Kumo Co-Founder Hema Raghavan Named to Inc.’s 2026 Female Founders 500

We’re proud to share that Kumo co-founder and Head of Engineering, Dr. Hema Raghavan, has been named to Inc.’s 2026 Female Founders 500 list - an annual recognition of the most innovative and impactful women entrepreneurs in the United States.

The list celebrates founders whose ideas, leadership, and persistence are shaping the future of their industries. Collectively, the women recognized this year generated approximately $12.3 billion in revenue in 2025, highlighting the growing impact of female founders across the economy.

Recognizing innovation and leadership

Each year, Inc. editors evaluate hundreds of applications through a rigorous, multi-round selection process. Founders are assessed across both quantitative performance metrics - including revenue growth, funding, sales, and audience size - and qualitative factors such as innovation, social impact, and brand momentum.

Past honorees include leaders such as Billie Jean King, Sallie Krawcheck, Serena Williams, and Emma Grede, all of whom have transformed their industries and opened doors for future generations of entrepreneurs.

Building a new foundation for enterprise AI

Dr. Hema Raghavan co-founded Kumo in 2021 after recognizing a fundamental challenge in enterprise AI. While companies have years of valuable relational data about customers, transactions, and behaviors, turning that data into accurate predictions often requires months of manual work by specialized teams.

Before starting Kumo, Hema spent more than a decade leading AI initiatives at LinkedIn, where she helped build systems such as People You May Know and contributed to the platform’s growth from 400 million to 700 million users.

At Kumo, that experience helped lead to the creation of KumoRFM, the first foundation model designed specifically for structured enterprise data. The platform enables organizations to generate predictions directly from their data warehouse - without task-specific model training.

Turning a counterintuitive idea into real-world impact

For years, many experts believed that structured data lacked the sequential patterns needed for transformer architectures to work effectively. The Kumo team took a different approach and demonstrated that these models can unlock powerful predictive insights from relational data.

Today, Kumo’s platform is in production at more than 20 enterprises, including DoorDash, Reddit, Snowflake, and Databricks, generating predictions for over one billion users globally. The company has raised $37 million in funding, led by Sequoia Capital.

A meaningful recognition

Reflecting on the honor, Hema shared:

“Being named to this list is deeply meaningful to me - not just as a founder, but as a woman in deep tech and as a role model to my children. When I co-founded Kumo, I knew we were working on a hard problem - one the industry had largely written off as unsolvable. This recognition is a reminder that there is space for women to lead at the frontier of technical innovation, and I hope it encourages others to keep building.”

Celebrating trailblazing founders

“The honorees on this year’s list include innovators in AI, beauty and wellness trendsetters winning devoted fans, and nonprofit leaders making a real impact in their communities,” said Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc. “Together, they are showing all of us what trailblazing female leadership looks like.”

Several honorees will be featured in Inc. magazine’s Spring 2026 issue, available on newsstands on March 17.

You can view the full list of the 2026 Female Founders 500 here: https://www.inc.com/female-founders/2026