Komal Ahmad

Founder & CEO, Copia

San Francisco

The reasonable woman adapts herself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable woman. Komal Ahmad is an unreasonable woman.

As the founder and CEO of Copia, Komal is working to solve the world’s dumbest problem by eradicating hunger while reducing food waste at scale. Using Copia's web or mobile app, businesses and event organizers request pickups of their excess food, and Copia’s fleet of professional Food Heroes deliver it to veterans agencies, after school programs, homeless shelters and other nonprofits serving the hungry. Copia is rated among the top 3 women-led startups in the U.S. and among the top 8 startups graduating from Y Combinator.

Komal has led Copia in recovering over 830,000 pounds of food and is now on her way to feeding 1 million people this year with high-quality food that would have otherwise been wasted. She was recently awarded the University of California's "30 Under 30" Global Food Changemaker, 2016 Social Entrepreneur of the Year, and named by Fast Company as one of the Most Creative People in Business and by Toyota as Toyota's Mother of Invention. Komal is also the recipient of the Nelson Mandela Humanitarian Award.