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MPWMost Powerful Women

5 Startups To Know On Women’s Entrepreneurship Day

By
Valentina Zarya
Valentina Zarya
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By
Valentina Zarya
Valentina Zarya
Down Arrow Button Icon
November 19, 2015, 11:45 AM ET
TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 - Day 3
Photograph by Steve Jennings—Getty Images

For the thousands of women who run their own businesses, every day is “women’s entrepreneurship day.” But for the rest of us, Nov. 19th has been earmarked as a special day to honor those hard charging female entrepreneurs.

Thursday marks the second annual Women’s Entrepreneurship Day, a holiday founded by entrepreneur and animal advocate Wendy Diamond. To help further the celebration, Fortune pulled together five innovative women-led startups that should be on your radar. Check them out below, in no particular order:

uBeam

Founder: Meredith Perry

Claim to Fame: uBeam is a wireless power startup that transmits power over-the-air to charge electronic devices. At only 25, Perry is already been called "the next Elon Musk." She created the first prototype wireless charger while she was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania.

Funds raised: $23.24 million, according to Crunchbase.

Notable investors: Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Mark Cuban, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

For more Fortune coverage on uBeam, click here.

LightSail Energy

Founder: Danielle Fong

Claim to Fame: LightSail’s aim is to compress air to create heat and use that heat to create power. Fong calls herself "the girl from the future," and though she has yet to bring a product to market, she's already managed to raise serious funds.

Funds raised: $42.8 million, according to Crunchbase.

Notable investors: Bill Gates and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

For more Fortune coverage on LightSail, click here.

Drawbridge

Founder: Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan

Claim to Fame: Sivaramakrishnan founded Drawbridge to enable brands to have seamless conversations with consumers. Unlike other mobile advertising companies, Drawbridge identifies multiple mobile devices that are used by the same person, improving ad targeting and attribution.

Funds raised: $20.5 million, according to Crunchbase.

Notable investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

For more Fortune coverage on Drawbridge, click here.

PlanGrid

Tracy Young, co-founder of PlanGrid, at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015

Co-founder: Tracy Young

Claim to Fame: Along with her co-founder and fellow construction engineer Ryan Sutton-Gee, Young set out to create a company to digitize blueprints. That company, PlanGrid, lets architects, construction workers, and their bosses access building plans from a mobile device and edit them like a group document.

Funds raised: $59.1 million, according to Crunchbase.

Notable investors:  Sequoia Capital, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Y Combinator, Google Ventures.

For more Fortune coverage on PlanGrid, click here.

Gobble

Founder: Ooshma Garg

Claim to Fame: A subscription-based food service, Gobble is similar to competitors like Blue Apron and Plated in that it provides a selection of meals each week and delivers recipes and pre-portioned ingredients to subscribers’ homes. The company’s key differentiator: There’s very little actual cooking involved.

Funds raised: $11.95 million, according to Crunchbase.

Notable investors:  Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn; Keith Rabois, former COO of Square; and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.

For more Fortune coverage on PlanGrid, click here.

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By Valentina Zarya
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