There’s a particular kind of courage that comes not from charging into new territory, but from refusing to leave when the doors are quietly closing behind you. It’s the courage to rebuild what’s broken instead of accepting what’s been designed to exclude. It’s the courage to say: this system doesn’t work for me, so I’ll build one that does.
This edition of Women Entrepreneurs of the Year, 2025 celebrates entrepreneurs who didn’t just break glass ceilings—they questioned why the ceilings existed in the first place. These are women who turned systemic failure into market opportunity, who transformed their own exclusion into everyone else’s access, and who proved that the most profitable businesses are often the ones built to serve the people incumbents forgot.
On our cover is Robyn Verrall, whose journey from nursing to founding Bully’s Meats and Harvesting Potential Ltd embodies this spirit entirely. Agriculture is among the world’s most traditional industries, where women’s contributions have historically been invisible and their leadership unwelcome. Robyn didn’t ask for permission to lead differently. She simply did—building businesses rooted in ethics and sustainability while championing equity for women and First Nations communities across rural Australia. Her influence now reaches from paddocks to policy, rewriting what purpose-driven leadership in agribusiness can actually look like.
Alongside Robyn’s story, this edition profiles entrepreneurs who’ve built empires by identifying who the system fails. Janice Bryant Howroyd transformed $1,500 and a typewriter into ActOne Group, the first Black-woman-owned business to surpass $1 billion in revenue, by serving diverse talent that traditional staffing agencies systematically overlooked. Melanie Perkins built Canva into a $42 billion design platform by democratizing tools that the creative industry had deliberately kept complex and expensive, proving that accessibility at scale isn’t charity—it’s the biggest untapped market in tech.
We’ve also examined how two industry insiders weaponized their expertise against the very systems they once served. Our case study explores Sallie Krawcheck, who was fired from Wall Street for advocating client interests, then founded Ellevest to rebuild financial services for the women that traditional wealth management ignored. And Anne Wojcicki, who gave consumers ownership of their genetic data through 23andMe, challenging healthcare’s gatekeeping model and proving that democratizing information creates breakthrough science at impossible scale.
What connects these stories isn’t gender. It’s strategic clarity about where power sits, who it serves, and what happens when you build for everyone else. These entrepreneurs recognized that the populations being underserved weren’t niche markets—they were the majority being ignored by systems designed for a privileged few. They understood that mission isn’t separate from competitive advantage. It is the advantage.
The future belongs to those who solve actual problems for actual people. This edition proves it’s already here.
