Nicole Carter

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