5 Women 35 And Under At The Forefront Of Business Innovation

A new study from global investment research company Ned Davis Research has found that women in their late 20s and early 30s could be the key to solving many of our current economic issues.

According to the report, women are outpacing their male counterparts when it comes to participation in the labor market, with record numbers of women at “prime age” working in developed countries. Women are now having an enormous impact on the economy in the U.S., Australia, Japan, Italy, South Korea and Germany, Yahoo! Finance reports.

With this in mind (and to close out Women’s History Month) we have rounded up some of the top power women Gen Zers and millennials in their 20s and 30s disrupting and innovating in business:

Whitney Wolfe Herd became the youngest self-made billionaire after the women-centered dating app Bumble – which she co-founded in 2014 with Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev – went public in 2021, according to Forbes. At 31, she was also the youngest woman CEO to take a U.S. company public, according to Business Insider.

Herd started her career working at dating app Tinder but left the company in 2014, according to CNN Business. In late 2023, Herd announced she would be transitioning to executive chair at Bumble and would be replaced as CEO by Lidiane Jones, a tech executive from Slack.

Nicole Moskowitz and Jessica Traver created IntuiTap Medical to streamline the spinal tap process using imaging technology, pressure sensors and predictive analytics, according to Forbes. In February, IntuitTap Medical announced their cutting-edge medical device, VerTouch was cleared for use by the FDA, Yahoo! Finance reports.

The device is designed to make spinal puncture more accurate and consistent. Today, Traver is the CEO and Moskowitz is the CTO and both were recognized in 2017 as leaders in healthcare by the Forbes “30 Under 30” list for their work with IntuiTap.

Family law attorney and former divorce attorney Julia Rodgers created the first automated prenuptial app, HelloPrenup, in March 2020 alongside co-founder and CTO Sarabeth Jaffe, the Suffolk Journal reports. The app was designed to allow users to create and purchase prenuptial agreement without an attorney and appeared on the hit ABC show Shark Tank in 2021 to pitch the company to the show’s investors.

HelloPrenup scored a deal on the show with a $150,000 investment for a 30 percent stake and has grown more than 14,000 percent and surpassed $3 million in sales, according to Newswire.

Lauren Simmons is an former New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) trader who, at the age of 23, became the youngest full-time female trader on Wall Street, according to CNBC. She was also only the second African American female trader in NYSE history, CNBC reports.

Simmons, now 29, has spoken out about the importance of diversity in finance and how being the “other” in the room because “I get to have a narrative that no one else has,” CNBC resports.

While working at the NYSE, Simmons leaned on her financial expertise to help millennials and GenZ get on top of their finances, and is the host of “Going Public,” an interactive series that follows a cast of entrepreneurs as they seek funding and get listed on the Nasdaq, according to Forbes.