Forbes just named America’s 250 greatest innovators. Here are the women on the list!
#8 Martine Rothblatt She created SiriusXM satellite radio. Then her daughter was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension. The drugs to treat it barely existed. So Rothblatt founded United Therapeutics in 1996, developed the medicines herself, and kept her daughter alive. Now United Therapeutics is engineering genetically modified pig organs for human transplant.
#16 Judy Faulkner In the 1970s, she hand-coded an electronic health records system from scratch in a basement. Epic Systems now powers the health records of over 300 million Americans and Faulkner still owns the majority of a company worth over $50B.
#20 Diane Greene Her company VMware built the virtualization technology that lets one physical server run multiple operating systems simultaneously: the foundational architecture of modern cloud computing. Every time a company migrates to AWS or Azure, they’re building on infrastructure her work made possible. Google acquired her next company for $625M and made her SVP of Google Cloud.
#23 Judy Estrin The internet is called the internet because different networks can talk to each other. Judy Estrin co-developed the technology that let incompatible network types communicate, literally putting the "inter" in internet.
#70 Therese Tucker She built BlackLine from scratch in 2001, coding the first version herself out of frustration with how badly corporate accounting was done. She took the company public in 2016 at a $1.5B valuation.
#83 Peggy Cherng When she joined her husband to open a Chinese restaurant in a California mall in 1982, she brought her background in computer science and AI systems with her. She built custom inventory software, AI-driven labor scheduling, and customer analytics tools that let Panda Express scale with engineering precision.
#84 Jennifer Doudna She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for co-developing CRISPR-Cas9: a gene editing tool so precise it can find a single sequence in 3 billion base pairs of DNA and cut it. She has since co-founded nearly a dozen biotech companies built on the technology, including Mammoth Biosciences and Scribe Therapeutics. CRISPR is now in clinical trials for sickle cell disease, cancer, blindness, and HIV.
#87 Sandy Lerner She co-founded Cisco Systems in 1984 from her living room to connect Stanford's incompatible computer networks. The router they built became the hardware backbone of the internet. VCs backed them, installed a new CEO without telling her, and fired her. She sold her shares for $170M. She used the money to co-found Urban Decay and buy a 2,700-acre farm.
#91 Fei-Fei Li Fei-Fei Li created ImageNet: a dataset of 14 million labeled images that became the training ground for the computer vision revolution. Without ImageNet, there is no facial recognition, no self-driving car perception system, no medical imaging AI. She was Chief AI Scientist at Google Cloud, co-founded the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, and in 2024 launched World Labs, a spatial intelligence company, raising $230M in its first round.
#96 Oprah Winfrey She took over a failing local Chicago talk show in 1986, turned it into the highest-rated daytime television program in history, then used that platform to build a media, publishing, film, and wellness empire worth $2.5B.
#100 Madonna She sold 300 million records. In 1992, she founded Maverick Records and negotiated one of the first artist-owned, multi-rights record deals in music history, covering recording, publishing, touring, and merchandise simultaneously.
#105 Temple Grandin She was diagnosed with autism at three and told she'd never speak. She graduated from college, earned a PhD, and redesigned the entire American livestock handling industry. Half of all cattle in North America now move through facilities she designed, built around her insight that animals respond to the same sensory triggers that overwhelmed her as a child.
#112 Carolyn Bertozzi She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022 for developing bioorthogonal chemistry: reactions that happen inside living cells without disrupting them. It's the platform technology behind a new generation of cancer drugs that can target tumors with precision impossible before her work.
#115 Frances Arnold She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for inventing directed evolution: a method of engineering proteins by mimicking natural selection in the lab, iterating mutations rapidly to produce enzymes with entirely new functions. Her technique is now used to make everything from biofuels to pharmaceuticals to biodegradable plastics, and is upending the petroleum-based chemicals industry.
#127 Suma Krishnan She developed Vyjuvek, the first-ever topical gene therapy approved by the FDA. It treats dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, a genetic skin disease so severe that patients' skin tears at a touch, earning it the name "butterfly disease."
#154 Xiaowei Zhuang She invented STORM: a super-resolution microscopy technique that broke the diffraction limit of light, letting scientists see biological structures 10 times smaller than previously possible. Her work at Harvard is used to map the brain, study cancer, and visualize how viruses infect cells.
#155 Neha Narkhede She co-created Apache Kafka while at LinkedIn, the open-source data streaming platform now used by 80% of Fortune 100 companies to move real-time data between systems. Then she co-founded Confluent to commercialize it, raising over $450M and taking it public in 2021 at a $9B valuation.
#160 Daphne Koller She co-founded Coursera in 2012 and put Stanford-level education in front of 100 million learners in 190 countries. Then she left to found Insitro, applying machine learning to drug discovery: using patient data at scale to predict which compounds will work before spending billions on clinical trials.
#161 Sangeeta Bhatia She brought microchip fabrication technology into biology, miniaturizing liver tissue onto a chip to test how drugs are metabolized before they ever reach a human. Her lab at MIT has since developed nanoparticles that detect cancer by producing signals readable in urine, and implantable devices that deliver chemotherapy directly to tumors. She holds over 100 patents, has co-founded 10+ companies, and was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize.
#163 Sheila Johnson She co-founded Black Entertainment Television with $500K in 1980, built its programming strategy from scratch, and sold it to Viacom for $3B in 2001, becoming the first Black woman billionaire in American history. Then she bought Salamander Hotels & Resorts, became the first Black woman to hold a stake in three professional sports teams (Wizards, Capitals, Mystics), and now runs one of the most respected luxury hospitality brands in the country.
#167 Nina Vaca She founded Pinnacle Group in 1996. Today it's one of the largest IT staffing and workforce solutions companies in the US, with $1B+ in annual revenue and clients including Fortune 500 companies across finance, tech, and healthcare.
#169 Katalin Karikó She spent 40 years being told her research was worthless. Demoted. Defunded. Nearly deported. She kept working on mRNA technology in a University of Pennsylvania lab while everyone else moved on. In 2020, her decades of work became the foundation of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. In 2023, she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
#176 Whitney Wolfe Herd She left Tinder in 2014 and built Bumble: the dating app where women make the first move. By 31, she had taken the company public with a $13B valuation, the youngest woman ever to do so, with a toddler on her hip at the Nasdaq.
#190 Shonda Rhimes She was broke and unemployed in an LA apartment when she started writing Grey's Anatomy. ABC gave her the Thursday night slot nobody wanted. She turned it into the longest-running primetime medical drama in TV history, then created Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, Bridgerton, and Inventing Anna, becoming the first woman to create three shows that each hit 100 episodes.
#194 Kate Ryder In 2014, Kate built Maven Clinic, the world's largest virtual clinic for women and families, covering fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, and pediatrics. In 2021, Oprah's investment made Maven the first unicorn in women's and family health. It now supports 17 million lives across 175 countries.
#199 Sara Blakely She spent $5,000 of savings, wrote her own patent, and convinced a Neiman Marcus buyer to stock Spanx by demonstrating it in a store bathroom. Oprah named it a Favorite Thing in 2000. When Spanx hit a $1.2B valuation in 2021, she gave every employee $10,000 and two first-class plane tickets. She was the first self-made female billionaire to sign the Giving Pledge.
#205 Katrina Lake She founded Stitch Fix in 2011 on the idea that personal styling shouldn't require being rich or having time. Clients fill out a style quiz; a combination of algorithms and human stylists curates a box of five items sent to their door. In 2017, she took the company public at a $1.6B valuation.
#208 Billie Jean King In 1973, she beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes in front of 90 million viewers. She co-founded the Women's Tennis Association, fought for equal prize money at the US Open (won in 1973), and helped launch World TeamTennis. Title IX passed the same year.
#211 Kay Koplovitz In 1977, she launched USA Network, and in doing so, invented the modern cable station business model. She negotiated the first-ever satellite rights deal for sports programming, figured out that cable channels could be funded by a combination of subscriber fees and advertising, and built the template every cable network since has copied.
#213 Daniela Amodei She is the co-founder and President of Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude. While her brother Dario is the public face, Daniela runs the business: revenue, go-to-market, partnerships, operations. Anthropic has raised over $7B.
#218 Kris Jenner In 2007, she shopped a reality show about her family to E! and built it into a media empire that launched six individual celebrity brands simultaneously. Kylie Cosmetics hit a $1.2B valuation in three years. Kim Kardashian's SKIMS is now worth $4B. Khloé's Good American crossed $200M. Jenner negotiated every deal, licensed every brand, and took a 10% management fee on all of it.
#219 Thai Lee She bought a failing software reseller for under $1M in 1989. Figured out that keeping no inventory and passing savings directly to clients was a structural advantage nobody else was willing to commit to. And built SHI International into a $14B company, serving 17,000+ customers including Boeing and AT&T.
#224 Mira Murati She was OpenAI's CTO during the most consequential product launches in tech history: DALL-E, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Sora. In 2024, she left OpenAI and founded Thinking Machines Lab: a company building tools for collaborative AI development.
#227 Doris Fisher In 1969, she and her husband Don couldn't find a pair of jeans that fit him properly. So they opened a store. That store was The Gap. Fifty-five years later, The Gap Inc. encompasses Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Athleta.
#232 Cathie Wood In 2014, she founded ARK Invest: the first actively managed, fully transparent ETF focused entirely on disruptive technology. In 2020, ARK’s flagship fund returned 153%. She called Tesla at $20. It hit $400.
#234 Lynn Jurich She co-founded Sunrun in 2007 because you shouldn't have to buy a solar panel to benefit from solar energy. She built the solar-as-a-service model: customers lease panels, Sunrun owns and maintains them, and homeowners get lower electricity bills from day one with no upfront cost. She took Sunrun public in 2015.
#237 Donna Dubinsky She ran operations at Apple in the 1980s, then co-founded Palm Computing and co-created the PalmPilot: the first mainstream handheld computer and the direct ancestor of every smartphone. When Palm was acquired and the vision got diluted, she and her co-founder left to build Handspring, which made the Treo: the first device to combine a phone and a PDA.
#238 Shivani Siroya She spent years working in microfinance in sub-Saharan Africa and India, watching creditworthy people get rejected by banks that had no way to assess them. So she built Tala, which uses smartphone data (app usage, transaction patterns, social behavior) to build a credit profile for people with no credit history and disburse loans in minutes. Over 6M people have borrowed through Tala. The average loan is $150. The repayment rate is over 90%.
#239 Janice Bryant Howroyd She founded ActOne Group in 1978 with $1,500 borrowed from her mother. Today it is the largest Black woman-owned staffing firm in the US, with $3B+ in revenue across 70+ countries.
#241 Limor Fried She founded Adafruit Industries in her MIT dorm room in 2005, building and selling open-source hardware kits for electronics hobbyists and makers. Adafruit now does $40M+ in annual revenue and has published thousands of free tutorials. She was the first woman on the cover of WIRED.
#242 Roberta Williams In 1980, she wrote Mystery House, the first graphic adventure video game ever made. Then she co-founded Sierra On-Line to sell it. She spent the next two decades pioneering narrative storytelling in games, building the King's Quest series into a franchise that sold millions and proved video games could have plots, characters, and emotional arcs.
#244 Caterina Fake She co-founded Flickr in 2004, the first platform built around user-generated photo sharing and social tagging, and in doing so, kicked off Web 2.0. Yahoo acquired it for $35M.
#246 Lisa Lindahl In 1977, she invented the sports bra by sewing together two jockstraps. She co-founded Jogbra Inc., sold it to Playtex in 1990, and opened up women's athletic apparel as a category.
#249 Marian Croak She holds over 200 patents and developed the foundational technology that makes internet voice and video calls possible: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). She also pioneered text-to-donate technology after 9/11/
#250 Taylor Swift She is the only person in history to become a billionaire solely from music and its related touring revenue. She did it through Rockefeller-style vertical integration: she owns her masters (the re-recorded ones), controls her touring, merchandise, film rights, and licensing, and turned a fanbase into an economy. The Eras Tour grossed over $2B.