In 2016, Nicole Carter was spending hours on stock-photo sites, struggling to find images that would resonate with the people her marketing firm was targeting. “I decided, why not contribute to the solution?” she says. She started developing Diversity Photos with her husband, Gerald Carter, and their co-founder, Althea Lawton-Thompson, and launched the following year. The Atlanta-based company works with photographers to provide stock images that represent people of various races, ethnicities, religions, sexualities, sizes, and disabilities. Carter and her co-founders are helping Adobe Stock, Getty Images, and Offset (the premium arm of Shutterstock) make their offerings more diverse. Carter declined to share a revenue figure, but she said that sales have more than doubled in the past year, and Diversity Photos is now profitable. This fall, the company plans to add more photographers to its stable, and is eyeing expansion into video content. --Sophie Downes

Front has been a buzzy company for years now. Silicon Valley’s favorite next-generation version of email, the San Francisco-based startup pulls all your favorite messaging systems into a single inbox. The past year has seen co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin finally turn that buzz into tangible growth. Her startup’s Series B round of $66 million (total funding now: almost $80 million) let Front make its first acquisition last October, a calendar-scheduling platform called Meetingbird. “We raised way more money than we needed,” Collin says. “We were actually not looking to acquire a company. But this company built on top of Front to make it available to our users.” Three months later, Front completely redesigned, repriced, and relaunched its app from scratch, leading to a boost in paying customers: 5,200 companies now, up from 4,500 at the beginning of the year. Front has also opened a new Paris office--a foreshadowing of Collin’s plans for international expansion, and a comfort zone for the native Parisian. --Cameron Albert-Deitch

Felicia Curcuru knew early on that starting her own company was never a question of if, but of when. After honing her business chops with stints at McKinsey and FundersClub, an online venture capital firm, she co-founded Binti in 2014. The San Francisco company provides software tools that help social workers and government agencies evaluate families going through an adoption process. Instead of filling out huge stacks of paper forms, families can use Binti to submit their applications online, making it easier for social workers to review them. Last year, Binti began partnerships with agencies outside of California, where it is up and running in 36 out of 58 counties. Now 78 agencies across 12 states use the tools. Since 2016, Binti has helped more than 15,000 families win approval to foster or adopt a child. Curcuru says: “Our mission is to help every child have a family.” --Guadalupe Gonzalez

After a career in startups and the music industry—one job was helping Prince secure his digital rights—Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins saw a loved one go through a complex and harrowing experience after missing a court date. He had bounty-hunters after him mainly because he didn’t know who to call to reschedule his appearance. Ellis-Lamkins teamed up with longtime lawyer Diana Frappier to remedy a flawed system that saw nonviolent offenders pay fines and await trial behind bars because they couldn’t afford bail or a lawyer. They called it Promise; its pitch was to take over parts of the local criminal-justice apparatus and provide individuals with an app and automated check-in process that keeps track of court dates and paperwork. Before even graduating from startup incubator Y Combinator in 2018, this audacious little company had raised $3 million in funding from the likes of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation and First Round Capital. Recently it has been working with Alameda County in California, as well as localities in Kentucky and North Dakota, and appearance rates--essentially, showing up when you’re supposed to in court--have increased by nearly 25 percent. “The system is fundamentally broken based on race and class,” Ellis-Lamkins says. She’s aiming to even the field, and help fix a system that penalizes those without means. --Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

Emily Feistritzer, a 78-year-old former nun, learned as far back as the 1970s that she didn’t like traditional teaching methods, like talking at students as if she were the expert, and organizing learning around planned lessons. A more collaborative approach, she came to believe, was far better. She founded two education foundations that sought to conduct and distribute the most up-to-date research in the field, and, in 2011, she founded Teach-Now, which trains and certifies teachers online. “We focus on preparing tomorrow's teachers for tomorrow's learning world,” she says. “so that the program will never be old.” This year the Washington, D.C.-based Teach-Now started offering master's certifications targeted at programs that are growing quickly, such as early childhood, multilingual, and special needs education. Since its founding, Teach-Now has enrolled 4,000 aspiring teachers in 125 countries. “I owe everything to my mother,” says Feistritzer. But of course she does: “She was a teacher.” --Anna Meyer