It’s the unfortunate truth – it’s still a male-dominated world. And despite what we’d like to be true, reports indicate women still face harder obstacles and tougher challenges to break the proverbial glass ceiling and make it in the business world. This Women’s Day, we want to applaud such women who have made it. Here’s looking at 6 champion entrepreneurs paving the way to progress with innovation and inspiration.
Whitney Wolfe Herd - Founder, and CEO of Bumble
Source: Instagram
Meet the world’s youngest self-made billionaire – Whitney Wolfe Herd. Everyone is familiar with Bumble today. It is a social media app that allows you to connect with people for dating, friendships, and business.
Started in Texas, in 2014, Whitney maintains that she started this venture as the gender dynamics in the field of dating and romance bothered her. Visit the personal letter that she has put up on the official website, and she writes, “It was 2014, but so many of the smart, wonderful women in my life were still waiting around for men to ask them out, to take their numbers, or to start up a conversation on a dating app. I thought, what if I could flip that on its head? What if women made the first move, and sent the first message?”
She therefore built a platform where women could take the lead. The app now has around 100 million users across six continents. In 2021, the company went public valuing it at almost $8 billion
Allyson Kapin - Co-founder of Rad Campaign, Founder of Women Who Tech
Named as “one of the most influential women in tech,” by Fast Company, “one of the top 30 women entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter” by Forbes and a “tech titan,” by Washingtonian, Allyson Kapin is clearly here to stay.
She founded the Rad Campaign in 2004, which is a digital agency, committed to helping organizations that want to bring about a change in the world. The company builds apps, websites, advocacies, fundraising campaigns, etc., for the biggest of nonprofits.
Aside from the Rad Campaign, she is also known for starting Women Who Tech, a large global program that aims to cancel the culture and economy that has made it increasingly challenging for women entrepreneurs to raise capital. Thanks to her dedicated work, Allyson has been able to build a diverse network of more than 65,000 engineers, investors, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders.
This woman is on a mission and there’s no stopping her!
Source: Instagram
Melanie Perkins, Co-founder, and CEO of Canva
Source: Twitter
This free-to-use design platform has become a hit not just amongst corporates but the overall public in general due to its easy and consumer-friendly features.
And one of the visionaries behind it all is Melanie Perkins, who is now competing with tech titans like Microsoft and Adobe. She co-founded Canva in 2013 in Australia and within just 5 years, she became one of tech’s youngest female CEOs, at 30! Not only that, as of 2020, Perkins was the 3rd richest woman in Australia and has been listed in Fortune’s 40 under 40 rankings for Tech.
Canva is now worth $3.2 billion. In Feb 2021Canva acquired two European startups – Kaleido AI and Smartmockups.
Well, the lady truly “meant business” and the rest is history!
Sharon Naim Ourian - Founder and CEO of CyberActive
When it comes to driving lessons, the whole process seems tedious. From attending classes in person to giving tests to attaining a license, it all posed as a huge convenience for many people. There was a desperate need to revolutionize the system and Sharon Naim Ourian dove right in. In 2000, she founded CyberActive, a company that pioneered the online driver safety education industry.
This company offers online traffic safety courses in more than 30 states, direct to consumers as well as via contracts with public and private institutions. When in-person driving lessons were no longer an option during the pandemic, CyberActive began allowing school districts and driving schools to enroll new students for undergoing driver’s education courses on platforms, while waiving setup and licensing fees.
Today, more than 7 million students have graduated from CyberActive!
Source: Medium.com
Jessica Alba - Founder of The Honest Company
Source: Instagram
The market is flooded with celebrity skincare brands be it Fenty Beauty by Rihanna, JLO beauty by Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Skin by Kylie Jenner. But if there’s a celeb that has been able to dominate the skincare space like no other it’s Jessica Alba. The Fantastic Four actress came up with The Honest Company, which is a safe baby and beauty store that sells toxic-free products.
She founded The Honest Company based on the idea that everything that touches the little one and his/her family needs to be nontoxic, while at the same time affordable and beautiful.
The company which was started in 2012 reached a valuation of a billion dollars in 2015. Although the business did hit a few roadblocks in 2017, Jessica kept going. She hired a new CEO that brought about significant changes in the business model, quality assurance and the brand picked up its sales in 2018. As of today, The Honest Company is allegedly eyeing an IPO with estimated valuation of $2 Billion!
Brynn Putnam - Founder, and CEO of Mirror
Mirror is a company started by former professional ballerina Brynn Putnam. It sells a unique product that is changing the space of home workouts- a mirror which streams fitness classes.
This product was born when Brynn connected a Raspberry Pi computer to a mirror to make life easy for herself where she could look at herself in the mirror while performing workouts, alongside being instructed about what to do. With no time to go to the gym, Brynn came up with this innovative idea that she then applied to start a full-fledged home-workout business that blew up during the pandemic.
The company was sold to Lululemon for a whopping $500 million dollars in 2020.
Source: Twitter
These are just a few examples of the several women that are taking the world by a storm with their entrepreneurship and knocking the glass ceiling out of the window. Onward and upward ladies!