Michelle Buelow is the CEO and founder of Bella Tunno, a boutique teething-toy maker that booked nearly $5 million in revenue last year with clients like Target and Nordstrom. But she’s not really in it for the money. In fact, her real passion is to feed hungry children. Since 2014, Bella Tunno’s buy one, give one model has helped supply at least one free meal to a hungry child with every product sold. That amounts to 6.6 million meals so far; her current goal is 10 million. Food insecurity in children is important to her because it’s a root cause for mental health problems and addiction later in life. Buelow’s brother died from a drug overdose in 2003, and she wants to help other families avoid that fate. “Children born into food insecurity can be linked to adults with addictive behaviors,” she says, adding that one in six children in the U.S. worry about the source of their next meal. The pandemic has only made things worse: 118 million more people were in food-insecure situations in 2020 versus 2019. That, she adds, “just makes us on fire for our mission.”--Diana Ransom

Every battery has an environmental impact. But what Catherine Von Burg wanted to produce when she founded SimpliPhi Power in 2010 was a lithium battery with the least impact possible. “Lithium is skimmed off the surface of the earth, so even the mining process is less invasive to the environment than hard coal,” she says. But Von Burg, SimpliPhi’s CEO, also eschews cobalt—a raw earth element used predominantly in lithium ion batteries—which is toxic and flammable and requires tunneling to mine, sometimes relying on child labor. Her lithium ion battery is made of nonhazardous lithium ferro phosphate and uses a proprietary cell and battery architecture, making it a safe and efficient energy storage system for renewable sources of power. SimpliPhi started by catering to the movie industry and the Department of Defense, both of which need portable systems in remote environments to provide energy off-grid. But these days many of its customers are California homeowners who want a backup power supply for planned power outages or unexpected shutdowns so they can save their food and keep their modems going. During the pandemic, when children were schooling at home, many people bought SimpliPhi batteries to save on energy bills since daytime use rates are too high. Von Burg made a decision early on to spurn VC funding. That choice has paid off: SimpliPhi’s revenue has grown by more than 40 percent during the pandemic. Since its founding, the company has donated 1 percent of its annual revenue to people and communities that need access to energy.--Hannah Wallace

Christina Carbonell grew up admiring inclusive, colorful brands like Benetton, and learned the ropes of e-commerce in the marketing department of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com. So, although the pandemic blindsided her, she instinctively knew that Primary, the cult kids clothing brand she co-founded with Galyn Bernard in 2015, was well prepared. “We did recognize that value would be more important than ever during Covid-19,” says Carbonell. The company ran a 50 percent-off-essentials sale from April through July 2020, and though the sale hurt margins in the short term, customers remained fiercely loyal, making 2020 a very good year for Primary. “We delivered $74 million in gross revenue, up 40 percent versus the prior year,” Carbonell says proudly, with about two-thirds of sales coming from repeat customers. Carbonell credits Primary’s guiding philosophy—making affordable, comfortable, high-quality essentials for every kid—with helping it thrive in difficult times. “All those things that were core to our mission were more relevant than ever once Covid started,” she says. Products that have always been strong performers, like pajamas and sweats, have done especially well. Pajamas, for example, comprised almost one-fifth of Primary’s kid clothing sales last fall and showed the highest growth rate of any category, followed by masks. Another win: scoring a coveted wholesale partnership with buybuy BABY, launching next March.--Jill Krasny

For Mandy Price and Star Carter, 2020 marked a turning point for them and Kanarys, a diversity, equity, and inclusion data and analytics company they co-founded with Bennie King in 2018. In May 2020, after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, interest in Kanarys skyrocketed, as more companies finally attempted to address systemic racism in the workplace. Kanarys’s bookings increased 11x over the third quarter of 2020, and the company raised $4.6 million from investors such as Rise of the Rest fund, Morgan Stanley, Rackhouse Ventures, Segal Ventures, and Zeal Capital Partners. “It’s a silver lining to see these companies open their ears and their hearts, and being more willing to talk about racial equity and talk about DEI and the importance of it,” says Carter, whose company relies on benchmarking diversity data and assessing clients’ performance in relation to industry peers. “For me, the ultimate goal is simple: to really put everybody on the same playing field; to get rid of these inequities and to have it be a true meritocracy. We know as underrepresented individuals in the corporate workplace that we can do something to make changes here.”--Diana Ransom

The daughter of immigrants from China and Sri Lanka, Sashee Chandran grew up steeped in the ritual of making tea. But the slow process of brewing loose-leaf tea didn’t fit into her Silicon Valley tech schedule as a digital marketer at eBay. After tinkering in her kitchen, she finely ground and compressed the leaves into a product that simply dissolves in water—no tea bags or strainers required. “Tea is thousands of years old, but the last true invention in this category was when the tea bag was invented,” Chandran says. That was around 1908. Tea Drops became a hit at farmers markets, so she quit her job in 2015 to pursue the project full time. Soon after, retailers like Anthropologie and Nordstrom began stocking the product. Fast-forward five years and Tea Drops, the company, has raised $8.4 million to date and is on track to pull in eight figures in revenue in 2021. While about 75 percent of Tea Drops’ sales come via e-commerce, the product is on shelves in 2,000 retailers nationwide, including Whole Foods and Costco. And in July, Chandran obtained a patent for her invention. “Persistence and grit alone gets you pretty far,” she says. “For someone with no technical or chemistry background, it was just sheer will to push that [patent] through.” Tea Drops initially responded to the pandemic by going into survival mode: Chandran let go of some staff, everyone on the team took a salary cut of at least 20 percent, and the company renegotiated terms around purchase orders with vendors. But then as the team frantically researched consumers’ tea buying habits in early 2020, they discovered a gap in the market that Tea Drops could fill: boba bubble tea. About a month later in May 2020, the company’s boba kits--complete with tea drops, sweetened condensed milk packets, and boba pearls--launched. Tea Drops sold millions of dollars from that “hero” product and wound up exceeding revenue expectations for 2020. --Lindsay Blakely