Women Who Founded Influential Technology Companies

Software services from home, 1962. Shirley, who arrived in Britain as a child refugee on the Kindertransport, founded Freelance Programmers from her dining table in 1962, employing mainly women programmers working part-time from home, an early model of remote work. It wrote software for clients such as the Concorde project and grew into the listed Xansa, partly owned by its staff. She signed letters as Steve to get replies. She died in 2025.

Manufacturing software. Kurtzig started ASK Computer Systems in a spare bedroom in 1972 with $2,000, writing programs for companies, then built MANMAN, software that let factories plan materials and production on minicomputers rather than expensive mainframes. ASK's 1981 listing made her one of the first women to take a technology company public. Its manufacturing planning tools were a forerunner of modern enterprise systems.

Electronic health records. Faulkner founded the company that became Epic Systems in a Madison basement in 1979, writing patient-record software, and built it into the dominant supplier of electronic records to large American hospitals, run from a campus in Verona, Wisconsin. Epic stayed private, made no acquisitions and grew by in-house development. Hospitals praise its depth but criticise its cost, and it has faced long arguments over sharing data with rival systems.

Networking companies. Estrin worked on early internet protocols in Vint Cerf's group at Stanford, then co-founded Bridge Communications in 1981 with her husband Bill Carrico, an early maker of equipment linking office computer networks, followed by Network Computing Devices and Precept Software, which Cisco bought. She later served as Cisco's chief technology officer. Her companies helped turn networking research into products businesses could buy.

Routers for the internet. Lerner and her then husband Leonard Bosack, who ran computer networks in different Stanford departments, co-founded Cisco in 1984 to sell multi-protocol routers that let incompatible networks talk to each other. Cisco's routers became the backbone equipment of the growing internet. Professional managers brought in by venture investors forced her out in 1990, and Bosack left with her. She later founded the cosmetics brand Urban Decay.

Java and software distribution. Polese was the product manager at Sun Microsystems who led the launch of Java in 1995, working with James Gosling's team. In 1996 she co-founded Marimba with three Java engineers to build Castanet, software that pushed applications and updates automatically to many computers over the internet. Marimba listed in 1999, and its approach to managed software updates is now standard.

Virtualisation. Greene co-founded VMware in 1998 with Mendel Rosenblum, her husband, and Stanford colleagues Ed Bugnion, Scott Devine and Edward Wang, and served as chief executive. Their software let one x86 server run many separate virtual machines, which cut data-centre costs and became the foundation of cloud computing. EMC bought VMware in 2004 and the board removed her in 2008. She later ran Google's cloud business.

Online travel in Britain. Lane Fox co-founded lastminute.com in 1998 with Brent Hoberman, selling unsold flights, hotel rooms and theatre seats at short notice, which matched airlines' need to fill empty capacity with customers' wish for bargains. Its 2000 listing at the peak of the dot-com boom made it a symbol of British internet business. She later founded the think tank Doteveryone and sits in the House of Lords.

Consumer genetics. Wojcicki co-founded 23andMe in 2006 with Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza, selling saliva-based genetic tests directly to the public for ancestry and health reports, and building one of the world's largest genetic databases for research. American regulators halted its health reports in 2013 until it won approval, a 2023 data breach exposed millions of users, and the company went bankrupt in 2025 before a non-profit she leads bought it.

Online courses at scale. Koller, a Stanford machine learning professor, co-founded Coursera in 2012 with Andrew Ng, partnering with universities to put full courses online with video lectures, automatically graded exercises and peer review. Millions enrolled, though completion rates were low and the free model gave way to paid certificates and degrees. She later founded insitro, which applies machine learning to drug discovery.

Browser-based design. Perkins co-founded Canva in 2013 with Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, building a drag-and-drop design tool with templates and a large library of images that runs in a browser. It grew to well over a hundred million monthly users, from schools to marketing teams, and pushed established design software makers to simplify. It shows a product-led business built on a free tier and paid team plans.

Dating apps with different rules. Wolfe Herd, a co-founder of Tinder who left after a harassment lawsuit, founded Bumble in 2014 with backing from Andrey Andreev's Badoo, built around one rule: in matches between men and women, only the woman can send the first message. Bumble added friendship and networking modes and listed in 2021. Slowing growth led to her return as chief executive in 2025.

Frontier AI. Murati, an Albanian-born engineer, was OpenAI's chief technology officer when it launched ChatGPT and the DALL-E image models, leading the teams that turned research into products. She left in 2024 and in 2025 founded Thinking Machines Lab, which raised one of the largest seed rounds on record to build AI systems and released Tinker, a tool for fine-tuning open models. Its long-term products are still taking shape.