Inc. Names Kumo Co-Founder, Dr. Hema Raghavan, to Its 2026 Female Founders 500 List

Inc.'s annual Female Founders list celebrates the nation's most innovative women entrepreneurs, who collectively generated approximately $12.3 billion in 2025

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Kumo is proud to announce that Dr. Hema Raghavan, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering, has been named to Inc.'s 2026 Female Founders 500, an annual list honoring the most dynamic women business leaders in the United States. The honor recognizes founders whose bold ideas, resilience, and execution are shaping the future of their industries.

Each year, Inc. editors evaluate applications through a rigorous, multi-round selection process. Founders are assessed on both quantitative performance metrics, including revenue growth, funding, sales, and audience size, as well as qualitative factors such as innovation, social impact, and brand momentum. Previous honorees have included such game-changing leaders as Billie Jean King, Sallie Krawcheck, Serena Williams, and Emma Grede, all of whom have transformed their industries and broken barriers along the way. This year, the list was judged by fellow women in leadership positions, including the co-founders and CEOs of New American Funding and Care.com, among others.

"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," said Dr. Hema Raghavan, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Kumo. "When I co-founded Kumo, I knew we were working on a hard problem, one that 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."

Dr. Raghavan co-founded Kumo in 2021 after identifying a fundamental gap in enterprise AI: every company sits on years of relational data, customers, transactions, behaviors, yet extracting predictive insight from it still required months of manual work by specialized teams. Drawing on her decade of experience leading AI at LinkedIn, where she built the systems behind People You May Know and helped scale the platform from 400 million to 700 million users, she set out to change that. The result is KumoRFM, the first foundation model built specifically for structured enterprise data, enabling zero-shot predictions directly from a data warehouse with no task-specific training required.

The technical breakthrough was considered counterintuitive. Prevailing wisdom held that structured data lacked the sequential patterns necessary for transformer architectures. Dr. Raghavan and her team demonstrated otherwise, and the results speak for themselves. Kumo's platform now operates in production at over 20 enterprises, including DoorDash, Reddit, Snowflake, and Databricks, generating predictions for more than one billion users globally. Customers have seen 142% more accurate fraud detection, 5.4x conversion rate improvements, and over $100 million in revenue impact, with model development that is 20x faster than traditional approaches. Kumo has raised $37 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital.

"Each year, we are increasingly amazed by the extraordinary leaders on our Inc. Female Founders 500 list," says Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc. "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. Together, they're showing all of us what trailblazing female leadership looks like."

Several honorees will be featured in Inc. magazine's Spring print issue, on newsstands March 17, 2026. To see the complete list of honorees, please visit: https://www.inc.com/female-founders/2026.

About Inc.

Inc. is the leading media brand and playbook for the entrepreneurs and business leaders shaping our future. Through its journalism, Inc. aims to inform, educate, and elevate the profile of its community: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters who are creating the future of business. Inc. is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow leading business publication Fast Company. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

About Kumo

Kumo gives companies the ability to extract real value from their business data — transactions, customers, inventory — that sits in the data warehouse but is often constrained by outdated AI techniques and complex feature engineering. Kumo's platform uses Relational Graph Transformers to work directly on relational data, enabling teams to train accurate predictive and embedding models up to 20x faster with no feature engineering. Teams can also use the Kumo Foundational Model for instant predictions and real-time decisioning. Kumo was founded by three PhDs who held executive leadership and academic roles at Pinterest, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Stanford. The company has raised $37 million and is backed by Sequoia Capital. Kumo makes relational data directly usable for high-quality predictive and generative AI, helping businesses of all sizes apply advanced AI more easily. To learn more, visit kumo.ai.

Contact:
Ali Goldberg
Concrete Media for Kumo
[email protected]
+972 (058) 789 5272

SOURCE Kumo.AI