cards work, job interview etiquette and how to spot financial scams. This year, McGoff premiered her new YouTube show "No One Knows What They're Doing," where she covers topics like "Should I move to Europe?" or "How do I negotiate my salary?" through both sit-down and interview style videos. She's been awarded a Pulitzer Fellowship, Webby Honor and Clio Prize and was a VidCon Featured Creator.

Golloria George is a beauty influencer focused on promoting makeup inclusivity and representation to her 2 million followers on TikTok. Originally a refugee from South Sudan, she came to the U.S. at the age of 5. While in college, she started posting videos of herself testing makeup on her skin and has since consulted for major beauty brands like Patrick Ta and Rhode, helping them expand their makeup offerings to be more inclusive.

Jacklyn Dallas launched her YouTube channel NothingButTech at 13 years old to assist her grandmother with technology. Since then, it has grown into a platform with 225,000 subscribers and more than 18 million views, featuring tech product reviews and interviews with industry leaders such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple Software Engineer Craig Federighi. As a high school student, Dallas began lecturing at top universities including MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and NYU, discussing YouTube journalism, media company building, and tech trends for Gen Z. While studying at NYU, Dallas expanded NothingButTech into a media company, running social media and offering consulting services for clients such as Samsung, SeatGeek, and Amazon. Recently, she spoke on AI regulation at the White House and joined the 2025 CES Board of Directors.

Jessica Jung is the lead producer at Niantic Games where she leads product development, game monetization, and partnership initiatives for the company's original franchise "Peridot," an AR-first mobile game with over 1 million plays, shipping over 100 updates with new game content. Jung launched Niantic's first in-game donation activation with Transgender Law Center in support of Pride Week with over $40K+ donated and record engagement from player community across mobile, mixed reality, wearables and current/future spatial computing hardware platforms. She also shipped the world's first Amazon Anywhere integration into "Peridot," enabling players to purchase physical goods directly within the game, bundled "with digital products.

As Special Projects Editor at The Nation, Ludwig Hurtado oversees the publication's podcasts, YouTube content, and original series. The magazine's audience has grown drastically since Hurtado has assumed his role: When he started his role in 2022, for instance, podcast episodes were averaging at 350 downloads per episode. In 2024, that number is up to 12,000. He also launched "Elie Mystal's Contempt of Court," a podcast series on how to reform the Supreme Court. With Hurtado at the helm of its multimedia efforts, The Nation has acquired and syndicated existing media, too--including podcasts like "Tech Won't Save Us" and "American Prestige." Outside of his work at The Nation, Hurtado recently launched "Play," an independent zine about food and recipes from LGBTQ+ chefs, artists, and writers. And his first book, "Bad Foodies," will be published by Beacon Press and covers the sociopolitical and ethical aspects of food.

In January 2020, MaryKatherine Black started Yellow The Label, a clothing company, with the idea of selling retro-inspired pieces driven by art and texture. The brand makes a variety of products, including dresses, athleisure and swimwear, and has been worn by the likes of Miley Cyrus and Kendall Jenner. Currently, 70% of its products contain sustainable fabrics made in a women-owned SMETA-certified factories, according to Black. The company, which was funded by Black with an initial $10,000 loan, is projected to make $10 million in revenue this year. Its pieces can be found at retail stores like Nordstrom.

Started by Nicholas Prentiss in 2022, Bread makes innovative, elastic shoelaces. It turns any shoes into slip-ons that I can pull on or off my feet in seconds. Three pairs go for $26 and are popular with the TikTok set. That led to a valuation of $3.5 to $7 million, according to Prentiss. It's hard to imagine how something as pedestrian as shoelaces could be a multimillion dollar business, but that's the world we live in.

24-year-old Parker Butler directs the team that runs @KamalaHQ, the campaign social brand for the Harris-Walz presidential campaign. Formerly @BidenHQ, the account's content has received over 1 billion of impressions, generated earned media and significantly shifted American political narratives by tapping into the increasing importance of memes and other creative ways to use online marketing. Butler's work was featured in CNN in August with the headline, "Inside the Gen Z Operation Powering Harris' Online Remix."

As a model and influencer, Pia Mance was tired of being the product of other's businesses. So in 2022, the Australian native launched her jewelry company, Heaven Mayhem, with $900, sourcing pendants from flea markets and hand-making her first orders. Within 12 months, its bold earrings were spotted on celebrities like Sofia Richie and Emily Ratajkowski. Now the company has expanded into different product lines, most recently watches, and is made by wholesale partners. Its products are stocked in retailers like Bloomingdales, Revolve and Selfridges. Heaven Mayhem is estimated to make $9.5 million in revenue this year.

Plastique Tiara is a Vietnamese-American drag star and founder of Plastique Beauty. With a social media audience of over 15 million, her viral "Wipe It Down" challenge video (showcasing her unique blend of anime and Vietnamese pop culture) has over 90 million views. Plastique gained fame on Season 11 of "RuPaul's Drag Race" and is currently featured on "RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars Season 9." Her success has landed her partnerships with major brands like Neutrogena, Hulu, Amazon Prime, L'Oréal, Disney+, Mac Cosmetics and Laneige, and she regularly works with Asian and Vietnamese charities.

Poetry me, Please is a poetry performance platform showcasing poets through in-person events and social media. With 250,000 followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, founder and CEO Rashan Brown brings his community together through monthly shows across New York City at venues like The Cutting Room and a 1,600-person-sold-out event at the Apollo Theatre. Through partnerships with brands like Eventbrite and Microsoft, it is the largest poetry showcase since Def Poetry Jam hit Broadway in 2008. Each event features 10 poets and attracts around 400 attendees. The organization supports a community of 1,200 poets by providing performance videos and headshots, helping them secure more paid opportunities and build their careers. In addition to Poetry me, Please, Brown is also a core sports Product Manager for ESPN.

Reece Feldman is a creator and filmmaker who became internet famous making TikToks on-set as a production assistant for the Amazon show "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." Since drawing an audience of more than 2 million, Feldman has been tapped by major studios, streamers, and award shows-including the Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, and Critics' Choice-to create exclusive content for in-production titles, new releases, and red carpet events. He has shared behind-the-scenes moments from projects like "The Summer I Turned Pretty," The Hunger Games' "The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes," and "Scream VI." Recently, he's interviewed lead stars from Wicked and Gladiator at their red carpet premieres, further establishing his role as a go-to entertainment insider.

Samuel Jordan is one of the top selling digital fashion designers on "Roblox," with over 30 million sales for his original digital clothing and accessories. He has designed digital fashion collections for the luxury fashion houses Stella McCartney, Rebecca Minkoff, and Burberry; collaborated with supermodel Karlie Kloss, helped dress Elton John's avatar for his "Roblox" concert,and was tapped as Forever 21's Metaverse Fashion Curator to curate their line of digital clothing. In 2021 Jordan joined the toy company Jazwares, where works as a creative director and consults on their Roblox-based toy lines. The studio has launched games for hit brands Squishmallows, Poppy Playtime, and Cobra Kai.

Founder Sarah Little spent part of her childhood in the Middle East and traveled to 40 countries by the time she was 18 years old. The experiences led her to found digital platform More to Her Story to highlight women and girls across the world. With a monthly audience of more than 3 million readers, the startup has partnered with think tanks like The Wilson Center and major media outlets like ABC News and ITV News to cover stories about girls and women in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran. The More to Her Story podcast has featured interviews with former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, the United National Refugee Agency's communications director Maeve Patterson, and top journalists like Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times and CNN's Clarissa Ward. Little was named a Women for Women International Champion, and is the youngest Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social Innovation at Babson College.

Tavares Brown is the co-founder of Charge It 2 The Game LLC, a studio that has gone viral on social media for blending Black culture with the excitement of drinking games. The game has sold more than 250,000 copies to date. "Charge It 2 The Game" was named one of Cosmopolitan Magazine's "14 Best Drunk Board Games You Gotta Have at Every Party." Brown also works to highlight the importance of diversity in creative spaces and draws inspiration from his roots in Saint Louis, where his game first gained notoriety.

Content creator Trevor Rainbolt has become the face of the "GeoGuessr" community, the popular game that tasks players with identifying exact places on the earth from Google Maps screenshots. Rainbolt began posting content on TikTok in 2022 and has amassed a dedicated audience of more than nine million followers on social media and garnered over 30 million impressions per video in 2024, making him the most viewed and consumed geography content creator in the world. His unique skillset and engaging presentation style has earned him accolades from both the gaming community and the wider press, where he has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, NPR, VICE, WIRED, GQ, and many other outlets.

The recipient of a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to drop out of school and become an entrepreneur, Alex Singer founded Voldex in 2015 when he was barely a teenager. Voldex now has 50 employees and specializes in user-generated content, publishing some of the most popular games on Roblox and Fortnite Creative. Voldex's game Driving Empire is one of the most popular games on the platform, and the company's full portfolio has more than 4.2 billion plays and 20 million monthly active users. It raised a fresh round of fundraising in 2023 led by Andreesen Horowitz.

Anne Shoemaker is the founder of Fullflower Studio, a Roblox-based game studio founded in 2020 at the start of the pandemic, because she wanted to create higher quality experiences on Roblox. A developer since she was 13, Shoemaker taught herself to code, 3D modeling, and game design. Unsatisfied with the pace of learning, she dropped out of college to release games on Roblox. Fullflower, once just Shoemaker and an employee, has since grown to a team of 22 people and developed a hit Roblox game, Mermaid Life, which has over 86 million views and won a 2022 Roblox Innovation Award.

The former manager of a Bath & Body Works store, Ariana Silvestro watched customers struggle to pick out candles from the wide selection available. In 2021, she started Scent Lab, which asks customers to complete a quiz and then makes a personalized candle recommendation. It expects to bring in about $1 million in revenue this year, its first full year in business.

The comedy creator first gained popularity for recording his therapy sessions and coffee delivery series where he delivered java to stars like J Lo, Kamala Harris and Austin Butler. With 12 million TikTok followers, Olsen--thanks to his unabashed humor and vulnerability--is normalizing conversations around mental health and sexuality. Olsen was GLAAD's first-ever Queer Advocate of the Year and also founded a sustainably sourced coffee business called Flight Fuel.

Cody "Clix" Conrad has built a following of over six million on Twitch and over 15 million on all social channels for his Fortnite video content. He launched a clothing brand Dr3aminClothing in November 2021, and last year founded a UEFN studio Clix Creative, gaining over 5,000,000 unique players in the first 2 months of map creation. He recently partnered with the Boys and Girls club of America to spearhead their new esports gaming initiative, after speaking to the local Dallas club in May and personally inviting 30 kids to be his special guests and watch him compete at a Fortnite event.

Druski is a comedian who rose to fame when he started posting content to his instagram page, back then under the handle druski2funny, in 2017. Since then, he's collaborated with the biggest stars in hip hop and Hollywood, including Drake, Jack Harlow and Lil Yachty. He's starred in the Peacock film "Praise This" with Chloe Bailey and this summer sold out comedy venues across the country on his Coulda Woulda Shoulda tour. President Joe Biden also invited Druski to the White House this year for the administration's Juneteenth celebration.

Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, Josh Glodoveza started in the gaming industry at age 13 and soon became an talent manager at Ader, representing up-and-coming Twitch streamers as well as Sykkuno (4M Twitch) and Hanhanxxrose (1.2M Twitch). He has negotiated brand partnerships with Puma, Mercedez Benz, and esports teams like Sentinels and Gen G, and helped secure an eight figure exclusive streaming deal for one of his clients on YouTube. After serving as VP of talent for merchandise company Fanjoy, this year he left to cofound his own Talent management firm and software company.

Katie Konans has revolutionized NASA's digital strategy through her work in audio communication. At NASA, she manages five active podcasts, including the flagship podcast "NASA's Curious Universe," which she launched. Since taking the leadership role in 2019, she's grown the podcast audience to more than 8 million episode plays on Apple Podcasts alone, with a listener retention rate of 70% on average. She's received the NASA Early Career Achievement Medal, a Webby Award, as well as the Robert H. Goddard Award for her team's contributions to NASA's public engagement and communication.

Kristina Ayanian is the youngest executive producer and host in Nasdaq's history. She is the host of Nasdaq's, "Live From MarketSite," a weekly listings and capital markets series where she interviews CEOs and business leaders to discuss company successes, business trends and new innovations. Ayanian has interviewed figures like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, trailblazer Ana Gardner and astronaut Dylan Taylor. She has helped grow the audience to more than 50 million viewers. Her work with the series has led to business collaborations with the likes of the Deloitte Fast 500, RedPoint Ventures InfraRed100 and CloudNY.

Molly Burke was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a group of rare eye diseases that affect the retina, at age 4. Ten years later, she had lost her sight. Since then, she has become the first blind creator to hit more than a million followers on social media (she has 3 million across platforms). In addition to disability advocacy, she posts about fashion, food and traveling. She's spoken at the United Nations and World Economic Forum, and has had partnerships with brands including Google, Starbucks and Disney. In 2019, she published her memoir, It's Not What It Looks Like, as an audiobook on Audible.

Morgan Lavoie cofounded Money News Network, a podcast company surrounding financial literacy, to close the wealth gap for women and people of color. The business was inspired by her time as the youngest podcast producer at iHeartMedia, where she produced "Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin," which hit no. 1 on the business charts. Lavoie and Lapin later decided to create their own network of podcasts, newsletters and social media content. Founded in January 2023, MNN has won Webby awards and built an audience of more than 6.2 million across the various platforms.

Morgan Ling leads a team of 30 in developing a new unannounced title for Amazon Games. In her previous role as revenue strategy manager at Riot Games, she lead monetization strategy and published three successful titles - The Ruined King, Hextech Mayhem, and The Mageseeker, which collectively have nearly one million downloads and two of which debuted on Steam's top 100 best-selling charts. In 2022, she founded a media company, Ling Productions, focused on making the games industry more welcoming to marginalized groups, particularly women and people of color. She's built a notable online presence with over 190K followers across platforms and 49 million views across Youtube and TikTok, partnering with brands such as Huawei, Girls Who Code, and 88Rising. She also created and cohosts a podcast tailored towards gamer girls.

TikToker-cum-researcher Abbie Richards specializes in understanding how misinformation, conspiracy theories, and extremism spread on TikTok. She has 531.7K followers and 5.6 million likes on TikTok. Richards is currently pursuing her Master of Science, where she's studying the intersection of climate change and disinformation. She is a co-founder of EcoTok, an environmental Tiktok collective that specializes in social media-based climate communication.

If you've seen celebrities like pop star Lizzo carrying a colorful, vegan leather bag with the words "Protect Black Women" emblazoned on the front, they are the creation of fashion designer Blake Van Putten. He started the Los Angeles-based clothing line CISE in 2020, and is on track to surpass $4 million in sales this year. A portion of the company's profits go to charitable organizations like BEAM, the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective.

Mari Llewellyn, a creator who once weighed 250 pounds, built her online following of more than 2 million by documenting her mental and physical health journey losing 90 pounds. She and Gregory LaVecchia have since cofounded Bloom Nutrition, which offers tasty, high-quality health supplements aimed at helping women reach their fitness goals. Bloom Nutrition's greens powder can be found on shelves in Target stores across the country.

Luu created Akrew's first product, a trading platform for "Animal Crossing," which went viral during the pandemic and had over 20 million active users its first month. The corresponding Discord server grew to over 500,000 active chatting users. The company expanded to be a trading platform across 30 titles including various "Roblox" titles, "Diablo 2" and "Pokemon." Akrew then launched an esports division, fielding top teams in "Valorant" and "Rocket League."

Faique Moqeet left his job at Airbnb to cofound affiliate marketing agency Hamster Garage with Imran Shamim. Now, Airbnb is their client, along with brands like Brex, Turo and Canva. The company acquired Swipehouse, an influencer marketplace with over 20,000 creators, in October 2021, further focusing on creator brand partnerships.

Jena Dominique Pruitt is the cofounder of marketing and creative agency Made In Color. Owned and operated by Black women, Made in Color has launched campaigns for clients like Airbnb, Apple and the Huey P. Newton Foundation that have reached over 2 million people on social media.

Jeremy Allen began his career in the mailroom at WME in 2016 but has quickly become one of Hollywood's most promising young entrepreneurs and producers. In 2020, Allen helped launch New Slate Ventures, a $100 million fund devoted to seeding and producing diverse and intersectional movies, television series and documentaries. Allen has financed projects including Lee Daniels' 'The United States vs. Billie Holiday,' and AppleTV+'s 'They Call Me Magic', a documentary about NBA legend and entrepreneur Earvin "Magic" Johnson.

Julian Shapiro-Barnum is a comedian and actor known for his viral online show, "Recess Therapy," where he recently unearthed the internet sensation "Corn Kid." The creator conducts on-the-street interviews with children about their hopes, confusions and dreams. He has amassed 3.5 million across social platforms, and partnered with Nike, Dole and Hasbro. Shapiro-Barnum has been profiled by the New York Times, CBS Sunday Morning and The Today Show.

Since she had to wear a uniform to school growing up, Julianne Goldmark channeled her creativity into accessorizing her hair. She started Emi Jay at age 13, selling non-crease hair ties made out of underwear elastic. Her line now includes colorful hair clips, scrunchies and headbands that have been worn by celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Emma Chamberlain and Hailey Bieber. Emi Jay is sold at Bloomingdale's stores, plus online at Urban Outfitters and Revolve.

Since its launch in May 2020, Our Future has reached 800 million total views across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, where founder and CEO Michael Sikand says, his target audience, Gen-Z, get their news. Born as a podcast series, Our Future has grown to include advertising deals with Shopify, HubSpot and Warby Parker

Jay Vaughn, Connor Navalta, and Stefan Gresham cofounded construction equipment rental company Opifex. The 50-person firm owns 2,000 pieces of equipment it rents to construction companies. Projects it's been involved in include the Austin Bergstrom International Airport and Tesla's Gigafactory in Austin. The Texas A&M University alums expect $30 million in revenue this year.

Seamus Ruiz-Earle started a consulting business for revenue operations in his bedroom while waiting to start a job at Deloitte, which had been delayed by Covid-19. Early momentum led him to forget the job and turn his gig into Carabiner Group instead. The self-funded company now employs 30 people and sells to customers including KPMG and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, which have helped it reach $7 million in revenue in 2022.

When Victor Fontanez, a former celebrity barber from Atlanta, was forced to stop cutting hair during the pandemic, he turned to social media to become a motivational speaker. He has since built an online following of more than 18 million, with content featuring both motivational speaking and haircuts that Fontanez gives to passersby. Through "VicBlends Academy," he says he is also developing barber schools for California prisons, giving inmates the chance to become licensed barbers while incarcerated.

Siblings Adina and Mayer Kamkhatchi started Adina's Jewels in 2015 as a side hustle. They now sell their necklaces, bracelets and earrings at Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale's, and have attracted celebrity fans like Billie Eilish, Cardi B and Kendall Jenner. The duo opened their first two brick-and-mortar stores this year, and project $15 million in sales in 2021.

As associate creative directors at BBDO NY, Low and Clark have built a profile for their creative studio with inventive campaigns that resonate for younger social media users, like an advertising partnership they designed between Dunkin and TikTok'er Charli D'Amelio that garnered 4 billion impressions. Low's podcast, Bouncing Back in Advertising, has profiled over 100 advertisers put out of work by the pandemic.

Chase Davis' impact on the gaming world dates back to his teenage years, when, at age 19, he founded a company in his Harvard dorm that built a groundbreaking product to enable high-end gaming and virtual reality on older laptops. It caught the eye of Facebook, where he later led the company's effort to move into cloud gaming, which boasts 1.5 million monthly users today. Now, Davis is a manager at Facebook continuing his work on cloud gaming and the coming Metaverse.

Frustrated by traditional media's lack of actionable resources and underrepresented experiences in its coverage, the trio started Impact in June 2020. Primarily operating on Instagram, Impact is a digital destination that shares socially-impactful content to more than 10 million people each month. In the past 16 months, they've registered thousands of young voters and driven hundreds of thousands of petition signatures for individual campaigns (like Justice for George Floyd) and broader movements, such as climate change and abortion rights.

Displeased when she received a gift in three separate packages, Lisa Marie Posso started GYFTING, which offers curated gift boxes stocked with products from diverse founders. She has quickly secured corporate partnerships since launching last year, with customers like TikTok, Twitch and Puma, who send the gift boxes to their employees. The company is on track to cross $1 million in revenue in 2021.

YCombinator-grad Patrick Chandler started working on FightCamp, his at-home boxing company, when he was in college studying mechanical engineering. FightCamp lets users take on-demand classes with professional trainers; sensors embedded in gloves track metrics along the way. In June, FightCamp announced a $90 million Series B led by NEA and Connect Ventures.

As TSM's vice president of operations, Walter Wang was instrumental in closing the organizations $210 million naming rights deal with FTX and building its new, 25,000-square-foot performance center. His influence started well before that, advising on things like the company's Series A fundraise and expansion into Fortnite two years before joining full-time in 2019. In 2020, he reached a $3 million per year contract with League of Legends star SwordArt, rumored to be the largest North American esports deal ever at the time.

The dancer and comedian from St. Petersburg, Florida is known as Young BBQ to her 1.4 million followers on Instagram. She started dancing as a hobby in 2005, copying the moves she saw her choreographer brother display. For her Instagram videos, Feacher has embraced a lo-fi, anything-goes-attitude, including one popular video of her dancing within a packed Times Square Starbucks. Diddy, Cardi B and Missy Elliot have all proclaimed themselves fans, corporations like Netflix and Spotify are too, signing Feacher up for brand deals.

Most famously, she's the creator of the Renegade dance, a hit piece of TikTok choreography for which she didn't receive credit until white social media celebrities popularized it. This shone a spotlight on the disconnect between white influencers and their minority peers while catapulting the mononymous Jalaiah to stardom, taking her audience from 2,000 followers to over 3 million across social media. The Atlanta teen has since performed at the 2020 NBA All Star Game, appeared on "The Ellen Degeneres Show" and struck brand deals with companies such as Samsung, Prada, Bloomingdales and Netflix.

Brownlee runs a popular YouTube channel, MKBHD, where he reviews gadgets and offers commentary on the tech industry. His channel has over 13 million subscribers and has drawn in 700 million views in the last 12 months. Brownlee posted his first YouTube videos while in high school, breaking down the inner workings of a HP Pavilion laptop he purchased with his saved allowance. His channel took off after he graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology, and he's since made YouTube videos on smartphones, headphones, camcorders, smartwatches, tablets, speakers, Nike's self-lacing boots and Tesla's Cybertruck. More recently, he's scored sitdown interviews with such luminaries such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Taibi in 2017 launched QuickTake by Bloomberg (formerly TicToc), a social video news network that has more than 90 million monthly views across platforms. The vertical is also planning to launch a streaming news channel. Taibi says she is the youngest senior editor on the global team.

Pierson founded The Newsette, a newsletter for women, as a college sophomore. Four years later, The Newsette has 500,000 subscribers and averages 4 million monthly views. Sponsors include Ulta, Fidelity and Bumble. Pierson recently launched an editorial platform for Diane von Furstenberg called The Weekly Wrap.

When Jesar Shah joined Twitter's associate managers program in 2016 at age 22, she found a passion in giving people across the globe a voice, regardless of where they lived. She then proceeded to launch a product that did just that: Twitter Lite, giving access to people in more than 100 countries and who speak more than 70 languages. Twitter Lite now has over 10 million downloads globally. Shortly after, she set her sights on building a private way for people to save the conversations they love on Twitter, launching Bookmarks in 2018. Her biggest project yet, however, has been launching Twitter's first web redesign in nearly a decade. She, along with a team of all female engineering and design leads, launched the new and long awaited Twitter.com in 2019.

When Kimberly and Timothy Lewis started CurlMix in 2015, they wanted to make organic haircare products more accessible to women with curly hair. Today, CurlMix boasts a full line of handmade and organic shampoos, conditioners, moisturizers and serums that they sell primarily on their own website. The husband-and-wife duo have received $1.4 million in funding from the likes of Backstage Capital and are on track to generate $7 million in sales this year.

After a backyard lacrosse session left a gaping hole in the net of the rebounder she was using to practice, 13-year-old Rachel Zietz created a more durable version by expanding the thickness of both the net and the steel bars. Now a sophomore and captain of the undefeated club lacrosse team at Princeton, she runs a full-fledged lacrosse equipment company that will do $7 million in revenue in 2020. A 2018 acquisition allowed her to expand into professional rebounders, which she sells to colleges like Harvard, Yale, Brown and Georgetown.

Rylee Ebsen creates content for traditional and digital platforms, and previously worked at Snap Inc. Storytelling runs in her family. As the granddaughter of Hollywood actor Buddy Ebsen and advertising creative director Stan Freberg, Ebsen decided to reinstate Buddy's old production company Ebsen Enterprises Inc. in April 2019. Clients include Disney, Facebook and Snapchat. Her commercial work has generated more than 40 million views on YouTube.

Nikhil Srinivasan and Alex Kern started working together in 2014 to commercialize anti-fraud and compliance tools they built for online communities and marketplaces. Distributed Systems paired computer vision technology with a Stripe-like developer SDK to offer businesses with a simple way to automate identity verification.The company was acquired by Coinbase in August 2018.

Anna Wan has spent her career scaling consumer tech companies. Currently, she is a general manager at $2 billion Bird, bringing scooters to most cities east of the Mississippi River, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington DC, and, one day, New York. Wan's preparation for the job came from her experience at Ofo, a Chinese dockless bike share company, where she launched, grew, and managed seven markets and teams, including ofo's largest city in the US. Previously, Wan worked in strategic planning at Airbnb.

When Brian Jeong and Phil Wong launched Hawthorne in 2016, they were on a mission to improve the accessibility, individuality and quality of men's personal care products. The brand, which has received $2.5 million in funding from the likes of Founder Collective and Comcast Ventures, uses customers' unique body chemistry and lifestyle to deliver tailored cologne.

Mike Murchison (CEO) and David Hariri (Head of Design) are cofounders of Ada Support, which provides AI customer support chat bots that automate customer service with the goal of saving save time and money for companies.Headquartered in Toronto, the company has 100 clients with 20 million end users.

When Eric Huang and Steven Mazur noticed the retail industry was overlooking short men, they launched Ash & Erie in 2015 with a signature shirt tailored for men 5'8'' and below. Last year, the Detroit-based brand appeared on Shark Tank, where Mark Cuban offered them a $150,000 investment. The first-time founders expect to pull in more than $1 million in sales for 2018.

Hemal Shah is currently a product manager for Instagram Direct, the standalone app that was launched late last year and is still in testing. Before coming to Instagram, Shah was the youngest product manager at Twitter when he joined. He worked on developer tools for Crashlytics and helped lead the strategic acquisition of Fastlane. He also serves as an advisor to multiple startups, including Workflow which sold to Apple last year.

Not just the cofounder of the esports team, OG, "n0tail" also captained his underdog Dota 2 squad to an improbable first place finish at The International 8 in August, netting the roster over $11 million in winnings. Sundstein's team is sponsored by Red Bull.

In 2016, Finman cofounded and was CEO of Escher Reality, which built augmented reality tools for mobile devices. Part of Y Combinator in the summer of 2017, Escher was acquired by Pokémon GO creator Niantic Labs this year, and Finman now leads the future AR teams for the company.

Taylor is the creator of The Bridge, an award-winning, M. C. Escher-inspired puzzle game that's sold over 600,000 units. He also created the action-puzzle game, Tumblestone, which sold nearly 500,000 copies. His work has earned recognition at IndieCade and the Independent Games Festival and has been featured in the Museum of Pop Culture.

Stahl is the CEO of Offworld Industries, which Kickstarted the multiplayer military shooter, Squad, for $330,000 in 2015. Now in Early Access, Squad is a hit with 1 million copies sold. Moving forward, Offworld plans to build out the studio to include publishing services for indie creators.

Launched insulated drinkware company BruMate in 2015, and recently secured deals with Cabela's and Olympia Sports. Jacobs, who owns 100% of the company, projects revenues of over $2 million for 2017.

Sneha Keshwani learned to code at age 16 and now runs global mobile growth and engagement for LinkedIn, leading projects across India, Germany, China and the U.S., which have resulted in double-digit increases in engagement since 2016. Keshwani, who was born in Dubai, is also responsible for securing large partnerships with OEMs and carriers such as Samsung, LG, Sony and Verizon, with goals to bring the LinkedIn app to more than 400 million professionals worldwide by 2019. While in college at the University of Pennsylvania, Keshwani consulted for a micro-finance non-profit in Ecuador and a women’s empowerment startup in India.

Aeva builds autonomous car technology that combines vision, depth an motion sensors in a single product designed to improve range and resolution across weather conditions and precisely measure velocity of every pixel of information. Both CEO Soroush Salehian and cofounder, Mina Rezk worked on Apple's Special Projects Group. Aeva's publicly released financing is $4.5 million in seed funding.

Neal runs social media for Hallmark's 2,000 Gold Crown stores. In her first year at the company, her collaboration with influencers generated more than 50 million impressions and three million user engagements. She also hosts an online show, Party 101, that has drawn more than 200,000 views and driven more than $25,000 in sales for Hallmark stores.

UNC-Chapel Hill grad Adelman built a 'universal shopping cart' allowing retailers to sell across devices -- and shoppers to buy from multiple online stores in one virtual trip. After getting early backing from chain store giant Target, the mobile technology company was acquired by female-focused media company Popsugar in 2015.

Futurism covers the future of science and technology. The site has more than three million unique visitors and 140 million video views monthly. The founders built a partnership with the Prime Minister's Office in Dubai to offer the site in Arabic and with The White House for SXSL and other events. Futurism also established a native advertising arm with partners like Nokia.

Moiseenkov is the CEO of Prisma Labs. Launched in June, Prisma allows users to filter photos in the style of their favorite artists. After launching in summer, the app quickly moved into the Top 10 Free Downloads Chart in the Apple app store in multiple countries. The company said in August that it has filtered more than 1.2 billion photos.

Brouwer created a goal-setting system, producing diaries, organizers, and journals to help people become "the best version of themselves." What started as a Kickstarter project made in the region of $3 million in revenue in 2016. Its bestseller, the $31.99 SELF journal, encourages users to plan three months ahead to achieve success.

Owner of the eSports organization Tempo Storm, which owns teams in games including Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch; "Reynad" is also a member of Tempo's Hearthstone roster and a popular game streamer. In 2016 he sold his successful all-Brazilian Counter-Strike team to competing eSports venture Immortals.

Two years after Donohue became CEO of Instapaper, the startup was acquired by Pinterest in August 2016. The platform, which allows people to sync and save articles to read later, is now helping Pinterest expand into the content space and will remain as a standalone app. Donohue started at Instapaper as an iOS engineer.

His online marketplace allows obsessives a chance to buy and sell sneakers, including via its app, which has over 128,000 downloads on Google Play. Khan is also the founder and publisher of KicksOnFire.com, a popular sneaker review website with over 1.2 million fans on Facebook.

Rodriguez was a cofounder at Vergence Labs, which was acquired by Snapchat in 2014 and became the foundation for its Spectacles project. Now launched, Spectacles, which are video-capturing glasses, is the social media company's first foray into hardware. As the architect of that project, Rodriguez, who dreamed up the device for his college honors thesis, is responsible for its design and function.

Lyons and Dziabiak are building The Zebra, a search engine for auto insurance quotes. With more than 50 employees and $23 million in venture funding, The Zebra lets customers instantly compare insurance options from over 200 companies. Lyons, the CEO, dropped out of high school at 15.

Oversees management of all Tonight Show social accounts. In 2009 launched initiative to start live-tweeting the show each night. Has driven live-streaming and unique Snapchat initiatives. Since The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon's launch in February 2014, digital audience has grown from about five million combined audience to more than 32 million. Facebook page has grown more than 655% since show launch and has more than 1.8 billion video views. The show's Twitter account has grown 350%, and Instagram account has grown 2300%. The show has more than 12 million YouTube subscribers.

Watching her father grow a family-run business into a national retail chain while growing up in Glastonbury, Conn. inspired Radocchia to become a serial entrepreneur. Radocchia, who learned to program when she learned to read, started her first business, an inventory management and marketing software company in 2011, picking up degrees at Colgate University and NYU along the way. In 2014, she cofounded Chronicled, an internet-of-things startup building blockchain identities for physical property to create a system for authenticity, ownership and connectivity. Radocchia is no stranger to risk -- she became a competitive skydiver at 18 and sold her gear at age 20 to fund her first company.

Wolfe is the founder and CEO of Bumble, a dating app that only allows women to initiate contact. It's majority owned by European dating company Badoo and had amassed 11 million registered users as of January 2017. In 2012, Wolfe cofounded Tinder and worked to market the app as it became a viral sensation. She left the company and sued over sexual harassment claims, but later settled.

Jack Sloane is going on his fifth season as the creative strategist and partnership consultant for the LA Kings. He has increased awareness and audience engagement with the brand among 18-24 year olds and dropped several merchandise collaborations that sold out quickly. In 2021, Sloane pitched a successful collaboration between the Kings and Los Angeles streetwear label Psychworld. Since then, Sloane has led projects such as the LA Kings x Cherry Los Angeles capsule, a fashion collab that sold out within days. Sloane also built a talent and influencer hosting program with celebrities such as Don Toliver, Cole Bennett and John Legend.

Matthew (Matteo) J. Sánchez is the founder of Matteo Parfums, an international fine fragrance brand sold in 15 countries. Bootstrapped until 2024, the brand won L'Oréals Inclusive Beauty Fund ($200,000) that year. With a 22% repurchase rate, the company is expanding beyond DTC into retailers this year. Sánchez is a two-time Art & Olfaction Awards nominee and two-time judge, and is a member of The Fragrance Foundation.

As a Black woman with thick hair and sensitive skin, Aliyah Marandiz grew frustrated when waxing, laser hair removal and sticky creams irritated her skin and were still ineffective. She began experimenting with her own sugar paste formulas, using just sugar, lemon and water, in her dorm room in 2016. She started Sugardoh in 2020, selling the paste from her garage and posting 15-second tutorials on TikTok. As of this year, Sugardoh is sold in all 1,300 Ulta stores nationwide.

As a teenager, Jordan Bentley started designing his own shirts with a silk screen printing machine he received as a gift. Bentley, who starred in HBO Max's "Sweet Life: Los Angeles," now runs clothing company Hypland, which combines his love for streetwear and anime. It sells graphic tees, hoodies and other apparel featuring popular anime characters like Hello Kitty, Sonic the Hedgehog and Naruto. He recently partnered with Netflix to design a product line for the animated series Yasuke. His clothing is sold at Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters and PacSun.

Haily Marzullo is the founder of Humankind, which launched its gender-inclusive swimwear in Target stores nationwide this year and sold out in the first month. She is also a consultant for brands like Kylie Cosmetics and Buck Mason.

A member of Fortnite's influencer team, Julia Onken's work in this year alone has included campaigns with LeBron James and Neymar Jr., multiple new season launches and collaborations that featured Bruno Mars and Ariana Grande. Before joining the Fortnite team, while working at Houseparty, she launched the #InTheHouseparty campaign on TikTok which generated 6.6 billion views.

Dave Jorgenson runs the Washington Post's TikTok channel, which has drawn more than 700,000 followers and 27 million likes since he started the channel in May 2019. His videos balance meme-heavy humor with takes on culturally significant events such as the Black Lives Matter protests and the pandemic; Joe Biden made a mask awareness video with Jorgenson in May.

Lulu Liang had a 10-year plan: work in consulting, get an MBA at an Ivy and become a beauty executive. However, after two years at Accenture she was miserable. She quit her job to become an operations assistant at start-up Luxy Hair. Liang earned three promotions in two years and became CEO in 2018 when the founders exited. She introduced 300 new colors of hair extensions this year and is gearing up to expand beyond extensions with a hair curler and haircare line.

Benjamin Lee joined Postmates in 2017 after it acquired his startup Bold, which he had cofounded with former Secret founder David Byttow. He's now head of product design and grew the team from three to 16 people. He helped spearhead projects like Postmates pickup, group ordering and Postmates Party, which allows customers to share a courier going to the same place. Previously, Lee was the first designer at Secret, consulted for Medium and joined video service Crunchyroll as its second designer.

In May 2019, LaPointe Jameson took over as CEO of storied but fading esports outfit, Evil Geniuses. In her first year, she's made significant moves to pull the team back to relevancy, primarily by re-entering two of the top esports, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends. The newly acquired CS:GO team quickly made its presence known by debuting with a championship win at ESL One New York 2019 in Brooklyn's Barclays Center. LaPointe Jameson has also opened offices in Seattle and Los Angeles and doubled headcount. Evil Geniuses boasts sponsorships from Monster Energy, Xfinity, AMD and Twitch among others.

Ali Mohamed built a patent-pending technology that enables individuals with hearing loss to visualize sound. Vound uses a combination of augmented reality and artificial intelligence to interpret sound waves and convert them into projections on a display screen in real-time at a fraction of the cost of cochlear implants or hearing aids. Vound is developing prototypes that could serve people with speech disorders and various hearing impairments that affect 1.3 billion people. Vound’s technology has won awards from MIT, Harvard, Intel and Microsoft. Mohamed, originally from Egypt, is currently taking time off from MIT to test his technology across the U.S.

A Russian immigrant, Alissa launched HERO in 2016 in response to the dehumanizing rhetoric she saw on the rise. HERO spreads positive and empowering messages by incorporating the heroic stories of women, people of color, and immigrants in its designs. Ten percent of profit supports programs that create pathways to equality, such as the Speak Truth to Power human rights education program and She's The First. A recent campaign has seen HERO donate a backpack of supplies to a child affected by Hurricane Harvey victims for each one sold

Nathan launched Vremi in 2015, selling colorful and high-quality home and kitchen products at an affordable price. In 20 months, Nathan has launched more than 150 products and will sell into over 1 million homes by the end of 2017.

Brooks launched the simple, chic accessories brand in 2013 after being unable to find the perfect card case. Vianel's wallets, caps, and more are sold at high-end stores like Barney's and Saks. Its luxe monogrammable iPhone cases, which cost up to $180, are favorites of celebrities like Gigi Hadid and Kourtney Kardashian.

McKellar joined Dropbox three years ago when the company acquired Zulip, the real-time collaboration startup McKellar cofounded in 2012. McKellar has since led Dropbox's engineering, product and design operations teams. Before becoming an entrepreneur, McKellar worked at Ksplice Inc., which was acquired by Oracle. A Fremont, Calif. native, McKellar earned degrees in chemistry and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ng's brand sells high-end watches and wallets at affordable prices with a transparent supply chain. Elliot Havok began on Kickstarter, where the entrepreneur raised over $400,000 for his luxury watch. He's sold over 250,000 slim, RFID-blocking wallets in 95 countries to date.

When Kavin Mittal moved back to India in 2011, the Imperial College engineering graduate had already built two successful startups: AppSpark and MoviesNow. But according to Mittal, it was a trip to a street food stall with friends in New Delhi that sparked the idea for hike ? an instant messaging service designed to rival WhatsApp. Noting the prevalence of the Nokia 1100 mobile phone at that time, he thought of the potential impact the Internet could have on India's enormous population. "I had an iPhone 4S at that time, with apps and Edge, not even 3G... there were all these people who had no clue what the Internet actually meant," he says. "India has a population of over one billion people, how would they come online?" Today hike has over 100 million users, is valued at $1.4 billion and has raised $175 million. On his India market vision, he says, "You never know. A market like India is very diverse. There are 200 million mobile Internet users, many of whom are accidental users or sachet-sized data users."

Aniket Shah, Ujjwal Sukheja and Saran S. got together over sandwiches and coffee at a Bangalore café in April 2024 to brainstorm ideas for a new venture. When their order took too long to arrive, they realized they had just stumbled on it. The trio invested $32,000 of their savings to set up Swish, an app that delivers freshly prepared food in 10 minutes. After hiring four chefs and setting up an automated kitchen for speedy cooking, they kicked off the service in July. A month later, California-based VC firm Accel provided $2 million in seed money for their fledgling startup. Swish has since built a network of kitchens, each servicing a 1 km radius in some of the tech city's dense neighborhoods. It offers a menu of 200 items, including Indian, Mexican and Italian fare. So far, Swish has raised $54 million, including $38 million in a Series B round in March led by U.S.-based Bain Capital Ventures and London headquartered Hara Global Capital that valued it at $139 million. Proceeds will be used to expand into other cities, including New Delhi and Mumbai.

Duval is the cofounder and chief science officer of Entalpic, a company using AI to design new materials for use in fields like manufacturing and energy. The goal is to shrink the time it takes to discover them from decades to just a few years. Instead of relying on trial and error, Entalpic's system predicts which materials are most promising and then tests them in the lab. This approach has already led to a new catalyst to remove hydrogen from ammonia, which could make it easier to store and transport hydrogen, a key element in the transition to renewable energy. Entalpic has raised approximately $9.3 million and is valued at over $65 million.

When one of cofounder Oliver Grenier's close friends lost his eyesight and was forced to leave university because he couldn't navigate websites, course portals and online materials, he teamed up with Braun and others to find a way to make digital accessibility simple, practical and effective. In 2020, he cofounded Eye-Able, software that helps companies make their websites easier to use for people with visual and other impairments by enabling compatibility with screen readers, adjusting contrast and text size and improving navigation. Today, Eye-Able company sells its tools as a subscription service to businesses and serves more than 30 million users across over 10,000 websites. The company has raised around $24 million from investors including Yttrium and 5I Ventures.

Harry Uglow is cofounder of Dex, an AI-powered recruiting platform designed to better match candidates with employers. Instead of filling out applications, job seekers can speak directly with Dex, which builds a detailed profile of their experience and surfaces opportunities based on that. Then it can deliver better candidates to employers, while reducing hiring fees. Before starting Dex with his over-30 cofounder Paddy Lambros, Uglow led product and engineering at social media company Kinscape and was an early employee at Ava Security, later acquired by Motorola for $400 million in 2022. Dex has raised around $2.7 million from investors.

In his previous job as a consultant at BCG, Hollman noticed a gap: most AI models were built for text and images, ignoring the huge swath of valuable data living in spreadsheets and databases. He founded Berlin-based Prior Labs to build foundation models that could tap into this data to do things like generate forecast reports for traders, flag fraud in financial data, or assess credit risk for loan approvals. The company has seen strong adoption with more than 3.5 million downloads of its TabPFN model, which Hollman says is used in industries like industrial analytics, clinical research and financial modeling. Prior Labs has raised around $9.6 million from firms including Balderton Capital and XTX Ventures, and counts AI pioneers Yann LeCun and Bernhard Schölkopf among its advisors.

A Linköping University graduate, Jacobsson is an early employee at Lovable, the AI-powered vibe coding startup that's now valued at $6.6 billion. She built and led operations, finance, strategic partnerships and investor relations, and designed the company's equity program, helping attract talent from more than 15 countries and supporting its Series A. Lovable has now raised over $550 million and has crossed $400 million in annual recurring revenue.

Hyungjun Kim is cofounder of Seoul-based AI startup SqueezeBits. Founded two years ago, SqueezeBits' software helps companies lower the cost of running AI models, democratizing the popular but pricey technology. The software, which is sold by subscription, optimizes AI models for specific cloud services. In January, the startup raised 2.5 billion won ($1.8 million) in pre-Series A funding from investors including Kakao Ventures and Samsung Next, on top of 1 billion won raised earlier in seed funding.

In 2019, Mehmet Ertan Uygun and his sister launched Getmobil, a marketplace for selling used smartphones and buying refurbished ones, and has since raised $5 million in funding. Now operating over 100 locations and online, 2023 revenue broke $17 million. The Istanbul company expects revenue could soar to $100 million in 2024 as its European footprint expands.

Ogasawara and his partners started CrossBorder in 2021 to help companies better identify potential corporate customers. Its software, Sales Marker, uses AI to sift through data such as revenue, hiring, fundraising and press releases, allowing for precision targeting of possible clients. In less than two years, the firm says it has hit ¥300 million ($2.2 million) in annual recurring revenue and has raised ¥550 million in funds. Ogasawara previously worked at Nomura Research Institute and BayCurrent Consulting.

Khatri and Krishna began Multiplier, a global recruitment platform, in 2020, and together with cofounder Amritpal Singh (over 30), they have raised more than $70 million -- including a $60 million series B in 2022 that has taken the startup to a reported valuation of $400 million in just two years. Aided by the trend of workforce globalization and remote working, Multiplier has signed on clients such as Amazon and Uber, which use its software to find hires in as many as 160 countries, process payroll and comply with local tax as well as insurance regulations. Its backers include Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India.

Agrawal is founder of Bangalore-based Vyapar, which says its accounting and inventory management app has attracted more than 10 million downloads. The app aims to help small and medium-sized companies digitalize their various processes. Vyapar last year raised $30 million in its series B round from investors including WestBridge Capital, IndiaMart, Fortytwo.vc and India Quotient.

Friends Thomas and his friend Safdhar Adoor (over 30) cofounded the restaurant company VRO Hospitality which operates 25 restaurants and bars in Bangalore, Goa and Mumbai, with plans to open more in other Indian cities. Last September, VRO raised $3 million in series A funding led by CreedCap Asia Advisors. The duo laid the foundation for their current business over a decade ago when they established an event company that started by throwing freshman parties at college and later sold it to Times Internet.

Rick Firnando started Verihubs, an AI-based authentication and fraud prevention platform in Indonesia. It has served over 100 clients across banking, fintech and e-commerce, including Indonesia's Bank Central Asia, Australia's Commonwealth Bank, e-commerce firm Bukalapak and payments platform Payfazz. Verihubs claims to have helped its clients verify and authenticate over 36 million users in the past year, with its revenue growing 50 times in the same period. Firnando has raised $2.8 million in funding from Y Combinator, Insignia Venture Partners, MDI and BCA's investment arm, CCV.

Soon after graduating from college in 2013 Kapoor started mobile gaming startup Mech Mocha. The Bangalore-based company has developed over 10 games targeted at regional language users across India's small towns, including Hello Play, India's first live multiplayer social gaming app. Mech Mocha raised in 2018 over $10 million from investors including Accel Partners, Shunwei Capital and Blume Ventures. In October Walmart-owned Flipkart acquired Mech Mocha for an undisclosed sum and Kapoor will lead the growth of Flipkart's gaming efforts.

Five years ago Talukder cofounded the Dhaka-based online store that sells everything from mobile phones to home appliances, apparel and makeup. Pickaboo was one of the first online retailers in Bangladesh to introduce a monthly installment payment plan, same-day delivery and a customer membership program, and it now plans to open 150 physical stores across the country by the end of 2021. It has raised over $6 million from investors in Bangladesh and India. Previously Talukder set up the e-commerce site ehaatbazaar.com, which he sold to his cofounder in 2016.

Goh cofounded Glife, a farm-to-table platform that aggregates farm sources and connects them directly to restaurants, thereby cutting out the middleman. With over 100 employees in supply-chain logistics fulfillment and tech development, the company serves 800 food and beverage businesses in Singapore and generates revenues of over $10 million. It has raised $7.2 million from investors such as Heliconia Capital Management, Global Founders Capital, 500 Startups and Quest Ventures. A serial entrepreneur, Goh previously cofounded the ecommerce aggregator AllDealsAsia that was acquired by Indonesia's Lippo Group.

Started by Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur alumni Malhi and Saurabh in 2018, the live trivia gaming app Zupee has over 10 million users. It offers quizzes across a range of topics including math, movies and sports, and users can compete against multiple players for cash prizes. The Gurugram-based startup has raised $20 million from Matrix Partners, WestCap Group, Smile Group, Falcon Edge Capital and Orios Venture Partners.

Chinese media startup BLOCK 12 Culture started as a designer of animated emojis. As they quickly took off and attracted as many as 1.3 billion downloads, the company expanded into anime and related content production. It is also venturing offline to open physical stores, where users can buy some of the emoji-based dolls and figurines. Since its founding in 2016, BLOCK 12 Culture has raised more than $40 million from investors including Chinese VC firms ZhenFund and K2VC.

The cofounders of GoComet previously built Plat, a marketplace for real estate agents in India, which was acquired by Housing.com in 2015. They then started GoComet, a logistics resource management (LRM) software platform that helps large enterprises to reduce freight procurement costs. GoComet claims that it has processed over 20,000 tons of air freight and 84,000 containers, saving $20 million for its customers. The Singapore-based company has raised $2.5 million from investors including Leo Capital, India Quotient, SGInnovate and August One.

Polariant is a startup that developed positional tracking technology using polarized light detection. The technology allows for accurate location detection where there is no GPS service, such as underground parking lots. The startup raised $3 million since it was launched in 2015 from investors including South Korean internet giant Naver, NP Equity Partners and top Korean actor Bae Yong-joon. In April 2019, Polariant was acquired by Korea's largest car-sharing startup, SoCar.

Farmskin is a cosmetics startup providing skincare products and superfoods using the nutrient-rich fluid that is produced by cows after giving birth. Taeil Kwak started Farmskin in 2017 after developing the technology to use colostrum, which is high in protein and antibodies while low in fat, in skincare products. Farmskin is sold through the company's app as well as in retail stores in about 40 countries worldwide. So far, the startup raised more than $4 million from investors that include Silicon Valley-based VC firm TransLink Capital.

Daniel Liang is a cofounder and the CEO of Get, which was originally branded as Qnect when it was founded in 2016. The platform is a purchase-sharing social networking service with the capability of digital payment. In October 2018, Get raised $2.5 million in a funding round led by Vertex Ventures and Click Ventures. Since its inception, Get has sold over $6 million worth of tickets, organization memberships and merchandise, and commands a major market share across Australian universities.

Kristel de Groot, 28, started making superfood blends to boost the health of her partner, Michael Kuech, during cancer treatment. In 2015, the two began Your Super to likewise help 9 out of 10 people who do not eat enough fruit and vegetables daily. The company's seven easy-to-use, 100% organic mixes can be added to water, nut milks, smoothies or breakfast foods and are mainly sold online across four continents. It has raised more than $7 million to date.

Akshay Gulati is cofounder and CEO of Slikk, a Bangalore-based quick-commerce fashion and lifestyle marketplace. Slikk combines 60-minute delivery with instant refunds, creating a unique try-and-buy model that blends speed and convenience. Consumers in Bangalore can place their order, try the clothes on, give what they don't want back to the waiting courier and get an instant refund. In May, Slikk raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, bringing the total funding to over $13 million. The funding will be used for further expansion across more cities.

Aryan Yadav is cofounder and chief technology officer of wearable device startup NeoSapien. Founded in 2024, the Bangalore-based company has developed Neo 1, an AI-powered pendant that consumers can wear as a necklace. The connected device takes notes during meetings and send summaries as well as key points to NeoSapien's smartphone app. Last year, the startup raised $2 million in seed funding from investors led by Merak Ventures.

Cofounders Derek Nee and Wu Yichen launched agentic AI startup Flowith in 2023. The Shanghai-based company's service can assist with a diverse range of tasks, from generating business insights to launching websites and creating video content. Powered by large language models, including Google's Veo 3.1 and the Kling series from Chinese short video firm Kuaishou, Flowith can generate a web page from text prompts in seconds. The company has raised $9 million from HSG (formerly Sequoia China), LongRiver Investments and Vertex Ventures.

Hyunjune Ji is founder of Seoul-based Vacatio, a hospitality tech startup building what he calls a "Shopify for hospitality." Its AI-powered operating system, Finehost, helps owners manage reservations, pricing and guest communications, and enables them to sell directly to consumers instead of relying on third-party platforms. Vacatio also runs Placelist, a consumer app that uses chatbot-style AI to turn map-based searches into personalized recommendations for places to stay and visit. Placelist won a Red Dot award for lifestyle apps in the junior category last year. Founded in 2022, Vacatio has raised $5 million from investors including BASS Ventures, Laguna Investment and Sazze Partners.

Ishita Sawant is the founder of Bangalore-based Meolaa, an AI-powered startup building digital-first consumer brands. Meolaa was initially founded in 2022 as a marketplace for sustainable direct-to-consumer brands. Seeing a gap in demand and supply, Sawant pivoted, using data and insights from the marketplace to build her own brands. The company launched its first brand, a fragrance called HIRA, in 2025 and aims to launch two new brands in the beauty and personal care category this year. Meolaa raised $6 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by General Catalyst in October 2025 to develop its AI-native platform and accelerate its expansion.

Cofounded by Kyotaro Takahashi and Yuta Kamiya in 2025, LobbyAI helps companies navigate regulatory procedures and connect with policymakers. The Tokyo-based startup has built a database of policy documents and proposals from the country's over 1,700 municipalities. It uses AI to analyze them to show key trends and contacts, saving businesses time in research. Lobby AI raised in March ¥300 million ($1.9 million) in pre-series A funding from investors including Firstlight Capital and PKSHA Algorithm Fund.

Twishaa Gupta, Sonaal Goel and Kanishka Garg left their consulting jobs in 2022 to start Salty, a direct-to-consumer fashion accessories business. The startup started selling jewelry, like rings and necklaces, through online channels and is now expanding to other fashion items such as watches, sunglasses, belts and bags. The startups raised a $3.3 million funding round in January led by MG Investments. The founders are planning to launch Salty's first offline store in Delhi this year.

Cofounded by Rinaldi Dharma Utama and Christian Wilfandio, Se'Indonesia is a fast food chain specializing in se'i, a traditional smoked meat dish from eastern Indonesia, at an affordable price. Utama, who spent three years at Kopi Kenangan, and Wilfandio launched their first cloud kitchen, Lakuliner, in 2021 then rebranded to Se'Indonesia a year later, offering beef and chicken rice bowls starting at just 25,000 rupiah ($1.50). Se'Indonesia operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, leveraging centralized kitchens and a strong digital presence to provide always-on delivery service. The company now operates over 200 delivery and takeaway outlets as well as 23 dine-in restaurants across Indonesia. In April 2025, Se'Indonesia raised a $9.7 million Series A round led by Insignia Ventures.

Founded by Simon Song, VAST's Tripo AI platform can transform image and text prompts into detail-rich 3D objects in seconds. Since its launch three years ago, VAST has drawn nearly 10 million individual users and 90,000 studios and companies, such as Chinese internet giant NetEase and Japan's Sony, according to Song, an avid gamer and anime fan. Corporate customers are charged on a project basis while individuals pay between $20 to $140 a month for the service, which can be used for a lot more than gaming, such as animation and industrial design. Next up is a TikTok-like platform for users to share the 3D content they've created using Tripo AI, to be launched this year. In March, VAST, which competes with big players like Tencent Holdings and other startups, including U.S.-based Meshy, raised $50 million, to be spent on research. The Series A funding round, at an undisclosed valuation, was led by Alibaba Group Holding and PE firm Hengxu Capital.

Soham Ganatra is cofounder of agentic AI startup Composio. Founded in 2023, and with offices in both India and the U.S., the startup has developed a software platform to help AI agents become smarter. Through its service, which connects various digital assistants to over 10,000 external tools such as Gmail, Notion and Slack, AI agents can learn from multiple workflows and become better at what they are instructed to do. Composio, which says it is on a mission to let agents learn the same way a human does, raised last year $25 million in series A funding from investors led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Thanapong Somjai is the cofounder and head of technology at Spacely AI, a Bangkok-based SaaS startup bringing generative AI to the architecture and interior design industry. Spacely AI tools help architects, interior designers, and realtors work faster and more efficiently by eliminating tedious, repetitive tasks in the process, such as floor plan conversion and lifelike rendering. In July 2025, Spacely AI raised $1 million in seed funding led by PropTech Farm Fund III, following a pre-seed investment from SCB 10X. Somjai holds an engineering degree from Chulalongkorn University.

The cofounders of Alaro are building an AI-native law firm designed to make legal work easier. A former corporate lawyer at Paul Hastings, Jongert left to build a firm where AI handles most of the heavy lifting, such as research, draft writing and analysis. The hope is that senior lawyers can focus less on the busy work and more on higher-level strategy. Since founding the company in 2025, Jongert and cofounder Adamski have raised more than $10 million from investors.

Teglbjærg is the CEO and cofounder of Copenhagen-based Spaak Technologies, an AI startup that builds software to help companies keep up with changing laws and regulations. Its software scans and analyzes global regulatory changes, showing businesses exactly what is changing and how it could affect them. Today, the 20-person startup has more than 100 large companies as customers and has raised approximately $5 million. Before founding Spaak in 2024, Teglbjærg led revenue operations at a fintech startup.

Executives are often drowning in too much data: emails, meeting notes and spreadsheets. Bond wants to help them cut through the noise by building an AI-powered "chief of staff." Designed to give leaders real-time visibility into how their business is performing, Bond can pull together data from internal apps, tools and workflows to help execs with decision-making. Founded by Wiels, who built the machine learning capabilities at healthcare startup Solv; Sanders, who did quantum computing research at the DOE-funded Fermilab; and serial entrepreneur Samaha, who built her first company at 19, Bond has raised roughly $3 million from the likes of Y Combinator and MIT venture fund E14.

Construction is a massive industry, but much of it still runs on analogue processes. Brickanta wants to bring it up to speed with AI. Founded by Sweden-born Otterling and Bein Fahlander in 2025, the company's software can ingest a customer's historical project data, including deal documents and cost inputs. Then it creates a proprietary report with recommendations like implementing more accurate pricing or flagging cost overruns. The company already has enterprise customers across eleven countries and four continents and has raised $8 million from firms including Y Combinator and 20VC.

A former professional soccer prospect, Casey Backhaus traded a career in sports to instead pursue entrepreneurship. With $700 from his grandfather, he launched direct-to-consumer streetwear brand NoneofUs in 2020, releasing its first products in 2022 and since fulfilling more than 200,000 orders worldwide. The digitally native, bootstrapped, German brand has attracted a social media following of 650,000 and has been worn by athletes like Rafael Leão, Kenan Yildiz and Cristiano Ronaldo, Jr. Backhaus continues to roll out new collections and limited product drops six times per year. Basic tracksuits have been his bestseller. He projects 2026 revenue of about $17 million.

Forgis was founded in 2025 after CEO and cofounder Martelli saw factories shutting down across Europe, including his father's workplace in Tuscany. The company builds software to help factories run more efficiently by pulling data from internal systems, machines and cameras to spot issues early and improve operations. Swiss-based Forgis licenses its software to industrial manufacturers, charging up to $200,000 per machine, and has secured pilot projects with major European manufacturers. The startup has raised approximately $5 million in pre-seed funding from the likes of Redalpine, Venture Kick and Kickfund.

Brothers Max Clarke and Lestat McCree founded Healf in 2020 to simplify what they saw as a confusing and intimidating well-being industry. Grounded in their own health journeys, the platform is built around four pillars: eat, move, mind and sleep. In under four years, Healf has scaled to 550,000-plus customers and a curation of more than 4,000 products, generating $56 million in 2024 revenue and surpassing more than $100 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2025.

Clément Nguyen and Sasha Collin, along with Roxane Laigle (over 30), are the technical architects behind Lemrock, a deeptech startup building the infrastructure for "agentic commerce." Their platform enables brands to sell natively within AI conversations on interfaces like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, reaching 100 million monthly interactions for over 60 major merchants in under a year. To date, the company has raised a $7 million seed round from investors including Criteo founder Jean-Baptiste Rudelle. Nguyen (CTO) and Collin (CPO) previously cofounded the Y Combinator-backed startup Mindely, bringing combined experience from McKinsey's QuantumBlack, Rakuten Advertising and research tenures at Harvard Medical School and ENS Ulm.

Since she was 17, Molly-Mae Hague has created content for various retail brands and has also launched products of her own. Now, her 16 million followers across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok purchase from her cosmetics brand called Filter by Molly-Mae, which is also carried by Selfridges and Boots, and her clothing line called Maebe. A dropout from the Fashion Retail Academy, London, she has also worked with Amazon Prime Video on a docuseries of her life as an influencer, entrepreneur and mother. Together under the umbrella MMH Group Holdings, her ventures generated about $26 million in 2025 revenue.

Teaching AI agents how to do a specific task is often repetitive and time-consuming because they tend to forget what they've learned. With backgrounds in mathematics and computer science, Dutta and Peri built Mubit, a memory layer designed to help AI agents retain knowledge, improve over time and avoid starting from scratch with every training iteration. Since its founding in November 2025, the company has raised about $2.1 million from investors including Hoxton Ventures and Heavybit. It's currently in a closed beta phase but has already attracted nearly 1,500 engineers to its pre-launch waitlist, Peri says.

Pacerin is a Spanish ecommerce company founded by best friends Antonio Faya Jiménez and Manuel Monterrubio Jaime while still undergraduate students, built around identifying and launching Amazon-native brands in underserved market segments, from portable air conditioners to forehead thermometers. Bootstrapped from the start, the company was fully acquired in 2025 by a Spanish affiliate of Chinese manufacturer Midea Group, and now serves as Midea's official Amazon Spain ecommerce partner. Pacerin finished 2025 with $17 million in annual revenue, operating out of Sevilla with a full-time team of 14.

For a long time, recruiting has been a slow and expensive process for both companies and job-seekers. Cambridge graduate Saaras Mehan thinks he can solve that. In 2025, he cofounded Jack&Jill, an AI recruiting platform designed to improve how candidates and employers find each other. "Jack" helps candidates with job searches, interview preparation and salary negotiations, while "Jill" matches recruiters with qualified candidates. The company has raised roughly $19 million from investors like Creandum and Entrepreneur First, as it takes on incumbents like LinkedIn and Indeed.

Email inboxes can be an overwhelming place. Scape is here to help. The AI-powered email platform highlights the messages that actually need your attention, drafts replies based on past conversation and automatically reminds you to follow up when it matters. The company has raised approximately $3.3 million in funding from investors including Y Combinator and General Catalyst. Hodzic met his cofounder while an investor at Wave Ventures, initially backing Hagberg before joining him to launch the company.

The cofounders of Vescartes wanted to create "wearable art" by independent creatives when they launched their direct-to-consumer fashion brand in London in late 2024. The trio started with $1,000, making hoodies on a single embroidery machine in Hamza Zafar's bedroom. He left a career in private equity consulting, while his friends and twin brothers Seif and Karim Lolah were pivoting from software engineering. After 18 months in operation, Vescartes has sold 65,000 items, offered a pop-up shop in Soho and been worn by celebrities including Kendrick Lamar and Joe Jonas. Remaining bootstrapped, they project $12 million in 2026 revenue.

Byeoli Choi is cofounder and CEO of Movin, a startup that develops AI-based real-time motion capture devices. Based in Seongnam, its devices help game studios, YouTubers and entertainment companies create lifelike animations. In March, Movin raised 4 billion won ($2.7 million) in a pre-series A funding round from investors including Atinum Investment and Naver D2SF, the South Korean internet giant's corporate venture arm. In the same month, Movin established an in-house studio to collect 3D motion data to help companies develop AI-powered humanoid robots. Before launching Movin, Choi worked at Naver's metaverse platform Zepeto.

Cofounded by Ackshay Jain and Devansh Jain Nawal in 2023, Culture Circle is an Indian marketplace for luxury sneakers, streetwear and accessories that plans to expand overseas, starting with the UAE. The company says its AI-driven SourceX technology ensures rigorous product verification, and that its price comparison tools help customers find the best deals from across thousands of verified sellers. In December 2024, Culture Circle raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by Info Edge Ventures. The following month it obtained around $344,000 for 3% equity on Shark Tank India from Titan Capital CEO Kunal Bahl and Oyo founder Ritesh Agarwal.

Dogyun Kim and Sunbin You, who were classmates at South Korea's Seoul National University, cofounded Dalpha in 2023. Dalpha, which goes by XBoost in the U.S., develops AI-powered tools for sellers on Amazon's marketplace that automate tasks such as in-app advertising and listing optimization. The startup raised $10 million in funding from investors including DSC Investment, Dunamu & Partners, IMM, InterVest and Mirae Asset. Kim, who serves as CEO, is a former gold medal winner of South Korea's Mathematical Olympiad for high-school students.

While studying for a master's degree at Nagoya University engineering school, Masaki Takaishi started Aixtal, which helps semiconductor and electronic component makers use AI to reduce the cost and amount of data needed to come up with efficient production processes. The firm has raised ¥270 million ($1.9 million) in funding from investors including SBI Investment and Deepcore.

Sihwa Kim is cofounder and CEO of BIND, which operates online fashion retailer Athler. Launched in 2022, Athler focuses on an underserved segment: middle-aged men. BIND says it has more than 500 brands on Athler tailored for men in their 40s and 50s, the biggest demographic group in South Korea. Athler has over 100,000 downloads in the Google Play store. In February, BIND raised 4 billion won ($2.8 million) in series A funding from investors including Kakao Ventures and BASS Ventures.

Founded by Vinayak Aggarwal in 2019, BiteSpeed offers a suite of AI-based tools to help e-commerce brands drive revenue growth by communicating with customers via WhatsApp and other chat apps. The Bangalore-based company's products include analytic software and chatbots that provide personalized responses and can help shape marketing campaigns. BiteSpeed has raised $5.6 million in funding from investors including Peak XV's Surge, Whiteboard Capital as well as angel investors such as Unacademy CEO and 30 Under 30 alum Gaurav Munjal.

Launched in 2018, Christchurch-based VXT is an AI-powered phone system for law firms, recruiters and accountants. Cofounded by Luke Campbell and Lucy Turner, the service uses AI to transcribe client calls and generate summaries. VXT raised in May $2.5 million at a $45 million valuation from Alpine Ventures. Its investors also include GD1 and Phase One Ventures

Camilla Wiese is one of the cofounders of Y2K Wholesale, a used clothes provider for vintage and resale shops. Wiese worked in a number of retailers, working her way up from sales associate to store manager at Agent Provocateur and Heidi Klein, but pandemic store closures cost her her job. So she started selling her own '90s-2000s womenswear clothes online, launching Y2K Wholesale in 2021 as a supplier for resellers across the U.K. Two years later, she opened up Y2K Vintage, her own brick-and-mortar retail store. Sourcing 12,000 items per month and serving over 3,000 customers across stores, wholesalers and events, Wiese projects she will more than double revenue to $4 million this year.

An online marketplace for glamping and off-the-grid travel experiences, Owayy started as a student project at Copenhagen Business Academy by Magnus Emil Holst Schou and Anton North. The Airbnb competitor began operations in 2019 and now lists more than 10,000 available locations--such as cabins, treehouses and yurts--in 16 countries as far away as Australia and Canada with 30,000 completed bookings. Owayy merged in 2024 with rival Campanyon, keeping the latter name. The team has raised $3.6 million and anticipates north of $700,000 in 2025 revenue, keeping 17% in guest fees and 5% in host fees per booking.

Prague native Linda Sejdova started Snuggs at age 23 with cofounder and co-CEO Tomas Zahradnik (now over 30). On day one in operation in 2019, the pair sold 1,000 menstrual panties, their signature product which Sejdova describes as a sustainable, comfortable, ultra-thin, absorbent, washable alternative to wearing pads or tampons. The London-based duo has raised $12 million in funding with a full-time team of about 50. The brand also offers everyday underwear, period swimwear, bras and more, which are sold DTC and at nearly 3,000 retail points in three countries. Snuggs recently announced a sponsorship with Manchester City Women soccer team.

Lluís Montull Casas is the cofounder and CEO of Natulim, a Barcelona-based brand which sells laundry detergent sheets, dishwasher soap tablets and other cleaning products sans harmful chemicals or single-use plastics. With David Weiss (now over 30), he started the company in 2021 and bootstrapped it to $17 million in 2024 revenue. Natulim's products are stocked in nearly 2,000 Spanish retail points and are also sold DTC online (including a subscription option) to 15 countries across Europe and South America. Natulim employs 75 people full-time and has moved most manufacturing from China to its own factory in Taradell, Spain.

A fashion and lifestyle content creator with 540,000 followers across Tiktok and Instagram, Luca Santeramo created his own apparel line called FiveFourFive from his bedroom in June 2020. His monthly exclusive online product drops sellout quickly, and in 2024 he began selling everyday items online such as men's jeans and t-shirts. Revenue for 2024 reached $6.1 million and is projected to surpass $9 million in 2025. Santeramo's team also hosts popular events and pop-up stores, attracting 6,000 shoppers to a 10-day pop-up in Rome in December 2024. Santeramo is expanding sales across Europe and the U.S. with aims of opening a brick-and-mortar storefront.

Cofounders Daniel Yuen and Kieran Riddell-Austin started Montirex, a sportswear company in 2019, combining Yuen's sports experience with Riddell-Austin's background in IT. In the last three years, the company has grown from making $19.5 million in revenue to a projected $171 million this year, with no outside funding. It also sponsors home-grown athletes including the likes of soccer player Troy Parrott and fighters Leon Edwards and Daniel Dubois. Its performancewear can be purchased online or at several retail locations, including JD Sports. They also launched the Montirex Foundation in 2023 and have so far donated $160,000 to charities.

Rima Suppan and her cofounder Morgan Mixon (over 30) set out to build a stronger, softer and more absorbent diaper, which resulted in Peachies, a London-based diaper subscription service. The diapers are free from fragrances, dyes and unwanted chemicals. Keeping in mind the waste that comes with diapers, Peachies also uses some plant-based materials in the construction. A certified B Corp, Peachies has raised $1.7 million in funding and projects $4.8 million in revenue in 2025. The company also partners with nonprofit Save the Children to fundraise for the organization by prompting customers to make a donation with each purchase.

A former telecom professional who also enjoys cooking, Sandy Tang signed up for BBC's culinary competition show "MasterChef" in 2020. The Macau native finished in runner-up position and gained the confidence to start a company--with business partner David Solomon--that sells refrigerated, ready-made dumplings. Offered in eight different flavors, Love Sum dumplings are available through online and in-person retailers including Ocado, GoPuff, Selfridges and Booths. In early 2025, Tang pitched the venture on British television's "Dragon's Den" and received a $60,000 investment offer from entrepreneur Peter Jones (though the transaction did not come to fruition). Annual revenue is expected to surpass $1.5 million in 2025.

Stefan Popa grew up as one of seven children in a modest household in Romania. He worked as a barber and tried multi-level marketing before deciding to start a fulfillment center in a small warehouse in Oradea. HelpShip was created in 2019, soon moving into a larger facility, now employing 115 full-time staff and processing 550,000 ecommerce orders monthly. The business generated $11 million in 2024 revenue. Cofounder Iosif Chesca exited in 2023, the same year that Popa sold part of the company to Eushipments Group and Sofia-based Black Peak Capital. He says the key to success is "relentless perseverance."

Tash Grossman started Slip, a receipt data startup, with the goal of bridging transaction history with customer insights. Retailers like JD Sports and ALDO use Slip to send digital receipts for in-person purchases where customers can then sign up for more emails and download loyalty apps. The approach allowed vintage clothing retailer Beyond Retro to increase newsletter sign-ups by 226% in a single month. Grossman has raised $4 million since starting the company in 2022 from investors like Adjuvo, Haatch and Unbundled VC, and projects the company will surpass $1 million in revenue in 2025.

At 18 years old, Václav Staněk started the Czech footwear company Vasky Trade rooted in the Czech shoemaking tradition. The brand makes everything from sneakers to boots and trekking shoes and is sold in 10 physical stores and online. In 2023, Stanek acquired historic Czech sneaker brand Botas which is now under the Vasky umbrella and run by his brother. With no outside funding, the company is projected to make $19.7 million in 2025, up from $11.5 million in 2024.

CEO Flore Lestrade, CTO Tristan François and CSO Christian Kotait are cofounders of Veeton, an AI-powered service offering fashion retailers a way to model their clothing without hiring real models. The hyperrealistic AI images allow fashion retailers to show off a wide variety of sizes and styles without using real models. The platform has a massive dataset of AI fashion images--over 50 million. The startup has already worked with some major fashion retailers like Showroomprivé. The company has so far raised $2.1 million in venture capital funding.

Founded by Arjun Soin in 2022, Clinikally offers online consultation and products to help treat skin and hair-related diseases. The digital healthcare platform also runs an online marketplace where users can buy the recommended treatments and nutritional supplements. In 2023, Clinikally raised $2.6 million from investors including Tribe Capital and Y Combinator. Soin worked as an AI researcher at Microsoft and Stanford University before striking out on his own.

Lee TaeKyu and Seo Dongmin are cofounders of Seoul-based Doodlin, which operates a recruiting software platform called Greeting. Launched in 2021, Greeting offers companies easier recruitment by collecting job applications from different job-search sites, scheduling interviews and reviewing candidates. Doodlin says more than 6,000 companies in South Korea use Greeting, including LG Display, Kakao Entertainment and e-commerce startup Kurly. The startup has raised a total of $12 million in funding including an $8.1 million round last year from investors including Altos Ventures, Atinum Investment, FuturePlay, Murex Partners, Primer and Schmidt.

Evan Heng founded the Singapore-based education company Zenith Education Studio in 2019 to help junior college students improve their academics. Heng then launched Zenith Academy to help primary school students improve their English, math and science skills. Zenith now offers a hybrid program that includes classes of ten brick-and-mortar branches with a gamified online education platform. Zenith raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by Trihill Capital and East Ventures in July 2023 to fuel expansion of the company, which is now called Zenith Learning Group.

Harshit Mittal is the cofounder and CTO of Supplynote, which develops management software for India's restaurant industry. Evolving from a dorm room project with his cofounders Kushang, Abhishek Verma and Nitin Prakash (all over 30) that helped to distribute packaging materials to restaurants, the platform now also lets users manage online orders and track inventories. It has raised $5 million in total funding from investors including Artesian and Venture Catalysts.

Jack Lin dropped out of his Ph.D. studies in computer science at Zhejiang University to cofound Abaka AI. Launched in 2022, the startup helps AI firms and researchers collect, analyze and label data properly. The step is increasingly crucial as companies from healthcare to autonomous vehicles seek to develop their own ChatGPT-like services and train the large language models based on datasets. Abaka AI has raised $20 million in total funding, and its investors include China's Spinel Capital and Future Value Capital.

Kasra Zunnaiyyer is the cofounder and CTO of Karachi-based Trukkr, which has developed a management platform for Pakistan's logistics sector. Established in 2020, the startup's software allows users to obtain financing, track their fleets and connect with customers. As it is one of the first digital services targeting the country's small- and medium-sized trucking companies, Trukker has caught the attention of global investors. It raised last year $6.4 million in seed funding led by Washington, D.C.-based Accion Venture Lab and London-based Sturgeon Capital.

Kangyeol Kim and Gyuhyeon Sim are cofounders of AI startup Letsur. Launched in August 2021, the Seoul-based company's software helps other companies use AI in their operations. Letsur says more than 50 companies in South Korea and Japan use its software. They include CJ Group's entertainment unit CJ ENM for AI-generated images and scripts, advertising agencies to help with copywriting and hospitals to help with surgical operations. The startup has raised $2.1 million in funding from investors including Smilegate Investment and Stonebridge Ventures. Letsur graduated from Samsung's startup accelerator program C-Lab Outside in 2021 and LG's Superstart in February 2023. Kim and Sim are doctoral candidates in AI at KAIST, but are on a leave of absence.

Ling Tiange is the founder and CEO of Shanghai-based Dubbing AI. Established in 2021, the startup provides dubbing services to sectors including animation, gaming and live streaming. It uses technologies including AI to process and alter voice clips and achieve various effects. Dubbing AI has raised $3 million to date from investors including China's Source Code Capital and MiraclePlus accelerator.

Vidya Madhavan and Abhinav Anurag are the cofounders of Schmooze, a meme-based dating company started in 2021. While most dating apps are based on looks, the startup differentiates itself by matching couples through their meme preferences and sense of humor, which is more appealing to Gen Z, who largely communicates with memes. Users swipe to like and dislike memes from a selection curated via an AI algorithm, and match suggestions will appear on the screen based on the meme choices. In 2022, the startup raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by Inventus Capital and Silicon Valley Quad.

Smarthveer Sidana is the founder of Singapore-based human resources startup HireQuotient. Established in 2021, the company has developed software that uses AI to filter candidates based on their experiences and skill sets. It also works with users to come up with tailored questions before setting up video interviews. So far, HireQuotient has raised close to $3 million in funding, and its investors include Flipkart founder Binny Bansal and Peer Capital founder Rohit M A.

Soumyadeep Mukherjee is cofounder of Dashtoon, which helps anyone become a visual storyteller by converting uploaded narratives, character details and storyboards into quality comics. With the AI-based software, creators can reduce production time for their comics. Dashtoon also helps monetization of the final product. Founded in 2022, Dashtoon raised $5 million in seed funding led by Matrix Partners India and Stellaris Venture Partners in November. Last year, Google Play named Dashtoon one of its Best for Fun apps in India.

Wang Yi started Shanghai Anban Information Technology in 2018 while still pursuing his master's degree in information security at Shanghai Tech University. The online security service provider focuses on so-called fuzz testing. The method involves identifying bugs and vulnerabilities in IT systems by feeding them with a series of invalid codes to help users assess how current software responds. In 2022, Anban Tech raised more than $15 million in series A funding from investors including China's Silicon Harbour and Junci Investment.

Woon Yeon Kim dropped out of Yonsei University's medical school in South Korea and launched Gravity Labs in 2022. Based in Seoul, Gravity Labs operates Moneywalk, a motivational fitness app. Moneywalk users earn points when they walk or run, which they can convert into gift cards for things like food or coffee. The app has reached more than half a million downloads in the Google Play store. Gravity Labs has raised $3 million in funding from South Korean investors including 100&100 Ventures, Bass Investment and healthcare-focused TAIL Ventures.

Lee Dong-jae, Lee Se-young, Jae Sung-won and Yoo Young-joon are cofounders of AI startup Wrtn Technologies. Launched in April 2021, Wrtn operates an online portal offering AI-related services such as conversational search and image generation that help users create PowerPoint presentations. The Seoul-based startup says its portal has more than 2 million monthly active users in South Korea and Japan. The startup has raised 19 billion won (about $14 million) in funding, including a 15 billion won round in June 2023 from investors including Capstone Partners, Hana Securities and Z Venture Capital, which is backed by SoftBank and Naver.