- Only 17% of venture dollars are owned by women, according to a 2019 report from Crunchbase.
- But some women are paving the way for the future of female leadership in fintech, energy, childcare, and real estate — including these seven rising stars.
- Business Insider received 80 nominations from top founders, CEOs, MBA professors, and others to decide on these women to feature. Meet them below.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Only 17% of venture dollars are owned by women, according to a 2019 report from Crunchbase. The study found that this represented $8.1 billion in the first quarter of the year. Of that slim percentage, 15% went to companies with male and female copartners, and only 2% to companies founded solely by women.
With these statistics in mind, Business Insider set out to identify some of the top women in business to watch. We received 80 nominations from top founders, CEOs, MBA professors, and others, including:
- Alex Rampell, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz
- Julia Austin, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, startup advisor and board member, and former CTO at DigitalOcean
- Obi Felton, the head of getting moonshots ready for contact with the real world at X (formerly Google X), supervisory board member at Springer Nature, and former director of consumer marketing at Google EMEA
- Catherine Casey Nanda, the director of Acumen America and a board member at Jacaranda Health
- Brian Welle, the vice president of people analytics and performance management at Google
- Tami Forman, the executive director at Path Forward, a nonprofit that empowers people who have spent time on caregiving to restart their careers
- Dianna Cohen, the CEO and cofounder of Plastic Pollution Coalition
From the uber-competitive pool of nominees, we selected seven businesswomen who are doing amazing things in their industries and have been particularly successful in their lines of work before turning 40.
The power players are listed in no particular order.
SEE ALSO: We asked top founders, CEOs, and executives to highlight the women 30 and under to watch
Rebecca Liebman, CEO and cofounder of LearnLux, 26
In the world of fintech, Rebecca Liebman is on a mission: to democratize access to financial planning for all Americans, including millennials, who often struggle with personal finance (less than a quarter of millennials are financially literate).
She was inspired to create a solution to this problem while working at a lab at MIT, where she realized that even though she was surrounded by highly educated people, there was a lot of confusion around how to make financial decisions. She envisioned an independent and scalable solution that wouldn't push people to financial products they don't need and could be rolled out to companies whether they had 20 employees or 20,000.
With this, Liebman cofounded LearnLux in 2015 to bring financial wellness to the modern workplace. LearnLux helps companies empower and educate their employees on money matters through online learning tools and expert guidance.
In 2019, LearnLux announced they had closed a $2 million seed round with funding from Ashton Kutcher's fund Sound Ventures, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Underscore VC, ex-Wealthfront CEO Adam Nash, and other notable investors.
Since the announcement, the workplace financial wellness program has welcomed on an eye-catching roster of customers ranging from large technology companies based in Silicon Valley and Seattle to local grocery stores in New York. On the heels of this impressive year of growth, Liebman has her sights set on disrupting the future of work and employee benefits in 2020 and beyond.
Kathy Hannun, CEO and cofounder of Dandelion Energy, 32
With a masters degree from Stanford in theoretical computer science — and seven years as a product manager on the rapid evaluation team at X charged with coming up with the company's next moonshot technologies — Kathy Hannun was well prepared to create Dandelion Energy.
Since the company's launch in 2017, Dandelion has become a leading geothermal energy company in a market that's predicted to reach $9 billion by 2025. Dandelion reports that the company can help homeowners save up to 50% on their heating and cooling bills each month over traditional fuels, and that over the course of one year, a Dandelion Energy system reduces enough carbon emissions to equal removing two cars from the road. Since inception, the company has raised $22.5 million, with a $16 million series A seed round in February 2019.
Hannun — who also spent two years as chair of the investor subcommittee for the California Sustainable Energy Entrepreneur Development Initiative (CalSEED), a funding initiative of the California Energy Commission — has been widely recognized for her business contributions. The geothermal energy CEO's previous honors include being named to Inc.'s "Female Founders 100 List" and Entrepreneur's list of "100 Powerful Women."
Georgene Huang, CEO and cofounder of Fairygodboss, 39
After being suddenly fired from her executive role during a management shake up, Georgene Huang found herself unexpectedly looking for a job while two months pregnant. While interviewing, she wanted to ask certain questions — "Is work-life balance enabled at this company?" "Are women paid and promoted fairly?" "What's the maternity leave policy?" — but feared being stigmatized.
Wanting to hear directly from other women about their experiences and how they overcame similar challenges, Huang founded Fairygodboss in 2015, which offers an online women's career community replete with expert career advice, job openings, and company reviews.
Today, with over three million people on the platform, Huang's brainchild has reportedly become the largest career community for women, with over 120 corporate customers and two- to three-times growth year over year from 2016 to 2019.
With a $10 million series A investment in March 2019 and $14 million capital raised total for Fairygodboss, Huang and her team are well positioned to continue Huang's firm commitment to improving the workplace for women through transparency and collaboration.
Erica Mackey, CEO and cofounder of MyVillage, 36
As a 36-year-old mom of two girls under age three, Erica Mackey experienced a common struggle faced by parents of small children. With infant care costing more than college in 30 states, Mackey struggled to find affordable, high-quality childcare.
Motivated to find a solution, she teamed up with her good friend, Elizabeth Szymanski, and studied the industry. They learned that the system was not just broken for parents, but also for educators, with more than 50% of them on government subsidies.
So Mackey and Szymanski joined forces to launch MyVillage, a venture-backed, tech-enabled company that helps people open affordable, home-based childcare programs where they can earn 30% more than the national average for childcare workers.
Since the company's first program opened in 2018, MyVillage has created over 80 women-owned businesses across Montana and Colorado. Last spring, Mackey closed the largest seed round in Montana's history at just under $6 million, bringing the organization's total funding to $7.2 million.
Over her career, Mackey, who holds an MBA from the University of Oxford, has raised more than $250 million in venture funding for social impact companies. The serial entrepreneur previously cofounded the largest solar company in Africa, Zola Electric, and is on the board of directors of HATCH Global and TheBoardroom Africa.
Emma Rose, CEO and founder of FinalStraw, 33
In April 2018, Emma Rose led the charge against single-use plastics when her product, FinalStraw — the world's first reusable, collapsible straw — became an overnight sensation. The viral Kickstarter campaign raised 1.8 million in 30 days.
Now, the CEO and founder finds herself at the helm of a rapidly growing company poised to make giant waves with the launch of an innovative line Rose terms "Foreverables": convenient items designed to replace single-use plastic and last forever. To date, the company reports that FinalStraw has prevented 70 million single-use straws from use by offering an alternative, and the company is just getting started in this effort.
Since inception, FinalStraw's mission has been engineered to encompass circularity in education, outreach, partnership, funding, and product design, with a belief that "reduce, reuse, recycle" is an outdated practice. Rose's patented straw, which is metal and comes equipped with a portable case, retails on the company's website for $24.95.
Rose has spent the last five and a half years as a sustainability specialist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and earned a master of liberal arts in environmental management and sustainability from Harvard Extension School.
Adena Hefets, CEO and cofounder of Divvy Homes, 32
At age 32, Adena Hefets has raised tens of millions to give more people the opportunity to own a home and build wealth by launching real estate tech company Divvy Homes in 2017. Divvy finds cities where owning a home makes good sense financially and then offers renters a three-year program to transition to becoming homeowners.
Hefets is expanding the definition of who can access the American Dream. In just two years, the company reports that it has helped saved an average of $5,000 per household and has gotten hundreds of people into their own homes.
It's a message that's clearly resonating with funders. This past year alone, Divvy has closed a $43 million series B round. The company has collected $180 million in total funding since January 2018, and since its inception has doubled the number of markets it serves.
Prior to Divvy, Hefets was one of the early product managers at mobile payment company Square, where she helped build and grow Square Capital. She was also previously part of the large-cap buyout team at TPG, a private equity firm, where she helped diligence and purchase companies in the real estate sector. She holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Jessie Wisdom, cofounder and head of people science at Humu, 37
After receiving her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 and spending nearly six years at Google — most recently leading projects for Google's People Innovation Lab, the research arm of Google's People Analytics team — Jessie Wisdom launched Humu in 2017.
Her behavioral change company, which uses science and machine learning to improve workplaces, has already raised a combined $40.6 million in funding with the support of investors at Index Ventures for its series A and Institutional Venture Partners for its series B.
As of September 2019, Wisdom's company had over 75 employees working with dozens of organizations that range from unicorn technology startups to 35,000-personal analytics and 75,000-person oil and gas multinationals. Some companies have been vocal about their use of Humu, including popular salad chain Sweetgreen, online luxury fashion retail platform Farfetch, and nonprofits like Teach For America, a pro-bono deployment.
The company reports being in active conversation with more than 20% of the Fortune 100 about putting Humu's products to work for their teams. Wisdom and her team are committed to finding solutions that serve both the individual and the organization in ways that are respectful, non-intrusive, and privacy focused.
Humu's platform runs in six-month cycles and the company shared with Business Insider that they are already seeing significant benefits for their clients, including eight- to 20-times ROI spend on Humu, 2% to 13% improvement in productivity, and 10% to 40% in proven employee retention.
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