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Computer scientist Barbie at The Makery.

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Melody Koh

"Love to meet more local startups and entrepreneurs."
Melody Koh is an associate venture capitalist at Time Warner Investments, which invests between $2 and $10 million in three to five deals per year in digital media, advertising and gaming. She came to the start-up world from the banking industry, speaks Mandarin fluently, and hits up dozens of tech meetups around the city. In her spare time she works with the New York chapter of Wokai, a peer-to-peer micro-financing program in mainland China.

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Eunice Chou

Eunice Chou began her working life on, you guessed it, Wall Street, doing stints at JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch. From there she moved into gaming, helping to launch the independent studio Archcraft, where she spent four years; then it was over to the corporate side, working on in game advertising at Massive, which was acquired by Microsoft.
In January of 2010 she launched Flavorize, which bills itself as the Pandora of food. Before launching the service, Ms. Chou was an avid food blogger, posting reviews and rhapsodic essays about her meals in New York, Greece and Taiwan. “There is a super supportive community of female founders here, to the point where you get pulled in pretty quickly, whether you want to or not. Luckily we discuss normal start-up obstacles, not just commiserate about being women in tech,” she said.

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Kanchan Koya

The first thing that distinguishes Koya is that she works in life sciences, a field of technology far less common in New York than more consumer facing web applications. As the co-founder of SwitchBiotics, Ms. Koya is working to discover novel antibodies to combat life threatening bacterial infections. She is currently based out of General Assembly.
When she’s not busy trying to save the world, Ms. Koya works as a program leader at the Startup Leadership Program, an initiative to groom the next generation of CEOs. Recently she helped run a mock pitch session to help young entrepreneurs learn to score their VC funding. "The mission was to get an insider glimpse into mind of an investor, but also to give start-ups an inside view into why VC funds make the decisions they make," Ms. Koya told Betabeat.

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Mariya Yao

"There's always a way."
Designer, hacker, live-tweeter and co-founder of stealth start-up Bloomsie--"stay in touch with the people who matter"--which is based out of WeWorkLabs, Mariya Yao also runs her own mobile design and development company, Xanadu Mobile. She also co-founded Founders Block, a blog where entrepreneurs share stories of start-up struggle. "I spend 50 percent of my day designing, 20 percent building, and 10 percent schmoozing. The rest of the time, I'm stalking you on Twitter," she says on her about.me page.

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Elena Silenok

"At first I got into security because hackers are really cool , and I wanted to be white-hat." If the start-up world doesn’t work out for Elena Silenok, she can always try a career as a secret agent. Born to a family of engineers in Kaliningrad, Russia, Ms. Silenok earned honors for mathematics and sharp shooting. Fluent in French, Russian and English, her current interests include augmented reality and mixed martial arts. Her resume in tech includes a masters degree in computer science and extends from high-frequency trading algorithms to intensive analysis of network security.
But when she moved from the west coast to New York, she saw a big opportunity in fashion. Her start-up, Clothia, is currently in private beta, but hopes to revolutionize the way people shop for clothing online. Clothia relies on a standard webcam to allow users to try on a virtual garment, getting a sense for the way the style and fit suit their body. With a wave of their hand they can resize a garment or share the look out to their social network. In a virtual closet users can mix and match outfits or trade with friends. "Right now their is a gold rush into fashion technology," she said. "We’re selling the picks which people can use to better mine that gold."

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Gauri Manglik, with Google's Marissa Mayer, left, back stage at TechCrunch Disrupt

Gauri Manglik also thought she was headed for Wall Street, spending seven months as a tech analyst for the financial services giant Blackrock before hopping over to try her hand as an entrepreneur. It’s been a wild ride since then. Ms. Manglik became the co-founder and CEO of SpotOn, a location-based mobile recommendation app, in February of 2010 and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last month. The high profile debut led to a flood of sign-ups and the young company is now focused on polishing their product and keeping up with demand.
Ms. Manglik and her team work out of the Local Response HQ in Chelsea, which means their investors from ENIAC ventures are just shouting distance across the office. "I was a computer science major at NYU, so I'm used to being the only girl in the room," she said. Ms. Manglik, 22, was also one of the youngest founders on stage at Disrupt. "I feel like the things that set me apart, being a woman, are kind of an advantage," she said. Her goal now is to expand SpotOn's reach beyond Manhattan and make it simple to move from using the mobile app to executing an "offline adventure."

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Sara Chipps and Vanessa Hurst

"We believe that there is only one way to repair the wide gender gap in development: getting women to ship software."
Sara Chipps is a freelance web developer, frequent New Work City dweller and organizer of many meetups; Vanessa Hurst is the lead analytics and database engineer for Paperless Post and organizer of Developers for Good. Together they founded Girl Develop IT, discount programming classes aimed at women that has already taught more about 20 courses on HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, Ruby on Rails and other languages to more than 300 students (including some dudes) since it launched in July, and inspired chapters in Ohio and Australia.

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Alexis Goldstein

If the amount of available tech talent is ever going to catch up with demand, women have to become a far more robust portion of the coding community. To further that goal, Ms. Goldstein teaches at Girl Develop IT, where she strives to create a approachable, low-cost programming class where "women can feel free to ask dumb questions." A proud member of NYC Resistor, Ms. Goldstein is also the founder and CEO of aut faciam, Latin for, "I shall make one." It’s an independent iPhone/iPad development company based in Brooklyn with an emphasis on building apps that mimic users natural habits and mesh easily with their lives.

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Tikva Morowati

"I try to get known people to talk about things that are not known about them. I want our audience to learn about new and interesting people and for them to hear from familiar people, telling stories that have not been told yet.""
On Tikva Morowati’s blog, she has a list of life goals, half of which are crossed off: "design products at the intersection of technology, art and design;" pay off her student loans; meet her dad’s family and become "great friends with her mom."
Still waiting to be crossed off: write a book, get married and have kids, "have enough money and investments that I don’t have to worry about my finances," host an interview show, visit Africa and live in a foreign land for an extended period of time.
Ms. Morowati seems posed to accomplish those goals. She is in charge of product engagement and marketing at Singly and the founder and director of IgniteNYC.
Ms. Morowati created a weekly speaker series while getting her master’s degree at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. After she graduated, she decided she wanted to continue that in the real world, and started coordinating the New York chapter of Ignite, the fast-paced infotainment popular with techies in which speakers are allowed five minutes and 20 slides.
Ms. Morowati has a background in storytelling. As an undergraduate, she studied filmmaking at NYU and worked on experimental documentaries. "I got good at extracting stories," she said. She uses these storytelling skills when selecting Ignite speakers.
When curating Ignite sets, a challenge that Ms. Morowati faces is trying to get 50 percent women speakers.
"It's actually pretty difficult to get this percentage," said Ms. Morowati. "We can get over 120 applications from just 14 spots, and rarely do we get more than 4 or 5 submissions from women."

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Marissa Evans

The only rising star on our list who routinely performs as part of an improv comedy troupe, this Harvard MBA also worked in the corporate world at the massive marketing agency Digitas right out of school. Working with start-ups there convinced Ms. Evans pretty quickly that trying her luck as an entrepreneur was the way to go. Brainstorming ideas and being able to pivot quickly with a team came naturally to Evans from all her training in improv comedy, she says.
She began working on GoTryItOn, a crowd-sourced fashion opinion site very similar to Fashism, which started running it initially as an email list with ten friends. As she refined the concept during nights and weekends, she brought on a CTO and art director and eventually raised a seed round and launched the product at South By Southwest. The app allows users to upload photos and get a reaction from the masses, putting it in direct competition with Fashism.

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Alexis Tryon

Alexis Tryon majored in art history, but found herself working on Wall Street after college. One perk of being an employee at American Express was she could afford to start collecting art. Her experiences with shopping at fancy Soho galleries, however, was so frustrating that the seed for her start-up, Artsicle, was planted.
The idea is to create an approachable way for novice art lovers to get their hands on original pieces. Not only does Artsicle skip the aloof, insular gallery scene, it also lets its customers rent the pieces out to decide if they like them before settling on the final purchase.
The site focuses on emerging young artists who have yet to make their name. "If one of our artists gains recognition and is able to join the roster of a high-quality gallery, I would be thrilled--even if that means no longer selling with us," Tryon told the BBC.

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Cheryl Yeoh

Cheryl Yeoh was a senior associate at the Big Four accounting firm KPMG when she got the start-up bug--bad. She started thinking of ideas for food, travel and fashion until she hit on the idea for CityPockets, an organizer and marketplace for daily deal coupons. She pitched the idea to a technical co-founder who went home and started wireframing; shortly thereafter she quit her job, sublet her apartment and moved into a friend’s living room.
CityPockets isn’t her first company; when she was eight years old and living in Malaysia, she sold about 100 sets of a children’s game called 5 Stones until her teacher shut her down. Her second venture was a company called APEX that she incorporated when she was 16, which made and sold do-it-yourself science kits, customized canvas bags, and “created a popular secret gift messaging system that eventually went viral across schools,” she told We Are NY Tech. "We made our investors a 13x return, which I hope to somehow replicate with my adult ventures," she said.
CityPockets just raised a seed round of funding from angel investors, moved into a new office, and is hiring. When asked what she would do if CityPockets fails, she said: "Failure is not an option so I'm not even thinking about a back-up plan right now."
But will you ever start another company, Betabeat asked?
"Yes, there's no question about it. I've always started something in every phase of my life so this isn't the first and won't be the last," she said.

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Alexa Hirschfeld

"I think you can expect in these few years to have technology move more towards you."
Alexa Hirschfeld bounced almost immediately out of undergraduate studies at Harvard and into the start-up world. (She worked briefly for Katie Couric at CBS News, but she quit to co-found the design-driven Evite competitor Paperless Post with her brother James in 2007 because it seemed more interesting.) She and her brother have raised at least $6 million for a fast-growing business that generates enough revenue that it became profitable last year. Strikingly, the pair was confident enough to ask users to pay for virtual currency to spend on customizable digital stationary from the first; there’s no advertising on the site.
New Yorkers in the tech scene have probably seen Ms. Hirschfeld--who is eloquent, sharp and incredibly laid-back--speak at local tech meetups or at Columbia, or they might have read about her in the New York Times, Forbes (“Women to Watch), or CNN Money (“Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs”), or Fast Company (“Most Influential Women in Technology”).

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Marissa Campise

"Sometimes the best learning is just rolling up your sleeves and diving in.
Venrock vice president Marissa Campise paid her way through Yale University while supporting her son as a single mother; she graduated in 2006 and started as a collateral analyst at big four accounting firm Deloitte & Touche.
Her quick climb up the ladder of the New York venture world began when she met StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon over Twitter. The two became friendly, and shortly thereafter Mr. Lindzon recruited her to work at his firm, where she learned the world of very early stage investing.
Ms. Campise's next stop was working with Alan Patricof at Greycroft Partners, where she was able to immerse herself in later, series A financing. "She comes across as a very calm, quiet, monochromatic individual, and then all of a sudden she speaks with laser-like focus, totally focused on the issue with total animation, and about as high a degree of energy as I can think," declared Mr. Patricof, after Ms. Campise won The Huffington Post's Energy Makeover competition.
In April, Greycroft put out a press release announcing that Campise had been promoted from senior associate to principal. But just two weeks later she left to become a vice president at Venrock, apparently wooed by a very aggressive offer.

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Julie Ruvolo

“Socializing is good for business.”
Julie Ruvolo is an entrepreneur, anthropologist, columnist and professional socializer who started her career in digital advertising and business development and has written for VentureBeat and AdAge, been written about in The Atlantic, and spoken at South By Southwest, SummitSeries and DEMO.
But Ms. Ruvolo is best-known in the New York start-up scene as a co-founder of Solvate, the marketplace for freelancers and small businesses, where she served for two years as COO and co-raised its $2.3 million Series A from RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham before moving on to head up digital strategy at the Museum of Sex, where she manages audience development and is currently consulting on an interactive exhibition on non-medical interpretations of genetic information. She recently launched a monthly column, “Digital Anthropology,” for Forbes, and co-hosts Innovator Date Night with Venrock partner David Pakman. But she’s plotting a start-up comeback later this year--in Brazil, where she did her undergraduate thesis, and where opportunity abounds for an entrepreneurial Portugese speaker with a well-established network in New York.
“The economy is booming, the private equity scene is booming, investors like Redpoint and angels like Dave McClure are seriously getting involved in Brazil, and I'm excited to get down there and see what I find,” she told Betabeat. “Brazil is emerging as an epic tech market on the horizon...I'm interested in a bridging role between New York City and Brazil... There is serious cross-cultural entrepreneurial work to be done.”

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Yao-Hui Huang

“The Hatchery was founded after meeting a lot of companies on a regular basis and seeing the deficiences in their companies. I just really wanted to show them the real-life experience of pitching in front of investors... It’s to get people to help each other.”
Yao-Hui Huang started her career in pharmaceutical sciences and the healthcare industry, where she worked at Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth, and Merck; she transitioned into the technology sector after the dot-com crash when she founded interactive agency Gigapixel Creative.
But Dr. Yao is best-known for her tough love approach as the co-founder and ruthless master of ceremonies at The Hatchery, a four-year old organization that hosts workshops and connects entrepreneurs with investors through events like The Gauntlet, a themed, invitation-only pitch event; Are You Serious, a monthly event where six companies pitch a panel of investors, who are directed to give very frank critical feedback; and the Hatch Match, a yearly event where companies pitch investors one-on-one for five minutes.
Dr. Yao also works around the world through non-profit work and is organizing a Hatchery event in Indonesia this summer; she’s also organized events in London and Beijing (she speaks Chinese fluently). She’s a frequent lecturer within the Asian community and hosts the invitation-only Wonder Women dinner series.

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Ashley Granata and Brooke Moreland

“Brilliant ladies” -Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Darabi
The best start-ups come from entrepreneurs try to solve a problem they have themselves, the adage goes. Photojournalist and reality TV show editor Brooke Moreland decided to create Fashism after she walked out of a dressing room to get her husband’s opinion and was greeted by an empty couch. "There must be a way to get an unbiased opinion using that internet everyone is talking about," she says on the company’s web site. She called a developer friend, who liked the idea and started working on the site.
Ms. Moreland bootstrapped a prototype while working full-time at her day job for a year, cashing in favors all the way. One day she got a call from Ashley Granata, digital fashionista whose pedigree includes bloomingdales.com and style.com, a friend of a friend who was excited by the idea and wanted to help; Ms. Moreland hired her as chief marketing officer and quit her own job the next week. The day she quit, she got a call from the New York Times wanting to do a story; soon, investors started calling.
In November Fashism announced it had raised $1 million in a first round of funding from investors including Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and moved into New York’s highest-profile coworking space, General Assembly, shortly after. The co-founders names’ came up over and over again when Betabeat was scouting around for up-and-coming women in New York’s start-up scene.
“Now I have a lot more confidence than I did when I first started out. I’d never started a company before. I’d never gone out on my own. I’d never pitched an investor,” Ms. Moreland told Business Insider. “I was missing a little bit of that cocky attitude. ‘This is what I’m doing, listen to me.’ If I could go back, I would have quit my job sooner, [raised] more money, and just done it all instead of taking my time and testing the waters. But you know, it was my first time.” Next time, she’ll know better.

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Hilary Mason

Hilary Mason started writing code when she was still in kindergarten on her school's Apple IIe. As a co-founder of HackNY, the non-profit that connects talented student hackers from around the world with startups in New York, Ms. Mason is helping other young people get involved in the tech world.
Ms. Mason started HackNY with Chris Wiggins from Columbia University and Evan Korth from NYU. “We were all independently working to strengthen the connections between the academic and startup communities in New York, so we met over burgers and milkshakes and sketched out the structure of an organization that could support and magnify these efforts,” she said.
Ms. Mason is also the chief scientist at bit.ly. Her work involves both pure research and development of product-focused features; she recently started the data science blog Dataists (dataists.com) and is a member of hacker collective NYC Resistor.
“There are several things you can give to invest in a young company--time, social capital, and money,” said Ms. Mason. “I really enjoy sharing what I know with people who are taking on ambitious challenges, and I'm happy to connect them to others with similar interests.”
In the future, Ms. Mason wants to continue her work with HackNY but can imagine it taking different shapes.
“HackNY is a non-profit that is structured to solve a very specific problem,” Ms. Mason said. “I love finding the right set of people, structures, and resources to solve problems, so yes, it's quite likely that I'll start things in the future! However, don't expect them to have the same form or goals.”

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Heather Knight

Roboticist Heather Knight and Data, her comedian-robot, took to the TED stage last year where for the first time, Data told live jokes and gathered audience feedback while Ms. Knight held the microphone.
Last week, the pair was in Europe and performed at London's Festival of the Spoken Nerd, New Castle's Thinking Digital conference and the Amsterdam Comedy Festival, where Data was the only robot on the bill.
Knight is currently conducting her doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and running Marilyn Monrobot Labs in NYC, which creates socially intelligent robot performances and sensor-based electronic art.
“As creative company the numbers that we care about are performances on stage, collaborations with other technologists and artists, and number of people that have started creating themselves because of our influence,” said Ms. Knight. “Less tangible goals are an exploration of ideas and impacts around technology, everyday Robotics and charismatic machines."
Ms. Knight is currently preparing getting ready for the first ever Robot Film Festival, which will take place on July 16. So far, the festival has received 35 submissions and will headline with a Spike Jonze robotic love story.
Ms. Knight hopes that the film festival promotes an understanding of robot-human relations and helps counter negative stereotypes about bots.
Ms. Knight is also looking forward to seeing more robots on stage.

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Phoebe Espiritu

Phoebe Espiritu is a force behind the scenes in New York’s start-up and design communities. She’s been a judge for Oracle’s ThinkQuestNYC, a panelist at SXSW, and an intern for the only digital marketer who can plausibly be called a guru, Seth Godin, when she co-built ChangeThis, a site for publishing big idea manifestos.
Now she manages the group of hackers that provides mercenary support to start-ups in the TechStars incubator; fundraises for scholarships to NYU’s ITP program, which she graduated from in 2004; and organizes initiatives like the Design Trust, a temporary collective of designers who helped out hackers at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon which she is now working to make permanent. “I've been really obsessed with getting more designers involved in technology and entrepreneurship in NYC and am looking to forge closer relationships with designers and academia to help address the shortage of T-shaped, analytical designers at start-ups,” she said.
She’s also helping Union Square Ventures-funded start-up Shapeways with product design, and serves as a mentor to start-ups at the recently-launched Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator.

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Campbell McKellar

Campbell McKellar was a high school cheerleader in the south, where the sport is a big, big deal. She was fairly certain she would be selected head cheerleader senior year--but when the list came out, she wasn’t on it. “I sat down by the lockers and started crying,” she told We Are NY Tech. “Just kidding. I marched myself into our coach's office and suggested she correct the typo. It took quite a bit of back and forth, but eventually I was back on the team. I wasn't the captain, but I was back. In that moment I learned a valuable lesson. No doesn't always mean no.”
Ms. McKellar is the Brooklyn-based founder of Loosecubes, a marketplace for renting extra workspace that received $1.3 million in seed funding from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures and some undisclosed angel investors. “As of today, we have 1,242 spaces being shared in 275 cities in 35 countries,” she said. “We're a completely free platform right now, but I can tell you that as far as I can tell from media mentions, etc., we have twice the number of listings that AirBnB had at this same time in its development. That makes me feel good.”
In the past, Ms. McKellar co-founded party photography service Tiger Photo and the business development non-profit New Sector Alliance; headed up finance and operations at real estate development firm Tribeca Associates; and worked as a real estate investment banker at Goldman Sachs, where she was “responsible for originating and packaging complicated securities (and tanking the global economy). Sorry guys,” according to her LinkedIn profile.
Her dream is to run Loosecubes “from an island somewhere... or maybe in Paris, for the rest of my life.” Eventually she’d love to be an angel investor and advisor to start-ups.
But if Loosecubes fails, she says, the first thing she is going to do is write a novel. “It's been a hilarious, wild ride. It would probably make for a great romantic comedy, with Prince Charming being a Groupon-esque success.”

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Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp

“We dream big for Birchbox.” Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp didn’t go to Harvard Business School planning to start a business. “No, we can answer that definitively,” Ms. Beauchamp told Betabeat. But they had a good idea, crunched the numbers, wrote a business plan and found out they couldn’t stop. Birchbox, which generates leads for beauty brands via a website that delivers subscribers a customized box of beauty samples every month, launched in the fall with $1.4 million in seed funding from First Round Capital, Accel Partners, Lerer Ventures and angel investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Sam Lessin of drop.io. They’re up to 32,000 paid subscribers and 50 brand partners, meaning the company is already generating at least $3.8 million in revenue a year, and growing fast (and inspiring knock-offs).
Birchbox’s deliberative co-founders are building a long-term business, but we’ll be surprised if it’s the last venture we hear of from either of them. “We only have eyes for Birchbox,” Ms. Beauchamp said when Betabeat asked if they thought they’d ever start another company. Angel investing, maybe? “We would love to be in that position some day. Until then, we can offer free and candid information to entrepreneurs who have questions--we don't have all of the answers, but we can share our perspective and experience,” Ms. Beauchamp said.

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Chrysanthe Tenentes

Chrysanthe Tenentes was working out of her Williamsburg apartment and her friend, the publisher of travel website Jauntsetter was working out of her Greenpoint apartment when they decided that a breakfast meetup would be a good way to create a sense of a tech community in North Brooklyn.
“The idea was to get a bunch of creative entrepreneurs together to share what we were working on, and we liked the idea of breakfast rather than another tech drinks setting,” said Ms. Tenentes.
On the last Friday of each month, North Brooklyn Breakfast Club MeetUp congregates at Enid’s on the edge of Greenpoint and Williamsburg to meet tech people, see presenters, and use the restaurant’s wifi.
Ms. Tenentes spends a lot of time working to create a sense of community--she's Community Manager for Foursquare's 10 million users. She is also a partner and contributing editor of the blog Brooklyn Based. Before starting North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, Ms. Tenentes started Digital Dumbo, a similar idea in a different neighborhood.
“When we started Digital Dumbo in 2008, it just made sense because of all the startups in a small neighborhood and we wanted likeminded people to meet,” said Ms. Tenentes. “When we started NBBC last winter, we had a bunch of startups and people working on small projects in our own neighborhood.”
Someday, Ms. Tenentes may want to work on her own start-up. She is working on a new project to connect women in tech, she said, and she has no plans to leave Brooklyn anytime soon.

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Christina Cacioppo

Christina Cacioppo had been reading Union Square Ventures blog for a few years when she saw a post that said that they were looking for hire someone younger on the investment side.
“I applied thinking I had no shot at their job. (Who gets their VC job off a blog post?),” she wrote in an email.
Ms. Cacioppo studied economics and industrial engineering at Stanford, which gave her access to the d.school and prepared her for Union square Ventures.
Before heading to USV, Ms. Cacioppo “meandered through the worlds of tech (in Silicon Valley), microfinance (in Bolivia), design (in Germany), journalism (in Uganda), and human rights (in Thailand and Rwanda).”
Right now, Ms. Cacioppo is excited to be in New York and at USV. “As milquetoasty as it sounds--trying to learn as much as I can from the USV team, the entrepreneurs and companies with whom we're involved, and the broader NYC tech community,” she said.
Another of Ms. Capcioppo’s goals is to be an angel investor.
“There's something so compelling about working with people who think the world is so broken in some specific way that they're dedicating years of their lives to starting a company and fixing it,” she said.

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Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman

After finishing courses at Harvard Business School two years ago, Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss turned to focus on the state of womens’ closets. As the story goes, Ms. Hyman had returned home to find her sister faced with an upcoming wedding and nothing in her closet to wear.
The concept of the ever-replenishing closet was born, and Ms. Hyman and her eponymous co-founder set out to make a wider selection of couture dresses available to women who are on a budget but still looking to dress up for a night out. The online rental service offering choices from a range of designers, which now include Vera Wang, Nicole Miller, Diane von Furstenberg and Escada. The dresses are available for a fraction of the retail price, with most ranging from $50 to $200 per four-day rental. It's not chump change, but women will happily pay up for high fashion and variety, and they have more than a million active users, according to TechCrunch--we don't even want to attempt to multiply those numbers.
Let's just say the revenue looks substantial, and it's no surprise the co-founders raised more than $30 million fromHighland Capital, Bain Capital and Kleiner Perkins, in order to expand its inventory and distribution.
"Over 90 percent of our renters have reported that they have purchased something from the brand they rented, post rental," Hyman told Inc.com, suggesting lead generation could be another revenue source in the future. "We are effectively grooming the next generation of women for high fashion."
Rent the Runway expanded to jewelry and handbags, and the two-year old company is up to 45 employees, mostly women.