Fortune’s annual 40 Under 40 list shines a spotlight on influential individuals shaping business in 2022. The founders, executives, investors, and activists on this year’s list are creating and seizing opportunity. They’re empowering others. They’re exploring new treatments for diseases that affect millions. They’re connecting people. They’re building upon their successes as athletes and entertainers. They’re trailblazing in their industries. And they’re even building new ones. They’re divided into five broad categories; learn more about them below.

Venture and Startups

Wemimo Abbey

Age:30 title:Cofounder and Co-CEO company:Esusu Financial

Wemimo Abbey grew up in the slums of Lagos, and lost his father when he was two. He and his mother moved to Minnesota, where they were turned away from several banks while looking for a way to pay for Abbey to go to college, because they didn’t have a credit score. His mother pawned his father’s ring, took out a 400% interest loan, and borrowed money from members of their church. That early experience inspired his current path: Indeed, one in every 10 adults has no credit history, and Abbey’s startup Esusu is working to change that. Esusu uses data to bridge the racial wealth gap by reporting on-time rent payments to major credit bureaus, so renters establish and improve their credit scores when they pay on time. The fintech company also offers 0% interest rent relief solutions for renters experiencing financial hardship. Abbey says Esusu’s customers have a reach of 3 million rental units across all 50 states, and the company has seen 600% growth year over year. After a $130 million Series B funding round in January, Esusu became one of a very few Black-owned unicorns in the U.S.

John Curtius

Age:36 title:Founder company:Cedar Investment Management

John Curtius left his role as partner at venture capital firm Tiger Global in October 2022 to start his own fund, Cedar Investment Management. He led roughly 250 deals at Tiger, arranging investments in notable software startups including Databricks, Snyk, Toast, Snowflake, SentinelOne, GitLab, and Kustomer. Cedar, which he plans to launch in mid-2023, will focus on Series A through Series C rounds, Curtius tells Fortune, and draw on his expertise gained from 12 years of investing in B2B software, fintech, and marketplaces. “Software is the best business model in the world,” Curtius says, “and can offer incredibly compelling risk-adjusted return opportunities.” Prior to Cedar and Tiger, Curtius started his investing career with stints at Silver Lake and Elliott Management.

Dylan Field

Age:30 title:Cofounder and CEO company:Figma

In 2012 Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University to become a Thiel Fellow, participating in a $100,000 grant program that gives college entrepreneurs the opportunity to build their companies. He created a web-based graphic design platform, Figma, which has since become a go-to design tool for teams at a range of firms around the world. Field reportedly became a billionaire about a decade after founding Figma: In September 2022 Adobe acquired the company for $20 billion—bolstering his net worth beyond $2 billion in one of the year’s largest mergers. Figma became a cult favorite among product teams for its collaboration-forward features, allowing users to virtually whiteboard, iterate, and test within the web-based platform. The plan is for Figma to remain independent within Adobe, and the effect of this on users remains unknown.

Li Jin

Age:32 title:Cofounder and General Partner company:Variant Fund

If Li Jin has her way, the next evolution of the internet will be the “user-owned web.” Variant, her early stage crypto-focused fund, recently raised $450 million for a third fund focused on making the world just and fair—by investing in crypto and Web3. The Harvard graduate and Andreessen Horowitz alum, who has said she’s often inspired by the ideological work of Karl Marx, has long fought for ways to give creator-workers more of a say with regard to their compensation, protections, and labor practices. She advocates an evolution toward labor laws “that protect modern internet-based workers.” This is personal for Jin: She herself is a longtime writer who currently publishes a newsletter on Substack. As she puts it, “The passion economy is the ‘what,’ and the ownership economy is the ‘how’”: how people can do what they love and express themselves creatively, while earning an income.

Luciana Lixandru

Age:38 title:Partner company:Sequoia Capital

When venture titan Sequoia decided to establish a permanent foothold in Europe in 2020, the firm knew it needed a leading partner with European expertise and investing vision to help build the U.K.-based division from the ground up. Luciana Lixandru, who grew up in Romania and went to Georgetown University in the U.S. before becoming a standout investor at Accel, was the ideal pick. She became Sequoia’s first European partner in 2020. As an early investor in UiPath, the Romania-based software company, and Miro, the collaborative visual platform, Lixandru says she looks for firms that create “new categories” for consumers and enterprises. This March, she co-launched Arc, a two-month-long incubator program for founders from across the world that delivers a course on how to develop and market their chosen project.

Deena Shakir

Age:37 title:Partner company:Lux Capital

The reversal of Roe v. Wade has made investing in women’s health—from public policy to the private sector—even more critical. In Silicon Valley, Deena Shakir has quickly become a go-to VC in the space. The only female partner at Lux Capital, a firm with $4 billion in assets under management, Shakir has backed employer-benefits platform Maven Clinic, fertility tech company Alife Health, and pediatrics startup Summer Health. The Google alumna and former State Department staffer even helped mint Maven as the first unicorn in the women’s and family health category.

Francesca Whitehead

Age:29 title:Vice President company:Fifth Wall

It’s clear sustainability is a huge priority for global businesses. How to get there? That’s not always so clear. Francesca Whitehead has become a go-to investor in the climate space, backing firms that create tech to help businesses and consumers cut down on emissions. She led G2VP’s investment in Pivot Bio, maker of a nitrogen-free fertilizer, and Trove, a sustainable B2B fashion platform. Whitehead was first drawn to working in the climate space growing up in Hong Kong and Vietnam and seeing the tangible impact of global warming during typhoon season. Her unique perspective as a young, biracial immigrant helps her spot investment opportunities and founders others might miss. As of November 2022, she is a VP at Fifth Wall, a sustainable real estate investing firm.

Cack Wilhelm

Age:38 title:General Partner company:IVP

Cack Wilhelm started her career as a professional runner, but in the years since, she’s applied her long-standing competitive drive to becoming a top investor in the data infrastructure space. In 2022, Wilhelm became the first woman promoted to general partner at IVP since 1983, a role she took on after a standout year for her portfolio. So far, she’s led investments in data platforms Monte Carlo and Obsidian Security, as well as joined data software firm Cribl’s $200 million Series C round. She previously led IVP’s investments in Papaya Global, the woman-founded employee payroll unicorn, and CircleCI, a software delivery platform. In her role as partner, she says she aims to pave the way for more women to be top decision-makers in the venture space.

Culture and Society

Paige Bueckers

Age:21 title:Basketball Player company:University of Connecticut

Paige Bueckers is on the sidelines for the majority of the 2022–23 basketball season with a torn ACL. But the University of Connecticut star has said she’s determined to get back onto the court next year, specifically at the college level: She’s turned down the opportunity to join the WNBA to remain a Husky for another year. This decision is closely related to the multiyear endorsement deal Bueckers signed last year with Gatorade. It was that brand’s first partnership with an NCAA player—making Bueckers one of the biggest college stars to benefit from the NCAA rule change that allows collegiate athletes to profit off their name, image, and likeness. While most male athletes who graduate into professional basketball can expect annual salaries in the millions, expected compensation in the WNBA is in the thousands. The NCAA rule change proves that entrepreneurial female athletes like Bueckers have what it takes to promote women’s sports—as well as or better than their schools, leagues, or organizations ever could.

Alex Cooper

Age:28 title:Podcaster company:Call Her Daddy

Alex Cooper always wanted to be famous, she just wasn’t sure how. When the former Boston University soccer star got laid off from her first postgrad job, she and her then-roommate and best friend, Sofia Franklyn, decided to start the raunchy podcast Call Her Daddy. “No one was talking the way me and my teammates back in college on the soccer team would talk in the locker room,” Cooper tells Fortune. “There was no woman out there being so raw and honest.” Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy discovered the podcast and hired Cooper and Franklyn as employees, taking ownership of its intellectual property. The show went viral—going from 12,000 to 2 million downloads in two months—and after the first year, the cohosts wanted a better deal. Ultimately, Cooper won ownership of the show, and today she has one of the most lucrative deals in podcasting: $60 million to license Call Her Daddy exclusively to Spotify for three years. She’s also pivoted the show’s content to celebrity interviews, clinician-advised mental health information, and relationship advice. In the process, she’s become Spotify’s most popular female podcaster.

Rihanna

Age:34 title:Singer and Entrepreneur company:Fenty, Savage X Fenty

The singer turned founder’s personal estimated net worth keeps climbing: She’s now worth $1.4 billion, per Forbes, while the value of Fenty Beauty, her cosmetics line known for its inclusive products, is at least twice that. Then there’s Savage X Fenty, her lingerie and loungewear company, which last year raised $115 million in a Series B funding round and is now reportedly worth $270 million. Even as she reaches these entrepreneurial milestones, Rihanna has not fully pivoted away from performing. She’s slated to headline the 2023 Super Bowl halftime show, and she recently recorded a new song for the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack, her first musical release in six years. Her fans constantly scour her social media posts for any sign of a future album. They instead find her using her enormous platform to promote her companies’ products, encourage her followers to vote, and bring attention to the climate crisis and racial injustice.

Joelle Gamble

Age:31 title:Chief Economist company:U.S. Department of Labor

Among economists, Joelle Gamble stands out. She’s not only just the second Black woman to serve as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, but she has an openly progressive bent. She also stands out in an environment not known for diversity: Just 29% of economists employed by the federal government are women, and only 10% identify as a minority. For Gamble, who earned her master’s from Princeton University, it’s critical to have different perspectives and representation in fields like economics, which has been historically homogenous. “Your experiences, whether you acknowledge them or not, inform how you approach the world,” Gamble says. “I am a Black woman, and I frankly struggled a great deal to get seen in econ policy spaces.” With a background in progressive economics, Gamble continues to push boundaries, routinely taking to Twitter to discuss the latest job reports and other workforce trends. “The scale of change that the government can make, even the smallest administrative action, has huge implications for businesses and workers,” she says. “I just never thought I would have that opportunity to help people on that scale.”

Khaby Lame

Age:22 title:TikToker

Khaby Lame, who became the world’s most-followed TikToker in June 2022, grew up in government housing outside Turin, Italy. When the pandemic hit, he was laid off from his factory job and began posting funny videos on TikTok. His wordless video skits, in which the 22-year-old pokes fun at overly complicated life hacks in deadpan style, have a universal appeal that’s attracted fans and sponsors. He’s worked with brands such as Hugo Boss, Google, and Binance, which pay him six figures for approximately six-second features on his TikTok channel. His manager tells Fortune that the social star is on track to make $10 million this year, largely from brand deals. His sights, however, are set on Hollywood: He spends his downtime watching cartoons in English and studying the language so he can eventually jump from the small to big screen.

Kylian Mbappé

Age:23 title:Professional Footballer company:Paris Saint-Germain and France

Kylian Mbappé has made a name for himself through both his athletic ability and outspokenness. In June 2022, he criticized the French Football Federation for not taking a strong enough stance on racist insults from fans, and in September, he refused to participate in photo shoots for fast food and betting sponsors because they didn’t align with his values. When he was considering leaving his hometown club of Paris Saint-Germain this summer for Real Madrid, he received a personal phone call from French President Emmanuel Macron urging him to stay. Macron reportedly told Mbappé he was “too important” for France and could become （or perhaps already was） a national symbol that transcended sport. Meanwhile, Mbappé’s $128 million in earnings this year have made him the highest-paid player in the world—the first time since 2014 the distinction didn’t go to either Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. The burgeoning Mbappé financial empire includes production company Zebra Valley, which inked a multiyear deal with the NBA in June; a children’s foundation, Inspired by KM; and endorsement deals with Nike, Hublot, EA, and Panini.

Christian Smalls

Age:34 title:Interim President company:Amazon Labor Union

Despite facing the Goliath of e-commerce, Christian Smalls successfully led the formation of the Amazon Labor Union in 2021. A year later, a majority of workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, N.Y., voted in favor of unionization. As the face of the movement, Smalls wears many hats, calling for support from politicians, raising funds, and rallying workers at other facilities to join the movement. While two other Amazon fulfillment centers have voted no since Smalls’ Staten Island victory, he’s committed to organizing all of Amazon’s 110 active fulfillment centers in the U.S. and to establishing a nationwide union at the forefront of the new labor movement. “My whole life, I’ve been organizing in one way or another,” Smalls says. “I recognized the moment we were in with historic wealth inequality and these corporations exploiting our labor, and I couldn’t not fight back.”

Lena Waithe

Age:38 title:Actor, Producer, and Screenwriter company:Hillman Grad

Chicago native Lena Waithe has been working toward revolutionizing the culture in Hollywood for nearly two decades. She jetted to L.A. following college graduation to get her start in television, and later became the first Black woman to win an Emmy for outstanding writing in a comedy series on Master of None. The producer, writer, actor, and founder of multi-platform entertainment company Hillman Grad is an advocate for queer representation in the industry. Pulling inspiration from her own experiences as a masculine-presenting queer woman of color, Waithe wrote and executive produced Twenties, the first series on the BET network to center on a queer lead character. Waithe is also the creator of Showtime series The Chi, a coming-of-age drama that highlights the bond among residents living on Chicago’s South Side. Off-screen, Waithe amplifies marginalized storytellers’ voices through the Hillman Grad Mentorship Lab, providing them with an opportunity to break into the industry.

Finance and Crypto

Anne-Victoire Auriault

Age:34 title:Partner company:Goldman Sachs, Global Markets Division

Anne-Victoire Auriault has been at Goldman Sachs for more than a decade, but her rise truly began when she was appointed managing director in 2019. The following year, she became one of the youngest women in the company’s history to achieve the rank of partner. “I think it was important to see that it’s possible to make partner as a female trader, particularly one who is devoted to her family and emphasizes a healthy work-life balance to her team,” Auriault says. “I had a lot of women reach out to me after I was promoted, letting me know how it represented an inflection point for them.” Auriault accepted an offer in 2022 to join Goldman’s partnership committee, which stewards the firm’s culture. She’s also a member of the global markets inclusion and diversity committee. In the coming years, Auriault says she’s looking forward to “continuing to scale my business and being a true partner to our clients,” adding, “initially my remit was focused on the U.S. Now, I’m managing the team globally. Next, I’d love to expand into more areas, and institutionalize the success we’ve seen across different product suites.”

Kanav Kariya

Age:26 title:President company:Jump Crypto

Kanav Kariya started as an intern at a Jump Trading startup incubator for crypto companies, but last year, the company handed him the reins of its rebranded, 170-person digital assets division, Jump Crypto. Since then, he’s overseen billions in investments in the crypto space and helped position the company as a major player in Web3. As for future ambitions, Kariya tells Fortune that he wants Jump Crypto to be a “key infrastructure builder that is part of the furniture of the industry as it scales.” Even as the crypto downturn rages on, Kariya’s Jump Crypto is undeterred. In just about a year, it has invested in more than 100 crypto companies.

Mary-Catherine Lader

Age:37 title:COO company:Uniswap Labs

With a strong belief in the future of decentralized finance, Mary-Catherine Lader left her Wall Street career behind with ease—and has quickly emerged as a powerhouse within the crypto realm. At Uniswap Labs, the company behind the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum, Lader has pursued her mission to bring DeFi to the mainstream, ongoing market downturn notwithstanding. Though Crypto Winter nearly decimated VC funding in the sector, Uniswap Labs was able to announce a fresh $1.66 billion valuation and $165 million Series B in October 2022, marking one of the largest single equity raises for a DeFi company. To Lader, who formerly led BlackRock’s first blockchain working group, the round signifies her high hopes for Uniswap’s growth. With upcoming plans to introduce an NFT aggregator, the company aims to become the top on-chain marketplace for all digital value.

Michael McCaffrey

Age: 27 title:CEO company:The Block

Michael McCaffrey launched his career in finance on what many would consider the side opposite from crypto, working at Goldman Sachs and Citi. He decided to take the path less traveled, joining The Block in 2018 as one of its first employees when the crypto publication was staffed by a tiny team writing on Medium. Today, McCaffrey is CEO of the budding blockchain media empire, which produces in-depth data breakdowns of the crypto industry. McCaffrey has been hard at work on two projects that he hopes will help achieve his goal of turning The Block into the “Bloomberg of crypto.” The first is partnering with an outfit called Access Protocol that will allow readers to pay for web-based content with tokens instead of having to buy individual subscriptions. The second is a new suite of intelligence products that will help companies better understand the crypto ecosystem. With both, McCaffrey hopes to bridge the worlds of business and consumer readership.

Alain Meier

Age:29 title:Head of Identity company:Plaid

Alain Meier has been working since his Stanford undergrad years on technologies to help fintech companies and their customers prove their users are who they say they are. In 2013, Meier cofounded Cognito, a platform that expedites and secures identity verification, and he served as CEO until its sale to Plaid for a reported $250 million in January 2022. Many of Plaid’s customers were already using Cognito’s tech by the time of the acquisition, including buy-now-pay-later company Affirm and corporate-finance-focused fintech Brex. Since then, Plaid has expanded upon its focus of connecting bank accounts to fintech apps and has dived into crypto. The company recently launched Wallet Onboard, which connects crypto wallets to decentralized Web3 apps. As Meier explained on an episode of Inspired Capital’s Inspired in 15 podcast, Web3 complicates identity verification given that “pseudonymization of identity,” or “personas,” are so key to the landscape; meanwhile, regulators have cracked down on anonymous transactions. Meier and the fintech industry at large are working to square these realities, and to improve trust in scam-riddled crypto.

Nicole Muniz

Age:38 title:CEO company:Yuga Labs

In less than a year, Nicole Muniz has turned Yuga Labs into a household name in the NFT industry. Under Muniz’s leadership, Yuga Labs, which had already created one of the most popular NFT collections, Bored Ape Yacht Club, acquired two other popular collections, CryptoPunks and Meebits, giving the holders of those NFTs all associated intellectual property rights. Investors have started to take notice. In March, Muniz helped the company raise $450 million in a round led by a16z Crypto that values it at $4 billion. Now, Muniz is building on Yuga Labs’ success in NFTs through a metaverse platform it is developing called Otherside. In April, the sale of 55,000 virtual land deeds called Otherdeeds raked in about $320 million.

Antonio White

Age:35 title:Senior Vice President and Public Policy Executive company:Bank of America

In his role as deputy assistant secretary for community engagement at the U.S. Treasury Department, Antonio White embodied the agency’s adapted focus, not just on economic policy but on its racially equitable implementation. White led the revamped public liaison’s office as it disbursed $1 trillion in American Rescue Plan funding to help communities and businesses cope with the effects of the COVID pandemic. In a first for the Treasury Department, he also prioritized outreach to organizations with “mutually shared values” such as civil rights groups, labor unions, and trade associations. He was involved as well in planning the disbursement of $350 billion in aid to city and state governments in May 2021. He got his start in public service as a 2011 intern at the White House, where he “started to understand how even though public policy can take a long time to get from A to Z, once it gets to Z, it can have a massive impact.” From there, he adds, “I was hooked.” This fall he brought his executive-branch experience to Bank of America as senior vice president of public policy. The bank will look to leverage his Washington expertise as it delivers on its mission of responsible growth.

Ksenia Yudina

Age:35 title:Founder and CEO company:UNest

Ksenia Yudina spent much of early 2022 trying to move about one-quarter of her employees out of a war zone. Of her 42 staffers at UNest—the North Hollywood, Calif.–based digital brokerage for parents aiming to invest and save for their children’s education—12 were located in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus when Russian troops invaded Kyiv at the beginning of this year. In March, Yudina’s team spent nights and weekends finding routes to move employees to safety and issuing cash payments to developers and their families. At the same time, they were prepping for the rollout of UNest’s cryptocurrency offering, which formally launched, albeit with a slight delay, in September. The war has been personal for Yudina, who herself is Russian. She fled to the United States at age 18, working as a hotel housekeeper before landing a job at Capital Group. Yudina has raised $38 million for UNest from venture capital firms including Anthos Capital, the Artemis Fund, Franklin Templeton, and Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures. And recently, the firm inked a partnership with iHeartMedia, which is investing $8 million in UNest and will advertise the company across iHeartRadio.

Tech and Innovation

Enric Asunción

Age:37 title:Cofounder and CEO company:Wallbox

Enric Asunción is CEO of Wallbox, a leading provider of smart, at-home charging systems for electric cars. Asunción, who hails from Barcelona, is already an EV veteran: Before cofounding Wallbox, he worked for automotive engineering firm Applus+ IDIADA, then Tesla, where he was responsible for home charging in Europe. Now his company has two factories in Europe, one in China, and a new one in the U.S.—and in October 2021 Wallbox became the first Spanish tech firm to list on the NYSE. With the EV market still in its early days, and Wallbox’s presence in 120 countries to date, Asunción sees massive opportunities ahead, not just for charging EVs but also in the wider transition to renewable energy: Because Wallbox’s system is bidirectional, it can also use EV batteries to power the home in the event of a power outage.

Alexis Barreyat

Age:27 title:Cofounder and CEO company:BeReal

After a couple of years working at action-camera outfit GoPro, Alexis Barreyat, a French techie and mountain biking aficionado, cofounded social media app BeReal in 2019. The app prompts users to post pictures of themselves and their surroundings at randomly assigned times—a playful rebellion against the carefully architected selfies of social media. BeReal became a sensation with Gen Z users this year, crashing into the mainstream with such force that it topped app-download lists while Saturday Night Live devoted a sketch to its merits. Barreyat’s small, Paris-based startup recently raised $60 million in funding at a $600 million valuation according to the Financial Times, and larger rivals like Instagram and TikTok have taken notice: Both recently launched similar features.

Jimmy Chen

Age:35 title:Founder and CEO company:Propel

For the 60 million low-income Americans who rely on government safety nets, keeping an eye on finances can be a confusing and tedious affair. Through his company, Propel, and its free-to-use app, founder Jimmy Chen is helping 5 million Americans focus on their financial health. Becoming the banking provider for low-income America is certainly a “tall order,” Chen admits, but he’s up for the challenge. Inspired by technology’s potential for social good and the financial challenges his family experienced growing up, Chen is proving entrepreneurship can not only work alongside government bureaucracy, but improve it. Chen and Propel are making philanthropy more efficient, too, partnering with nonprofit GiveDirectly to issue $200 million in relief funds to Propel users affected by hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico.

Vivian Chu

Age:35 title:Cofounder and CTO company:Diligent Robotics

Vivian Chu is the cofounder and chief technology officer of Diligent Robotics, a company that has raised nearly $50 million to develop socially intelligent robots for use in hospitals. Its flagship product is Moxi, a robot that performs delivery tasks for nurses. Having decided software engineering wasn’t for her, Chu got into robotics when she realized she could make things that could change one’s living and working environment; her health care focus came from watching her grandparents age and go into a nursing home, which showed her where such technology could have a big impact. She says her work is not about taking away jobs, but rather taking away the parts of jobs that nurses hate doing, enabling them to “spend more time with their patients or just have a moment to breathe.”

Mariana Costa

Age:36 title:Cofounder and CEO company:Laboratoria

Mariana Costa cofounded Laboratoria to ensure that women are part of Latin America’s growing tech sector, a vital vehicle for economic opportunity. The tech boot camp will have trained 3,000 women across several Latin American countries by the end of this year, Costa estimates, with a post–boot-camp job placement rate of nearly 90% last year. Costa says she was inspired by Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant, whom she saw speaking at a conference that she attended through a scholarship from Google—which today is one of Laboratoria’s leading donors. Currently she’s working on a new venture, intended to be a division within the company called Laboratoria+. It will focus on helping women who are already in tech grow in their careers so that they can become leaders and influence the future of the sector.

Pavel Durov

Age:38 title:Founder and CEO company:Telegram

Pavel Durov was once dubbed Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg. But after his social media company VKontakte ignited the Kremlin’s wrath, he fled the country and used the $300 million from its sale to launch Telegram. Since Durov last made the 40 Under 40 in 2018, Telegram’s rise has been stratospheric. Durov estimates it now has more than 700 million active users, with 2 million new subscribers daily. Iranian protesters, Russian commanders, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and countless MAGA supporters of Donald Trump have turned the encrypted, uncensored platform into a megaphone of rage, grief, breaking news, and propaganda. By some estimates, Durov is now worth $15 billion, though he maintains a low profile in his adopted home of Dubai （he also snapped up French citizenship last year）, restricting his communications to his own Telegram channel. “Telegram doesn’t need additional promotion,” he wrote in October. These days, that is an understatement.

Susan Li

Age:36 title:CFO company:Meta

Susan Li has been at Meta since 2008 when the startup then known as Facebook was just a handful of employees “scattered across a few buildings” in downtown Palo Alto. On Nov. 1 she became Meta’s new finance chief, succeeding longtime CFO Dave Wehner. Li enters the C-suite at a pivotal moment, as the internet company attempts to reorient its business around metaverse technology and as advertising revenue feels the sting of a slowing economy. The twin challenges mean the Stanford University alumna will have her work cut out for her, balancing difficult cost cuts （including major layoffs during her first month in the new role） with strategic investments. Having helped steer the company through some of its past ups and downs, Li, who was previously VP of finance, comes equipped for the task with a deep reservoir of firsthand knowledge.

RJ Scaringe

Age:39 title:Founder and CEO company:Rivian

RJ Scaringe has been obsessed with cars for as long as he can remember, and, after earning a doctorate in automotive engineering at MIT, he went on to found EV startup Rivian in 2009. Since then, he’s signed on marquee customer Amazon; raised $12 billion in the largest IPO since Facebook’s; and won the prestigious MotorTrend Truck of the Year award with Rivian’s first model, the R1T electric pickup. The past year has been bumpy: Scaringe had to slash Rivian’s annual production targets in half, owing to a lack of microchips, and an effort to foist a hefty price hike on customers who had already placed an order resulted in a PR black eye. The company’s stock has been battered, but Scaringe’s EV company is pushing forward, adding a new electric SUV to the lineup and appearing on track to meet its full-year （albeit lowered） production goals.

Health and Bioscience

Eren Bali

Age:38 title:Cofounder and CEO company:Carbon Health

Chess is a mentally taxing activity for many, but after spending his days striving to improve the future of health care services, Eren Bali finds the game to be a relatively relaxing way to unwind. After immigrating to the San Francisco Bay Area from Turkey, Bali experienced the broken U.S. health care system firsthand and embarked on a path toward dismantling it and reimagining it with increased access, lower costs, and hybrid care. To achieve this, Bali cofounded Carbon Health, a chain of primary- and urgent-care facilities that offer both telehealth and in-person appointments. The company says its services are now available to more than three-quarters of the U.S. population, and it plans to expand further. Carbon Health allows patients to book same-day appointments in person or online and access medical records and test results via smartphone. It is venturing into diabetes care with a first-of-its-kind program combining glucose monitoring with direct access to primary care providers, both virtually and in person. Looking forward, Carbon Health has plans to integrate primary health care with mental health services.

Florian Brand

Age:36 title:Cofounder and CEO company:Atai Life Sciences

Florian Brand is CEO of Atai Life Sciences, a German biopharmaceuticals company that is trying to develop new mental health treatments based on novel technology and drugs—notably psilocybin mushrooms and other psychoactive substances whose medical uses have only recently started being taken seriously. Brand, who has a business rather than medical background, delved into the field after witnessing friends and family members struggle to find adequate conventional treatments for their depression and other mental health disorders. Brand notes the need for diverse treatments in the space, and Atai has set up or bought a number of subsidiaries that are each investigating different potential routes. The company hopes to gather a critical mass of data within the next couple of years, and is working with regulators to pave the way for future treatments.

Ankit Gupta

Age:35 title:Founder and CEO company:Bicycle Health

The No. 1 priority in addressing the opioid crisis in America is improving access to treatment and recovery services, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Yet 40% of U.S counties lack facilities that offer medication-assisted treatment. Enter Ankit Gupta, whose Bicycle Health aims to fill that gap with specialized telehealth services for opioid use disorder. Gupta founded the company in 2017, when he bought a single clinic in Redwood City, Calif. Then in 2020, government regulations were relaxed to allow for more opioid-treatment medications to be prescribed online. Since then, Bicycle Health has expanded to 29 states, treated 20,000 patients, and raised $83 million in venture funding. Bicycle says it has a 40% higher rate of retention than standard in-person clinics, as well as a lower cost for many patients, owing to the ease of access via telehealth. With the $50 million in funding Bicycle received in June 2022, Gupta tells Fortune he plans to expand to six more states over the next couple of quarters, improve Bicycle’s tech, and grow the number of health plans offering Bicycle’s services.

Jamie Karraker and Mattieu Gamache-Asselin

Age:33,33 title:Cofounders company:Alto Pharmacy

Mattieu Gamache-Asselin and Jamie Karraker left engineering jobs at Facebook to found Alto Pharmacy in 2015. Their goal was to disrupt the very offline business of prescription drugs, but first they bought and ran a brick-and-mortar pharmacy, which gave them plenty of experience-improving insights （such as the importance of eliminating the need for fax machines）. Today, the company’s technology streamlines the drug-prescription process for prescribers, pharmacists, and patients—who get their meds delivered to their homes. The goal of those improvements: making sure that more people who need prescription drugs actually receive and use them. Alto has been rewarded with rave reviews from consumers—a net promoter score of 86—and $550 million in venture capital funding. Other impressive milestones: The company hit $1 billion in revenue in 2022, and landed Amazon S-Team exec Alicia Boler Davis as its new CEO this summer.

Kristina Saffran

Age:30 title:Cofounder and CEO company:Equip

For nearly 15 years, since recovering from an eating disorder herself, Kristina Saffran has been working to make effective treatment accessible to others. Only 20% of the 30 million Americans who suffer from disordered eating ever get help, and the stakes are high: The mortality risk and costs associated with eating disorders exceed those of most other psychiatric disorders. In 2008, Saffran founded Project HEAL to fund treatment for those who couldn’t afford it. Realizing such a nonprofit couldn’t fill the gaps in care alone, she decided to try the private sector, cofounding Equip Health in 2019. Equip’s focus is family-based treatment, an evidence-backed outpatient treatment model for adolescents and young adults, which it provides virtually. Equip has so far served 1,000 families; it raised $58 million in a Series B earlier this year and has partnered with a number of the nation’s major insurers, including Aetna, Cigna, and UnitedHealthcare.

Elenoe “Crew” Smith

Age:38 title:Director, Integrated Pharmacology company:Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Elenoe “Crew” Smith has dedicated herself to addressing and researching sickle cell disease （SCD） ever since she was in middle school. Sickle cell disease is predominantly found in individuals of African descent, and Smith says that while growing up in the Virgin Islands she knew more people that had SCD than cancer. Smith started her career as a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital, and she’s now creating treatments for SCD as a director at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. So far, Smith is researching potential small molecules in pursuit of creating accessible medicines and therapies to address SCD. “I’m just excited that so many worlds are waking up and realizing that this is an important health problem,” Smith tells Fortune. Because the disease mostly affects Black individuals, there have been some social determinants and structural racism that stalled progress in treating SCD. But Smith adds that she’s seeing more momentum in the patient, scientific, and policy communities toward finding equitable care and conducting in-depth research.

David Vivero

Age:39 title:Cofounder and CEO company:Amino Health

At age 19, David Vivero was diagnosed with hereditary hemochromatosis, a rare condition. Some years later, after leaving his job as VP of rentals at Zillow, Vivero applied for health insurance and found that he was denied coverage because of his condition. He then spent weeks trying to figure out how he could afford a plan. Instead of accepting the health care system in the U.S. for the labyrinth that it is, Vivero and his cofounders decided to demystify the process by creating a health care price transparency platform and benefits navigator, Amino Health. Vivero tells Fortune that some of the most significant purchases in one’s life regarding health care are often made with little information—and a lot of inconveniences. “We try to make it convenient to make really great choices in health care,” he explains. So far, they’ve been successful, as Amino says its interface increased the rate at which people choose high-quality, low-cost providers by two to three times compared with nonusers. “We are provably able to shift people toward making a better decision for themselves,” he says.

Alice Zhang

Age:33 title:Cofounder and CEO company:Verge Genomics

In fall 2022, Alice Zhang traveled to the Centre for Human Drug Research in the Netherlands for a momentous milestone: Verge Genomics’ first in-human clinical trial of its ALS drug. The process began in 2015, when Zhang abandoned her MD/Ph.D. degree program in neuroscience to cofound Verge. She believed her research using artificial intelligence to map diseases could have a massive-scale impact, and she set out to develop drugs for some of the most difficult-to-treat conditions, including ALS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. In contrast to other drug development techniques, Verge uses samples of human tissue to sequence and create a data map of a disease’s biological profile, in an effort to pinpoint areas that can be addressed with treatment. Last winter, Verge raised $98 million in Series B funding from BlackRock, Eli Lilly, Threshold Ventures, and others.