Best Female Founder

Sara Blakely is an American entrepreneur who founded the apparel company Spanx in 2000 after developing a footless undergarment designed to create a smoother appearance beneath clothing. She began the business using $5,000 of her own savings and retained ownership while building the brand into a maj...

Augusta Ada Lovelace was a 19th-century English mathematician recognized for her notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. These notes included what is considered the first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine. Lovelace’s work demonstrated an understanding of computing's potential bey...

Florence Nightingale was a British nurse during the 19th century. Her pioneering work dramatically improved healthcare standards in England and beyond. Utilizing meticulous data collection and innovative statistical analysis, particularly through visual representations of mortality rates, she champi...

Mary Kay Ash was an American entrepreneur who founded the cosmetics company Mary Kay Inc. in Dallas, Texas, in 1963. The company used a direct-sales model in which independent beauty consultants demonstrated and sold cosmetics, skincare products, and related items to customers. Ash became closely as...

Whitney Wolfe Herd is an American technology entrepreneur who co-founded the dating application Tinder and later founded Bumble in 2014. Bumble initially distinguished itself in heterosexual matching by requiring women to send the first message after a match, while also developing modes for friendsh...

Mitchell Baker is an American technologist and executive widely recognized for her foundational role in the Mozilla open-source software movement. She co-founded the Mozilla Foundation and has served as both its chairperson and the CEO of Mozilla Corporation, where she guided the development of the...

Daniela Amodei is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and President of Anthropic, an AI safety company founded in 2021. She helped establish the company alongside her brother Dario Amodei and other former OpenAI researchers. Prior to Anthropic, she worked at OpenAI and other technology organizations....

Leila Janah was an American social entrepreneur who founded Samasource in 2008. The organization was created to provide digital work opportunities to people living in poverty in developing countries. Her approach combined technology training with employment in data and AI services. She also founded...

Katrina Lake is an American entrepreneur who founded Stitch Fix, an online personal-styling and clothing retail company, in 2011. The service combines recommendations based on customer data with selections made by human stylists, then sends clients clothing that they can choose to purchase or return...

Margaret Hamilton was a pioneering American computer scientist instrumental in NASA’s early spaceflight programs. Her leadership during the Apollo 11 mission resulted in the first-ever crewed lunar landing. She fundamentally shaped software engineering as a distinct field, establishing critical proc...

Anne Wojcicki is an American entrepreneur who co-founded 23andMe in 2006 after working in health-care investment on Wall Street. The company became known for direct-to-consumer genetic testing that provided ancestry information and selected health-related reports from a saliva sample. Wojcicki's wor...

Jennifer Hyman is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder of Rent the Runway, a fashion-rental company established in 2009 with Jennifer Fleiss. The service lets customers rent designer clothing and accessories for temporary use through recurring subscription plans and individual rentals. Hyman...

Tan Le is a Vietnamese-Australian entrepreneur and a co-founder of Emotiv, a neurotechnology company specializing in electroencephalography, or EEG, devices. Emotiv develops headsets and software that detect electrical activity from the brain and translate recorded signals into data for analysis or...

Frances Allen significantly advanced computer science through her research on compiler optimization. As a pioneering academic, she developed groundbreaking techniques that dramatically improved software performance in the 20th century. Her work was foundational to modern compilers and earned her the...

Adora Cheung is a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur and technology investor. She co-founded Homejoy, an online service that connected customers with independent home cleaners, helping make household cleaning part of the on-demand service economy. After Homejoy, Cheung became a partner at Y Combinator,...

Jean Bartik was a pioneering American mathematician instrumental in the development of early computing. As one of the six women on the team that programmed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, she established foundational programming practices. Her work significantly advance...