Digital Entrepreneurs

Turning an online design platform into a billion-dollar company takes drive, and Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins has had that accelerator on lock for years. The 38-year-old tech entrepreneur from Perth, Australia, launched Canva in 2012, which achieved unicorn status in just four years, with the startup's value soaring over $1 billion in 2018.

At the time, Perkins became the youngest female entrepreneur to have reached unicorn status at 30 years old — no mean feat in the male-dominated tech industry. Plus, Perkins has said she was turned down by 100 venture capitalists in the initial pitching phase for Canva, which is the type of legendary told-you-so origin story successful businesses are made of.

Now, Canva is an invaluable all-in-one creator tool that boasts 170 million monthly users, and Perkins alone has a current net worth of $5.8 billion, according to Forbes. The CEO has overseen Canva's branching out into programs and platforms for nonprofits, education, and developers, as well as the platform's moves into AI, and remains one of the most successful tech business leaders on the planet.

Few podcasters have rebranded quite like Alex Cooper. First known for raunchy, confessional content on her super successful Call Her Daddy podcast, Cooper has since evolved into a media powerhouse — and one of the most influential women in podcasting. After parting ways with Barstool Sports in 2021, she inked a reported $60 million exclusive three-year deal with Spotify, and in 2024, signed a $125 million multi-year deal with SiriusXM, turning her solo-hosted show into a top-charting juggernaut that now blends sex talk with celebrity interviews and mental health conversations. Cooper has been praised for her candor and sharp interviewing skills, sitting down with everyone from Hailey Bieber to Jane Fonda.

In 2023, she launched The Unwell Network, signing on creators like Alix Earle and expanding her influence behind the scenes as a producer and businesswoman. At just 30, she’s reshaped the audio landscape and built a fanbase that sees her as both big sister and boss. Love her or not, Cooper is setting the bar for women-led media and doing it on her own terms. Her rise hasn’t dismantled the podcasting patriarchy, but it’s made room for a different kind of power.

From college champion to cover model, Olivia "Livvy" Dunne has made the leap from the balance beam to the spotlight. The 22-year-old from New Jersey arrived in Baton Rouge in the summer of 2020 to join Louisiana State University's gymnastics program. On April 20 last year, Dunne helped lead LSU to its first-ever NCAA women’s gymnastics championship, deeming it the “best day ever.” Dunne retired from gymnastics on April 18, stepping off the mat and straight onto the cover of the 2025 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue. Meanwhile, her social reach has exploded, with Dunne now clocking 5.4 million Instagram followers and 8 million TikTok fans. But her social media following made her a star even before the NCAA championship, with Dunne quickly securing deals with brands such as Vuori and Grubhub following the 2021 ruling that college athletes could be compensated for the commercial use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL). Dunne’s partnerships, valued at around $4.1 million, made her the highest-paid female college athlete.

From launching a coffee empire to podcasting to accumulating billions of views across platforms, Emma Chamberlain is a household name in the world of influencing. Taylor Lorenz crowned her "the most important YouTuber today" in 2019. Her trajectory didn’t stop there. Chamberlain is an online powerhouse, instantly recognizable and a brand name in herself. The 24-year-old lifestyle creator has graced the covers of Cosmopolitan, Vogue Turkey, Vogue Hong Kong, and Harper’s Bazaar, appeared on Variety’s "Power of Young Hollywood" list in 2020, and has become the brand ambassador for the likes of Lancôme. Of her coffee brand, Chamberlain Coffee, she told Mashable, "It's about making a brand that I'm proud of, that feels like a reflection of me, and what Chamberlain Coffee has now become as a result of everyone who works on it." Between the many hats she wears and the millions of followers she's attracted, Chamberlain will likely be influencing for many years to come.

It's difficult not to find Sophia Kianni's work spectacular.

The 24-year-old Stanford grad is behind Climate Cardinals, the world's largest youth-led climate nonprofit, and she co-founded, with business partner Phoebe Gates, Phia, an AI shopping app aimed at making shopping secondhand easier.

"We started off as two random Stanford roommates arguing over clothes," @phiaco, Kianni and Gates posted recently on Instagram. "Those fights turned into late-night brainstorms, our first scrappy Chrome extension, and a dream of getting 500 users. Fast forward to today there are 500,000 of you, millions in sales driven, and a community that’s helped us shape the future of shopping."

Kianni, who has amassed nearly 170,000 followers of her own on Instagram, is also the youngest United Nations adviser in U.S. history.

Dani Austin is big business, and increasingly so. Forbes estimated the 32-year-old mom will earn $13.6 million in 2025. There are lots of eyeballs and dollars to be had in family-friendly, family-focused content — and that’s exactly Austin's lane. She's racked up 2.3 million followers on Instagram and nearly a million on TikTok by sharing her life as a fun, relatable mom. You've probably seen her most viral TikTok — it has 32 million views — where she hazily detailed being made to pee shortly after giving birth. But mom content isn't all Austin's got going on. She launched her hair-and-scalp care line Divi a few years back, which has since taken off. It’s now being sold at Target and Ulta. All her endeavors have gone well enough that Austin was named Entrepreneur of the Year, Southwest, by Big Four firm Ernst & Young in 2025. It's been a big year for Austin, and it seems the arrow is only pointing up.

You might've first seen Nick DiGiovanni as a finalist on MasterChef. Or you might've first spotted him as the handsome chef who threw knives on TikTok. But now you likely see him everywhere. He’s one of the biggest food creators on the internet, period. He's got more than 28 million subscribers on YouTube, collabing with huge accounts like MrBeast and Dude Perfect. And while DiGiovanni certainly dabbles in stunt food and YouTube histrionics, he also puts together snappy, interesting videos where he’ll taste food from all over the world. DiGiovanni’s reach — his recipes and shorter videos on TikTok garnered him 13.5 million followers — makes him one of the most influential voices in all of the culinary world. And while his content definitely learns hard toward the light and bubbly — definitely more YouTuber than Bourdain — it's led him to become one of the premier voices in the food space.

DiGiovanni is hardly just a chef. You've likely seen his line of seasonings, Osmo, all over your FYP (or in Walmart) and his cookbook on the New York Times bestseller list. And being perhaps the biggest food YouTuber is a business unto itself — Forbes estimates he’ll earn $10 million in 2025 alone.

MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, 27, has scaled the heights of YouTube success to become the most-subscribed creator in the world — but he's not without his controversies. Donaldson's gameshow-style content, which often involves competitors being rewarded life-changing sums of money for completing endurance challenges, led to a Prime Video show in 2024 called Beast Games that quickly became the streamer's most-watched unscripted show. It's since been renewed for two more seasons, despite a class action lawsuit alleging mismanagement (Donaldson has said the claims were "blown out of proportion.")

With an estimated $85 million in earnings as of June, MrBeast's massive platform has allowed him to branch out into other areas, too, creating a chocolate empire in Feastables (Mashable’s Tim Marcin called it "pretty good!") that turned a $20 million profit last year. Elsewhere, Donaldson, alongside fellow YouTubers Logan Paul and KSI, co-owns snack kit company Lunchly, a product that came into question for its health benefits. His YouTube numbers continue to surge upwards, with more than 439 million subscribers at the time of writing.