Companies

Founded 2005

New York, United States

Chobani

Food and beverage

Chobani began in a shuttered New York yogurt factory and grew into a major food company while making employee participation, refugee employment, and local manufacturing part of its public operating identity.

Founder: Hamdi Ulukaya

Founded 2011

Pittsburgh, United States

Duolingo

Education technology

Duolingo is an education-technology company founded in Pittsburgh by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, known for combining free access, short lessons, experimentation, and character-driven product design.

Founder: Luis von Ahn, Severin Hacker

Founded 2017

San Francisco, United States

Incredible Health

Healthcare technology

Incredible Health connects nurses and other healthcare professionals with permanent roles while helping hospitals replace slow application workflows with direct candidate outreach and hiring tools.

Founder: Iman Abuzeid, Rome Portlock

Founded 2013

San Francisco, United States

Databricks

Data and artificial intelligence

Databricks grew from UC Berkeley research and Apache Spark into a data-and-AI platform, carrying an unusually large founding team and an enduring negotiation between open ecosystems and proprietary enterprise services.

Founder: Ali Ghodsi, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Reynold Xin, Patrick Wendell, Andy Konwinski, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji

Founded 2003

Amman, Jordan

Maysalward

Mobile games

Maysalward is an Amman-founded mobile-games studio and publisher whose history spans carrier distribution, handset fragmentation, localization, app stores, and ecosystem development.

Founder: Nour Khrais

Founded 2017

San Francisco, United States

Mos

Education finance

Mos helps students search scholarships, understand school-specific costs and aid, organize applications, and get support from financial-aid advisers.

Founder: Amira Yahyaoui

Founded 2009

Pan-African

Onafriq

Payments infrastructure

Onafriq, formerly MFS Africa, connects mobile-money operators, banks, remittance companies, card systems, merchants, and other payment providers across African markets.

Founder: Dare Okoudjou

Founded 2019

New York, United States

Ramp

Financial operations software

Ramp combines corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, travel, treasury, and finance automation in a platform built around reducing cost and manual work.

Founder: Karim Atiyeh, Eric Glyman, Gene Lee

Founded 2018

Dublin, Ireland

Swoop Funding

Fintech and SME finance

Swoop Funding connects SMEs with loans, equity, grants, and other business funding products through a data-assisted matching platform.

Founder: Andrea Reynolds

Founded 2014

Cordoba, Argentina

Kilimo

Climate technology and agritech

Kilimo combines hydrological analysis, satellite and weather data, agronomy, and field implementation to create measurable agricultural water-conservation projects.

Founder: Jairo Trad

Founded 2009

London, United Kingdom and Dubai, UAE

Checkout.com

Payments infrastructure

Checkout.com provides payment processing infrastructure for digital businesses operating across global markets.

Founder: Guillaume Pousaz

Founded 2012

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Careem

Mobility and technology

Careem began in Dubai in 2012 as a corporate car-booking service and became a regional consumer platform spanning ride-hailing, food, groceries, payments, and partner services. Its history is now split across two linked businesses: Uber fully owns the ride-hailing operation, while Careem Technologies—the non-rides business—has been governed through changing stakes held by e& and Uber.

Founder: Mudassir Sheikha, Magnus Olsson, Abdulla Elyas

Founded 2014

Austin, Texas, United States

Bumble

Consumer technology and online dating

Bumble is a public online-connection company founded around a women-first initiation rule and now rebuilding its product, trust systems, and member experience after a period of declining revenue.

Founder: Whitney Wolfe Herd

Founded 2008

Mainz, Germany

BioNTech

Biotechnology and immunotherapy

BioNTech is a biotechnology company built around immunotherapy platforms. Its COVID-19 vaccine with Pfizer made the company globally known, but its founding and current strategic center is oncology.

Founder: Özlem Türeci, Uğur Şahin, Christoph Huber

Founded 2019

New York, United States and Dakar, Senegal

Anima Iris

Luxury fashion and accessories

Anima Iris designs luxury handbags and works with a Dakar artisan team, using limited materials, bold geometry, and founder-led storytelling to place African production inside the brand rather than behind it.

Founder: Wilglory Tanjong

Founded 2018

Dakar, Senegal

Wave

Fintech and mobile money

Wave is a mobile-money company founded by Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk. It launched in Senegal in 2018 with free deposits and withdrawals, a one-percent person-to-person transfer fee, an app-led wallet, QR access, and a physical agent network connecting cash to electronic money.

Founder: Drew Durbin, Lincoln Quirk

Founded 1998-1999

Tokyo, Japan

NTT DoCoMo Emoji

Mobile interface design and communications

The DoCoMo emoji record documents Shigetaka Kurita's 176 pictographs for i-mode, the carrier incompatibility that followed, and the standards work that transformed local mobile symbols into interoperable global characters.

Founder: Shigetaka Kurita

Founded 2012

Sydney, Australia

Canva

Design software

Canva is a visual-communication platform built around templates, collaboration, and an accessible browser-based editor. What began as a tool for non-designers now spans individual creation, education, enterprise brand systems, professional creative software, and AI-assisted workflows.

Founder: Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, Cameron Adams

Founded 2006

Ottawa, Canada

Shopify

Ecommerce software

Shopify provides commerce infrastructure for merchants across online storefronts, checkout, payments, point of sale, financing, marketing, and a large partner ecosystem. It began as software built for one snowboard shop and now supports millions of businesses in more than 175 countries.

Founder: Tobias Lütke, Scott Lake, Daniel Weinand

Founded 2000

Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Spanx

Apparel and consumer products

Spanx is an Atlanta-founded apparel company that began with footless shaping hosiery and expanded into innerwear, activewear, denim, pants, and other apparel. Sara Blakely bootstrapped the business for twenty-one years before Blackstone acquired a majority stake in 2021.

Founder: Sara Blakely

Founded 2011

London, United Kingdom

Wise

Fintech and international payments

Wise is a regulated international money network serving personal customers, businesses, and institutions. It began as TransferWise with cross-border transfers at the mid-market rate and now offers multi-currency accounts, cards, business products, and infrastructure connections for banks and large companies.

Founder: Taavet Hinrikus, Kristo Kaarmann