Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also Chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.
Ayah Bdeir is a Canadian entrepreneur, inventor, and interactive artist of Syrian descent. She is the founder and CEO of littleBits. She is also the co-founder of Daleel Thawra, a directory of protests, initiatives, donations in Lebanon.
Marita Cheng is the founder of Robogals. She was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year. She is the founder and current CEO of Aubot, a start-up robotics company. She co-founded Aipoly, an app to assist blind people to recognise objects using their mobile phones. She was named as one of the World's Top 50 women in Technology by Forbes in 2018 and was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016. On 9 June 2019, Cheng was appointed a member of the Order of Australia for significant service to science and technology, particularly to robotics.
Roya Mahboob is an Afghan businesswoman. She founded and is CEO of the Afghan Citadel Software Company, a full-service software development company based in Herat, Afghanistan. She has received attention for being among the first IT female CEOs in Afghanistan, where it is still relatively rare for women to work outside the home. On 18 April 2013, Mahboob was named to TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2013 for her work in building internet classrooms in high schools in Afghanistan and for Women's Annex, a multilingual blog and video site hosted by Film Annex. This was the 10th anniversary of the TIME special edition. The Women's Annex platform give the women of Afghanistan and Central Asia a platform to tell their stories to the world. The TIME magazine introduction to Mahboob was written by Sheryl Sandberg who is the chief operating officer of Facebook and the author of "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead". U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Mahboob and other Afghan women entrepreneurs at the International Center for Women's Economic Development at the American University of Afghanistan. She is also known for her work with online film distribution platform and Web Television Network Film Annex on the Afghan Development Project. She is an advisor at the Forbes School of Business & Technology.
Kimberly Bryant is an American electrical engineer who worked in the biotechnology field at Genentech, Novartis Vaccines, Diagnostics, and Merck. In 2011, Bryant founded Black Girls Code, a nonprofit organization that focuses on providing technology and computer programming education to African-American girls. After founding Black Girls Code, Bryant was listed as one of the "25 Most Influential African-Americans In Technology" by Business Insider.
Wendy Tan White MBE is a British technology entrepreneur and technology investor. She is the CEO of Intrinsic, a robotics software company under Alphabet Inc.
Alice Yvonne Bentinck is a British entrepreneur. Along with Matt Clifford, she is the co-founder of Entrepreneur First, a London-based company builder and startup accelerator. Based in London and Singapore, EF funds ambitious individuals based across Europe and Asia to create startups. In 2017, it was announced that Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock, was leading a $12.4million investment into Entrepreneur First.
Adriana Gascoigne is an American technology executive and activist, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Girls in Tech, a global non-profit dedicated to empowering, educating, and mentoring women in the technology industry.
Clarisse Iribagiza is a computer scientist in Rwanda. She is the CEO and co-founder of the mobile technology company HeHe Limited and she is one of the UNCTAD's seven "eTrade for Women Advocates from the developing world". She was previously the winner of the East African entrepreneur reality TV show Inspire Africa Season 1.
Gayle Jennings-O'Byrne is a venture capitalist and founder of the Wocstar Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in women of color ("WOC") and diverse inclusive teams in the tech sector. She is best known for her work to empower women of color startups and help build wealth in communities of color and diversity. Her management and consulting company managed the iNTENT Manifesto campaign to mobilize women startups and allies across the globe.
Tabitha Goldstaub is a British tech entrepreneur who specialises in communicating the impact of artificial intelligence. She is the co-founder of CogX, a festival and online platform. She is also the chair of the UK government's AI Council, a member of the DCMS Digitial Economy Council and on the TechUK board. A serial entrepreneur, she was the co-founder of video distribution company Rightster. Tabitha is the author of How To Talk To Robots - A Girls' Guide to a World Dominated by AI. She's also an advisor to Tortoise Media, Raspberry Pi, CarbonRe, Monumo, Cambridge Innovation Capital and The Alan Turing Institute.
Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine, and is ranked by Forbes, Inc, and Quartz as a leading entrepreneur and influential scientist.
Ellen Hagan is a Ghanaian entrepreneur, human resource practitioner and the CEO of L’aine Services Limited. She is a Co-Founder of Legacy Girls College.
Somaya Faruqi is an Afghan student and engineer, and the captain of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, also known as the "Afghan Dreamers." She was named to the BBC's 100 Women in 2020 and was featured by UNICEF in 2020 as well as the UN Women Generation Equality campaign in 2021. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, her team designed a prototype ventilator to help fight the coronavirus in Afghanistan.
The Afghan Girls Robotics Team, also known as the Afghan Dreamers, is an all-girl robotics team from Herat, Afghanistan, founded in 2017 by Roya Mahboob and made up of girls between ages 12 and 18 and their mentors. A documentary film featuring members of the team, titled Afghan Dreamers, was released by MTV Documentary Films in 2023.
Anisha Singh is an Indian businesswoman and founder of She Capital, a diversity focused venture capital fund that focuses its investments on Women-led/focused startups. She is also the founder and former CEO of Mydala.
Evelyn Namara is a Ugandan technologist, technology entrepreneur and corporate executive who founded Vouch Digital in 2017. She serves as a non executive director on the KCB Bank Uganda Board of Directors, MTN Mobile Money Uganda Limited Boards of Directors and also serves on the Refactory Advisory Board. She is first Ugandan to win the Anita Borg Change Agent Award Winner in October 2012. She is the founder of Innovate Uganda
Jacob Helberg is an American author and entrepreneur. Helberg currently serves as a commissioner for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and senior policy advisor to Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies. Helberg has commented extensively on US-China relations, and the national security implications of Chinese-developed web apps like TikTok.
The Hill and Valley Forum is a consortium of American lawmakers and venture capitalists first convened in March 2023 to combat China's influence on the US technology industry. Founded by United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission member Jacob Helberg, the working group includes Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla. The forum's initial private dinner in Washington, D.C. was held in advance of congressional testimony by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, and was attended by then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr.
