There are some incredible female founded startups in New York City. These include the founder of “Tribe”, a company that sells clothing and accessories to millennials, and the founder of “Crowdtap”, a social media marketing company that helps connect brands with consumers. Being a female founder isn’t easy, but these startups are proving it can be done.
According to recent national research that looked at the national impact of women-led enterprises, the number of women-owned businesses expanded four times faster than male-owned businesses over the last five years.
According to the survey, the number of women-owned businesses in New York increased by a whopping 65 per cent between 2002 and 2012. Every day, 45 new enterprises are established.
The startup industry in New York is thriving, and the city’s growing population of female entrepreneurs is taking notice. The combination of exponential growth in invested capital and job creation, as well as New York’s longstanding prominence in the media, fashion, retail, and beauty industries, has produced a perfect storm for local women entrepreneurs.
Women are pushing the limit in New York as senior leaders in these disciplines, as well as other industries such as health tech, hotel tech, fintech, and edtech, and bringing new entrepreneurs to the scene at a quick rate.
Female entrepreneurship in New York is also outpacing those of the nation’s other main tech hubs, including Boston and Silicon Valley. According to CrunchBase, whereas only roughly 16% of businesses in San Francisco are founded by women, 21% of female founded startups in New York include at least one female founder.
Similarly, New York City outperforms other major tech centres in terms of venture capital dollars invested in female-led firms.
According to the survey, 16.9 percent of NYC startups receiving venture capital in the third quarter of 2015 had a female founder, compared to 14.8 percent in Boston and 12.1 percent in San Francisco.
But who are the trailblazers driving this tremendous increase in female-led businesses? Here are the top 50 female founders driving the tech revolution in New York City.
Alula -Female Founded Startups
Liya Shuster-Bier, founder and CEO of Alula: Alula is a completely honest resource that makes cancer less lonely. Alula is turning the knowledge of others’ lived experiences into an unmatched, radically honest space by centralising the information patients and caregivers need to know (the kind that generally only exists in talks amongst cancer-friends and scattered corners of the internet). This is accomplished through a marketplace of recovery products curated by cancer patients and guided by the company’s advisory board of medical experts, communication tools that assist patients and loved ones in finding the words to deliver difficult news, and logistics tools that digitise all of a patient’s support needs outside of the hospital room.
LearnVest -Female Founded Startups
Alexa Van Tobel founded LearnVest in 2009 with the goal of making financial planning more inexpensive and accessible to everyone. Alexa has been widely acknowledged as a personal finance expert and entrepreneur in top tier business and consumer channels since starting LearnVest. She writes for Cosmopolitan and Inc. Alexa von Tobel serves as an inaugural member of the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE), and she was named a 2011 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, named to the Ernst & Young Entrepreneurial Winning Women Class of 2011, honoured as a 2012 Fortune Most Powerful Women Entrepreneur, and named a Scholar at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival.
Realm– Female Founded Startups
Liz Young, the founder and CEO of Realm, describes the company as the first unbiased, centralised data hub for American homeowners. We assist homeowners in making informed home decisions ranging from how much to spend on a renovation project to how to increase the value of their home.
Rent the Runway-Female Founded Startups
Rent the Runway was founded in 2009 by Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, who met at Harvard Business School. Over 50,000 gowns and 10,000 accessories from over 200 designers are currently available from the firm.
theSkimm-Female Founded Startups
theSkimm, the email newsletter that saturates millennial women’s inboxes every morning, was established by Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg back in 2012. The two previously worked as NBC producers and started their own businesses to reach more millennials with the news. TheSkimm currently has more than 1.5 million subscribers.
Andela– Female Founded Startups
Companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, can now access the top 1% of global tech talent in Africa thanks to Andela. Andela matches these high-potential developers with businesses in a way that helps them develop into technical leaders. Since starting schools and youth programmes in the United States, China, The Palestinian Territories, Kenya, and Nigeria, Christina Sass, who is originally from Georgia, has built educational programmes in a number of other countries as well.