“For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer”: 20 Startups Co-founded by Couples

Is it hard to run a tech business with your romantic partner? I would say, “Nobody knows until they’ve tried,” and these founders are definitely aware of all the ups and downs that arise during this tough journey of building a company. Here are some inspiring stories to share with your partner if you are thinking about going into business together!

1. Eventbrite, Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz

Kevin and Julia Hartz of Eventbrite believe that having a compatible relationship with a co-founder is paramount. They met at a friend’s wedding while Julia was working for MTV (on “Jackass”) and Kevin was founding Xoom. Eventbrite, one of the world’s most used event management and ticketing platforms, was founded by Julia and Kevin Hartz in 2016, just before the couple got married. Eventbrite develops an online platform that lets users find and create events, it has raised a total funding of $349M over 11 rounds. The company has become a global leader in the industry, with over 1 million events hosted on the platform every year.

2. VMware, Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum

Google board member Diane Greene is married to Mendel Rosenblum. The couple met while attending the University of California, Berkeley, when Rosenblum gave Greene a ride on his motorcycle. They co-founded VMWare, along with three other people in 1998. VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that help complex digital infrastructure. The company accelerates digital transformation by enabling unprecedented freedom and flexibility in how its customers build and evolve IT environments. In May 2022, Broadcom Inc. announced an agreement to acquire VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at $61 billion.

3. SlideShare, Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle

Rashmi Sinha, the CEO and co-founder of SlideShare was named amongst the world’s Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by FastCompany. Jonathan Boutelle was the CTO of SlideShare and came up with the initial idea behind the website. College buddies Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle launched the platform in 2006, and since then more than 9 million presentations have been uploaded to SlideShare, helping professionals connect through content. LinkedIn acquired SlideShare for over $100 million in 2012. She also is guiding and growing around 500 start-ups as an advisor.

4. CodeSee, Josh Leven and Shanea Leven

They met thanks to an online dating app. Shanea says: “Spouses and startups can co-exist beautifully, as long as the partners take steps to minimize complications and maximize the health of their personal and professional relationships”. CodeSee is a developer of a cloud-based data visualization software designed to help everyone master the understanding of code. The company’s software delivers the tools to continuously understand the codebase at every step of the development process, enabling developers and development teams to understand how all of the code and functionality map to each other.

5. Houzz, Adi Tatarko & Alon Cohen

The two met by chance on a 16-hour bus ride across Thailand, where both were vacationing after their year of military service in Israel. The couple launched the website after they had trouble finding ideas for remodeling their house. Launched in 2009, Houzz enables home professionals to post portfolios of their work so consumers are able to find professionals who can help them bring their home improvement and interior design visions to life. By March 2021, the company reportedly had 2.7 million professionals in its professional services database.

6. Clearco (ex-Clearbanc), Andrew D’Souza and Michele Romanow

Clearco, formerly known as Clearbanc, was founded in 2015 by Andrew D’Souzaand and Michele Romanow. The two initially met at an event in San Francisco and followed up with a friendly informational interview at a Mexican restaurant. Clearco is a suite of performance financing products and services tailor-made for founders in all stages of their journey. A pay-as-you-grow pioneer and e-commerce investor, Clearco’s mission is to remove the barriers between brilliant ideas and brilliant businesses. Clearco has raised a total of $698.6M in funding over 6 rounds.

7. Talkspace, Roni Frank and Oren Frank

Roni and her husband Oren co-founded Talkspace in 2012 while she was pursuing her Master’s Degree in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. The company was conceived after a transformative experience in couples therapy that saved their marriage. As of March 31, 2022, over 2 million people have used Talkspace, and 76.5 million lives were covered for Talkspace through insurance and employee assistance programs. The total funding amount is $413.7M, the company went public in 2021.

8. NEXT Trucking, Lidia Yan and Elton Chung

Founded in 2015, Next Trucking is essentially an online marketplace that helps connect shippers — companies and distributors who dispatch cargo en masse — with truckers and truck companies. The company’s platform uses predictive load offering technology and a trucker-centric approach that addresses the needs and preferences of drivers and also provides real-time updates to shippers.

9. Grabr, Daria Rebenok and Artem Fedyaev

Daria Rebenok and Artem Fedyaev were named to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for their innovative startup. Grabr, founded in March 2015 is a global community marketplace that allows people to get unique or hard-to-find items from around the world by connecting them with travellers headed their way. Since 2016, Grabr travellers have earned more than $5 million USD for deliveries in 75 countries and counting.

10. Anomalie, Leslie Voorhees and Calley Means

Leslie Voorhees and Calley Means co-founded Anomalie, a wedding dress customization startup. Instead of vacationing to Bora Bora the day after their wedding, the newlywed founders hopped on a plane to China, where Leslie stayed for a couple of months to set up the supply chain for Anomalie. The company’s dresses are made while collaborating with designers to provide consultation and designing of gowns with fabric material, laces, silhouette and measurements confirmed by brides, thereby enabling brides to buy wedding gowns tailored to their imagination at affordable prices. David’s Bridal (the US clothier that specializes in wedding dresses) acquired the team and technological assets of Anomalie in 2022.

11. Honeyfund, Sara Margulis and Josh Margulis

Sara, working with her husband Josh, created Honeyfund in 2005 as a honeymoon registry page, where friends and family could help contribute to their dream trip to Fiji. They eventually extended the service so that all couples could experience an unforgettable honeymoon. Today, Honeyfund is the no. 1 online wedding registry. The platform has allowed 6 million givers to fund more than $640 million in gifts for more than one million couples.

12. Beau, Kyril Kulikov and Mila Dayan

Beau, founded by Mila Dayan, Kyril Kulikov and Kirill Zakharov in 2021, is a no-code tool for businesses to onboard and automate interactions with their clients. Customers use the software to collect submissions, payments, send messages and more. Mila and Kyril are 2021 YC alumni (with Beau), but this is not their first mutual venture. They have previously founded Moderne, the tool that helps creative teams to save hours or even days on research and allows them to collaborate up to 3x faster. This story is one more proof that it’s absolutely possible to build a startup alongside the relationships.

13. LiSA, Philippe Frères and Sophie Frères

Philippe and Sophie Frères cofounded Dusseldorf-based retail tech company, LiSA, in 2018. The couple, both being 38 at that moment, have been together for 16 years. LiSA’s platform brings interactive and shoppable live streams, videos, and short stories to the websites of brands, retailers, marketplaces, and publishers to create a fun and authentic shopping experience that boosts engagement and conversion with advanced scalability capabilities and user-friendly interface in the sector, thereby enabling retailers and brands to offer live stream shopping events in their online shops to boost audience engagement and social commerce discovery for all users across all platforms.

14. Haus, Helena Price Hambrecht and Woody Hambrecht

Healdsburg-based Haus Apéritifs was founded in 2019 by Helena Price Hambrecht and Woody Hambrecht, a third-generation winemaker. Their beverages have a low-alcohol content “for more hangouts and fewer hangovers.” Haus is the first company to bypass traditional distribution and sell online, directly to the drinker. Haus has raised $4.5 million in funding and sold out so many times they’ve generated waitlists of 3,000+ customers.

15. Pix, Margaret Rimek & Serhii Yezdin

Rimek and Yezdin met at the university, they both have a background in marketing and had worked as digital marketers before Pix. Pix, the world’s first smart animative backpack, was founded in 2016. The company’s backpack provides cartoons and animations along with a USB wire to charge the mobile phone whenever required and facilitates shock and water resistance, enabling people to highlight their personalities and change the digital art easily.

16. Natural Cycles, Dr Elina Berglund Scherwitzl and Dr Raoul Scherwitzl

Former CERN particle physicist Dr Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, and her scientist husband, Dr Raoul Scherwitzl, have run the fertility app Natural Cycles together as co-CEOs since 2013. Natural Cycles has more than 3 million registered users worldwide, $37.5M in investment and 95 employees globally. It’s the first app to be certified as a contraceptive in Europe and cleared by the FDA to be marketed as birth control in the US.

17. BauBax, Hiral Sanghavi and Yoganshi Shah

A collection of nine travel pillows in three months led San Francisco-based Hiral Sanghavi and his wife Yoganshi Shah to their latest venture. Together, on a flight to Mexico for their one-year anniversary, the brain power-packed couple sketched out their first design of the jacket. The BauBax jacket is a multi-purpose jacket intended to keep travelers organized with 15 features that include a built-in neck pillow, koozie drink pocket and iPad pocket, among others. So far, it has raised almost $2 million from almost 11,000 backers on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.

18. Inmagine, Andy and Stephanie Sitt

Andy Sitt and his wife Stephanie Sitt started Inmagine in 2000 when ‘startup’ was still an alien word in most parts of the world. Inmagine Group is one of the few technology companies to have bootstrapped globally from Asia. Boasting an annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, it has been profitable for years. Its website 123RF, which accounts for bulk of the revenue, is said to be the world’s fourth-largest stock image library with 72 million items, drawing 16–18 million visitors a month. In 2020, the company launched its first AI platform, Inmagine Brain.

19. Canva, Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht

Husband and wife Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins are cofounders of design software maker Canva, which has raised a total amount of $572.6M to date. Canva was launched in 2013 by the couple together with Cameron Adams in Sydney, Australia, but was met by investor skepticism due to its location. Defying the doubts, Canva has attracted 60 million monthly users to its freemium software, with 500,000 teams from companies like Intel and Zoom paying for it.The couple have topped the 2022 Australian Financial Review’s Young Rich List with a combined wealth of $16.5 billion from their software company, Canva.

20. Flickr, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake

Stewart Butterfield asked Caterina Fake to start a company with him before he asked her to marry him. Butterfield and Fake, both Web design consultants who had been involved with startups, created their company in 2002, two weeks after they got back from their honeymoon. Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, it was a popular way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp (Flickr parent company) and Flickr on March 20, 2005. The acquisition reportedly cost $22 million to $25 million.

Bonus: YCombinator, Jessica Livingston & Paul Graham

Paul Graham and his then-girlfriend Jessica Livingston created Y Combinator in 2005 together with co-founders Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. They met in 2003 at Paul’s house party in Boston. Having funded about 2000 startups, Y Combinator is now the largest startup accelerator in the world. It has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe and Twitch. Graham and Livingston admit that they treated Y Combinator just like another project and never thought it would grow into this big thing. When asked about combining marriage and business, Paul said that his wife Jessica is Y Combinator’s most powerful weapon.

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