Companies

Founded 2018

Dublin, Ireland

Swoop Funding

Fintech and SME finance

Swoop Funding connects SMEs with loans, equity, grants, and other business funding products through a data-assisted matching platform.

Founder: Andrea Reynolds

Founded 2014

Cordoba, Argentina

Kilimo

Climate technology and agritech

Kilimo combines hydrological analysis, satellite and weather data, agronomy, and field implementation to create measurable agricultural water-conservation projects.

Founder: Jairo Trad

Founded 2009

London, United Kingdom and Dubai, UAE

Checkout.com

Payments infrastructure

Checkout.com provides payment processing infrastructure for digital businesses operating across global markets.

Founder: Guillaume Pousaz

Founded 2012

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Careem

Mobility and technology

Careem built a regional mobility platform around cash payments, local navigation, driver relationships, and market-specific cultural requirements before Uber acquired the company in 2019.

Founder: Mudassir Sheikha, Magnus Olsson, Abdulla Elyas

Founded 2014

Austin, Texas, United States

Bumble

Consumer technology and online dating

Bumble began with a women-first messaging rule in heterosexual matches and expanded the same product thesis into friendship and professional networking.

Founder: Whitney Wolfe Herd

Founded 2008

Mainz, Germany

BioNTech

Biotechnology and immunotherapy

BioNTech develops immunotherapies and messenger-RNA platforms, beginning with cancer research and later applying the same scientific foundation to an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine developed with Pfizer.

Founder: Ozlem Tureci, Ugur Sahin, Christoph Huber

Founded 2019

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States and Dakar, Senegal

Anima Iris

Luxury fashion and accessories

Anima Iris is a luxury handbag company founded by Wilglory Tanjong and built through direct production relationships with artisans in Dakar, Senegal.

Founder: Wilglory Tanjong

Founded 2018

Dakar, Senegal

Wave

Fintech and mobile money

Wave is a mobile-money company founded by Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk. It launched in Senegal in 2018 with free deposits and withdrawals, a one-percent person-to-person transfer fee, an app-led wallet, QR access, and a physical agent network connecting cash to electronic money.

Founder: Drew Durbin, Lincoln Quirk

Founded 1999

Tokyo, Japan

NTT DoCoMo Emoji

Mobile communications and interface design

The original 176 emoji were designed for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service as compact visual cues for early mobile communication.

Founder: Shigetaka Kurita

Founded 2012

Sydney, Australia

Canva

Design software

Canva is a visual-communication platform built around templates, collaboration, and an accessible browser-based editor. What began as a tool for non-designers now spans individual creation, education, enterprise brand systems, professional creative software, and AI-assisted workflows.

Founder: Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht, Cameron Adams

Founded 2006

Ottawa, Canada

Shopify

Ecommerce software

Shopify provides commerce infrastructure for merchants across online storefronts, checkout, payments, point of sale, financing, marketing, and a large partner ecosystem. It began as software built for one snowboard shop and now supports millions of businesses in more than 175 countries.

Founder: Tobias Lütke, Scott Lake, Daniel Weinand

Founded 2000

Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Spanx

Apparel and consumer products

Spanx is an Atlanta-founded apparel company that began with footless shaping hosiery and expanded into innerwear, activewear, denim, pants, and other apparel. Sara Blakely bootstrapped the business for twenty-one years before Blackstone acquired a majority stake in 2021.

Founder: Sara Blakely

Founded 2011

London, United Kingdom

Wise

Fintech and international payments

Wise is a regulated international money network serving personal customers, businesses, and institutions. It began as TransferWise with cross-border transfers at the mid-market rate and now offers multi-currency accounts, cards, business products, and infrastructure connections for banks and large companies.

Founder: Taavet Hinrikus, Kristo Kaarmann