Cover Immigrants have founded or co-founded 59% of America's 775 privately held start-ups valued at US$1 billion or more, according to a June report by Forbes. (Photo: Getty)
Immigrants have founded or co-founded 59% of America's 775 privately held start-ups valued at US$1 billion or more, according to a June report by Forbes. (Photo: Getty)
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From data architecture to automated engineering, these Asian-American executives are shaping the start-ups at the core of the enterprise software ecosystem
Asian-Americans make up a substantial share of Silicon Valley's technical workforce but have historically been underrepresented in executive and venture leadership, a pattern often described as the bamboo ceiling.
A group of founders of Asian heritage, particularly from East Asian and South Asian backgrounds, now lead several of the highest-valued private technology companies in the United States. (Some of these founders were raised in parts of Asia or around the world, but through the process of building their careers, gained US citizenship; we've counted them as Asian-American.) Their companies focus on enterprise infrastructure—data platforms, financial software, developer tools, search, and clinical networks—rather than consumer applications.
Here are seven companies, ordered by reported private market valuation, led by Asian-Americans.
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1. Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO; Reynold Xin, co-founder and chief architect, Databricks
Valuation: US$134 billion
Databricks sells data and analytics software to large enterprises dealing with AI. Its co-founders Ghodsi and Xin developed the "lakehouse" architecture, which combines the structured querying of a data warehouse with the storage flexibility of a data lake. The system allows companies to store, govern, and train machine learning models on internal data within their own environments rather than transferring it to external services. The company counts a majority of the Fortune 500 among its customers and has become a central piece of corporate AI infrastructure, competing directly with Snowflake and the major cloud providers.
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2. Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and CTO; Gene Lee, co-founder, Ramp
Valuation: US$44 billion
Founded in 2019, Ramp is best known for offering corporate cards and expense management software. Following a US$750 million funding round in June, the company added automation tools that categorise transactions, flag policy violations, and reconcile receipts against company ledgers. Reported use cases include tracking AI compute costs across departments. Ramp competes with other fintech start-ups like Brex and Mercury, as well as incumbent corporate card issuers like American Express.
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3. Scott Wu, co-founder and CEO; Steven Hao, co-founder and CTO, Cognition AI
Valuation: US$26 billion
Wu and Hao created Devin, an AI agent designed to perform software engineering tasks within a sandboxed environment, including planning, writing code, running tests, and debugging. In 2025, Cognition acquired the Windsurf developer platform and integrated it into its product line. The company increasingly competes with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Anthropic's coding tools as enterprises evaluate where AI agents fit into software development workflows.
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4. Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO, Perplexity
Valuation: US$20 billion
Perplexity is an AI search product that returns conversational answers with inline citations to source websites, rather than a ranked list of links. Like other AI search start-ups, Perplexity's revenue comes from consumer subscriptions and enterprise tiers. Notably, the company has signed licensing agreements with publishers including Time and Der Spiegel to address concerns about content use, and faces ongoing legal disputes from other media organizations including the New York Times and Dow Jones over scraping practices.
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5. Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO, Replit
Valuation: US$9 billion
Replit is a browser-based development environment that removes the need for local installation and configuration. After a US$400 million funding round, the company added AI agents that can build, test, and deploy applications. Users include individual developers and corporate engineering teams. Replit has reported tens of millions of registered users globally, with significant uptake in education and among non-professional developers building internal tools, and has expanded its enterprise offering to compete with established cloud development services.
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6. Arvind Jain, co-founder and CEO, Glean
Valuation: US$7.2 billion
Glean is an enterprise search product that indexes internal company applications—email, chat, document storage, and customer relationship systems—and returns results filtered by each user's access permissions. The company has reported approximately US$300 million in annual recurring revenue. As for prior experience with start-ups, Jain previously co-founded Rubrik, a data security company that went public in 2024, and built Glean to address information retrieval problems he observed during his earlier career as a distinguished engineer at Google.
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7. April Koh, co-founder and CEO, Spring Health
Valuation: US$3.3 billion
Spring Health is an employer-sponsored mental health benefits platform. Its software matches employees to therapists and treatment plans based on clinical assessments and tracks recovery outcomes over time. Customers are typically large employers who offer the service as part of their health benefits package. The company has reported contracts with hundreds of employers covering several million covered lives, and publishes outcomes data in peer-reviewed journals as part of its clinical validation strategy.
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Cat Wang is an editor at Tatler Asia based in Hong Kong, where she covers business, wealth, innovation, and impact. Previously, she was a Forbes Asia reporter and assistant editor of the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, spotlighting startups and small companies on the rise across the Asia-Pacific. She began her career as a trainee reporter at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. Born in New York City, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a B.A. in political science.
