In a male-dominated sector, many women are beginning to rise to take up various top leadership positions in organizations or to create their own luck as founders.
This year’s Cloud 100 list has 8 out of 100 firms being led by women. This is an increase compared to 6 last year.
These startups focus on edtech, e-commerce, SaaS and others. Although the number is small compared to the overall number of female founders across all unicorns, it is still commendable.
About Cloud 100
The Cloud 100 recognizes the best private cloud companies in the world. Cloud 100 is produced in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures and recognizes standouts in tech’s hottest categories, from small startups to private-equity-backed giants.
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Here are some of the female tech founders that made it on this year’s list:
Melanie Perkins (Canva)
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Melanie Perkins founded Canva in 2013. The business began as a little yearbook design firm and has since grown into a $40 billion behemoth. Canva, which is ranked 3rd on the list this year, is the highest-ranked female-led business. Canva is an Australian graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. The app includes templates for users to use. The web-based visual design tool has assisted corporations, students, social media managers, and school organizations in creating attractive artwork. “The goal of our business is to enable design across the globe”, according to the CEO.
Rachel Carlson (Guild Education)
Rachel Carlson, a native of Colorado founded Guild Education in 2015. The $553 million platform for education is dedicated to assisting the biggest businesses in creating benefits plans that let staff members attend college for free. After a challenging early work experience when she claimed no one explained how equality and remuneration work together, Carlson vowed to act differently when she established Guild Education in 2015. The tech firm is ranked number 32. As at 2017, she was a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus and a member of the hall of fame. Carlson has a lengthy association with publications and is also listed among America’s self-made richest women.
Edith Harbaugh (LaunchDarkly)
Edith Harbaugh co-founded LaunchDarkly in 2014, which is rated at number 34. LaunchDarkly is a SaaS platform for developers to manage feature flags. By decoupling feature rollout and code deployment, LaunchDarkly enables developers to test their code live in production, gradually release features to groups of users, and manage flags throughout their entire lifecycle. After previously participating as a juror for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Enterprise Technology list of 2022, Harbaugh has established herself as a pioneer in her field. In an interview with Forbes earlier this year, Harbaugh said, ”The software feature management company has demonstrated its ability to grow year after year with 532 workers and well-known clients like IBM and Grubhub”.
Karen Peacock (Intercom)
Karen Peacock founded Intercom, which is a $1.2 billion customer communications platform that helps businesses engage and support their customers and prospects. She grew up developing a love of technology early and began coaching high school students in STEM subjects. Her company took the number 35 spot on this year’s list and has high-profile clients like Microsoft, Meta, and Contentful.
Bernadette Nixon (Algolia)
Bernadette Nixon founded Algolia, a Cloud 100 newcomer. This year’s list places the API search and discovery platform at number 39. The company is mainly female-led, as more than 50% of its employees identify as female, which is unprecedented in the tech sector. Nixon said that Algolia was developed with the user in mind and hopes that its 12,500 users would find inspiration on the platform.
Eynat Guez (Papaya Global)
This entrepreneur was born in Israel and used her over 20 years of experience in global workforce management to her advantage when she founded Papaya Global in 2016. Papaya Global is an automated platform that helps companies hire, onboard, manage, and pay people in more than 160 countries. The company is one of Israel’s fastest-growing startups, with a valuation of $3.7 billion and a year-over-year revenue growth rate of 300%. The company moved up 24 spots from last year’s list, coming in at number 74. As the CEO, Eynat holds diversity as a core value of the company, with half of its 200 employees identifying as female.
Laura Behrens Wu (Shippo)
Last on the list is co-founder and CEO, Laura Behrens Wu who founded Shippo as an online store in 2014 with a classmate. Shipping helps e-commerce businesses, online marketplaces, and platforms integrate shipping with multiple carriers through their API and web application, helping users to compare shipping rates, create labels, generate international customs documents, return labels, and track parcels. Some of their customers and partners are eBay, GoDaddy etc. The company raised over $29 million in funding lead by Bessemer Ventures, SoftTechVC and Union Square Ventures.
Mathilde Collin (Front)
Mathilde Collin is the CEO of Front. Front is one of the 100 newcomers to the 2022 Cloud 100 list. Front is a customer communication hub that keeps teams focused on ensuring every conversation strengthens the customer relationship. In other words, it brings all customer messaging and business apps into a single place and pairs them with native internal collaboration so that every person in a company can have an impact on the customer experience. The app also takes out the stress of team inboxes and enables you to scale your customer support, hiring, sales and more. The company has raised more than $138 million in venture capital funding and has more than 200 employees with offices located in San Francisco, California, and Paris, France. Its mission remains: to help people everywhere work happier.
