American Startups with Immigrant Founders
From NatWiki
We're trying to build a list of American startups where at least one founder was a foreign-born immigrant or visitor on a non-immigrant visa when the company started.
Employee numbers for the companies will help us show an impressive total number of jobs created by non-American entrepreneurs.
If you have any other examples, please add them here or tweet them to @natfriedman.
For more information about the startup visa movement please go to StartupVisa.com or this blog post, or visit the original essay from Paul Graham.
| Company | Foreign Founder(s) | Employees |
|---|---|---|
| StumbleUpon | Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith (Canada) | |
| Frugalytics | Miron Lulic (Canada) | |
| Astir Analytics | Kishore Ganji(India) | 150 |
| Bank of America | Amadeo Peter Giannini (Italy) | 300,000 |
| Sun Microsystems | Andy Bechtolsheim (Germany) and Vinod Khosla (India) | 33,350 (2008) |
| Flickr | Caterina Fake / Stewart Butterfield (Canada) | |
| Fotki | Dmitri Don / Katrin Lilleoks (Estonia) | |
| eLance.com | Srinivas Anumolu (India) | |
| Hotmail | Sabeer Bhatia (India) | |
| hi5 | Ramu Yalamanchi (India) | |
| Yahoo | Jerry Yang (Taiwan) | 15000 |
| Red Hat | Bob Young (Canada) | |
| Powerset | Lorenzo Thione (Italy) | 70 |
| eBay | Pierre Omidyar (France) | 16,200 (December 2008) |
| Sergey Brin (Russia) | 19,665 (Sept 30 2009) | |
| Computer Associates | Charles Wang (China) | 13,200 |
| PayPal | Max Levchin (Ukraine), Elon Musk (South Africa) | |
| Akamai | Preetish Nijhawan (India) | 1578 |
| Nvidia | Jen-Hsun Huang (Taiwan) | |
| Funambol | Fabrizio Capobianco (Italy) | 40 |
| reCaptcha | Luis von Ahn (Guatemala) | |
| doubleTwist | Jon Lech (Norway) | |
| Ximian | Miguel de Icaza (Mexico) | |
| Eazel, Flock, Tapulous | Bart Decrem (Belgium) | |
| Acquia | Dries Buytaert (Belgium) | |
| Mindjet | Michael and Bettina Jetter (Germany) | 200 (2008) |
| Synopsys | Aart de Geus (Holland) | 5,500 |
| Seesmic | Loic Le Meur (France) | |
| Borland | Philippe Kahn (France) | |
| Cluster File Systems | Peter Braam (The Netherlands) | |
| Wildfire | Alain Chuard (Switzerland) & Victoria Ransom (New Zealand) | |
| db4objects | Christof Wittig (Germany) | |
| Chegg.com | Osman Rashid (Pakistan) | |
| Orologic | Yannis Viniotis | |
| Be.com | Jean-Louis Gassee (France) | |
| Openwave.com | Alain Rossmann (France) | |
| Syncplicity | Ondrej Hrebicek (Czech Republic) | |
| Data Dynamics | Ferhat Buyukkokten (Turkey), Issam Elbaytam (Palestine) | 27 |
| Marvell | Sehat Sutardja (Indonesia), Weili Dai, Pantas Sutardja (Indonesia) | 5,000 |
| DotSpots | Matt Mastracci (Canada) | |
| Friendster | Jonathan Abrams (Canada) | |
| Jajah | Roman Scharf (Austria), Daniel Mattes (Austria) | 110 |
| Shockley Transistor Company | William Shockley (United Kingdom) | |
| Fairchild Semiconductor International | Victor Grinich (Croatia), Jean Hoerni (Switzerland), Eugene Kleiner (Austria) | |
| Zoho Corp | Sridhar Vembu (India) | |
| SneakerLabs, Inc | Manu Kumar (India) | 20 |
| iMeet, Inc./Netspoke, Inc. | Manu Kumar (India) | 80 |
| Octane Software | Tim Guleri (India), Kira Makagon (Russia) | 220 |
| Refocus Imaging, Inc. | Ren Ng (Australia) | |
| DNAnexus, Inc. | Andreas Sundquist (Sweden) | |
| TopTier (acq. by SAP), Better Place. | Shai Agassi (Israel) | |
| StreamBase Systems | Eddie Galvez (Chile), Ugur Cetintemel (Turkey), Mitch Cherniack (Canada) | |
| BEA Systems (acquired by Oracle) | Alfred Chuang (China) | |
| Social Gaming Network, Inc.(SGN) | Shervin Pishevar (Iran) | 100 |
| Yola | Vinny Lingham (South Africa) | 35 |
| mig 33 | Steven Goh (Australia) | 100 |
| TheFind | Siva Kumar/Nanda Kishore/Shashikant Khandelwal (India) | 32 |
| Vertica Systems | Mitch Cherniack (Canada) | |
| Saama Technologies | Suresh Katta (India) | |
| Kosmix Corp. | Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan (India) | 70 |
| 1and99.com | Enrique Shadah (Venezuela) | |
| ComponentOne | Gustavo Eydelsteyn (Argentina) and Sunny Wong (Hong Kong) | 100 |
| Funji.me | Shinyoung Park (Korea) | 3 |
| Information Nexus | Matt Perez (Cuba) and Yair Daon (Israel) | 5 |
| Scheduling.com | Matt Perez (Cuba) and Paul Krug (Germany) | 100 |
| Nearsoft, Inc | Matt Perez (Cuba) and Roberto Martinez (Mexico) | 50 |
| Sycamore Networks, Inc. | Gururaj Deshpande (India) | Not Known |
| SlideShare | Rashmi Sinha (India) | Not Known |
