Meet America's 5 richest self-made female billionaires in tech

Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei and Epic Systems founder Judy Faulkner lead America's five richest self-made women in technology, whose combined fortunes total $44.4 billion.

According to Forbes' 2026 ranking of America's Richest Self-Made Women, published June 3, the U.S. has a record 43 self-made women billionaires, with a combined net worth of $166.3 billion. Nearly half made their fortunes in technology, benefiting from the growth of artificial intelligence, software and computing infrastructure.

The five richest women in the sector are Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei, Epic Systems founder Judy Faulkner, SHI International CEO Thai Lee, Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal and Marvell Technology cofounder Weili Dai.

Forbes calculated the rankings using stock prices as of June 1, 2026, and estimates of privately held company valuations. Only women with fortunes of at least $1 billion qualified for this year's list.

1. Daniela Amodei

Amodei, 38, is the cofounder and president of Anthropic, the U.S. artificial intelligence company behind Claude chatbot. With an estimated fortune of $15.5 billion, she ranks as America's richest self-made woman in technology and second overall, behind Diane Hendricks, cofounder of building materials distributor ABC Supply.

Her wealth surged nearly 13-fold from $1.2 billion a year earlier, lifting her from 28th to second place in Forbes' overall ranking.

Unlike many Silicon Valley technology founders, Amodei has no computer science degree. She studied English literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before joining payments startup Stripe in 2013 as a founding recruiter. At Stripe, she worked across recruitment, operations and risk management, gaining experience alongside software engineers despite lacking a technical background.

In a May interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business, Amodei explained that working with engineers and growing up alongside her physicist brother Dario helped her feel comfortable in the technology industry.

She joined OpenAI in 2018, eventually taking on senior management responsibilities, including safety and policy. In December 2020, she and Dario left OpenAI with five colleagues. The group founded Anthropic in 2021, aiming to develop increasingly powerful AI systems while emphasizing safety and reliability. Dario became CEO, focusing on research and technical development, while Daniela took responsibility for building the organization and recruiting its leadership.

Anthropic's rapid expansion has made the siblings billionaires. In May 2026, the company raised $65 billion in funding at a valuation of $965 billion, becoming one of the world's most valuable privately held companies.

Amodei and her fellow cofounders have also announced plans to eventually donate 80% of their wealth.

2. Judy Faulkner

Faulkner, 83, has an estimated fortune of $9.6 billion, placing her third among America's richest self-made women overall. She built her wealth by developing software that helps hospitals manage medical records, turning a small startup in Wisconsin into one of America's leading healthcare technology companies.

In 1979, she founded the company that became Epic Systems in a basement in Madison, Wisconsin, with approximately $70,000 raised from family members and other investors. She personally wrote its original software.

Her entry into healthcare technology began when physicians asked her to develop a computer system capable of tracking patient information over time. "I was young, I didn’t know it was hard," Faulkner recalled in a 2025 interview with BBC World Service's Business Daily. "So I said sure, and I figured it out."

The project helped lay the foundation for Epic, whose software is now used by major U.S. medical institutions, including Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic. Unlike many technology startups, Epic has never accepted venture capital or acquired another company, choosing instead to remain privately owned and develop its technology internally.

In the BBC interview, Faulkner also recalled how a patient's death after medical records were unavailable during an emergency reinforced her determination to improve information sharing between healthcare providers. Epic has since expanded into AI-powered medical documentation and patient care tools. Its software supports the medical records of more than 250 million patients. The company generated $6.7 billion in sales in 2025, and Faulkner owns an estimated 42% stake.

She has pledged to donate 99% of her assets to philanthropy, primarily supporting healthcare, education and basic human needs.

3. Thai Lee

Lee, 67, is the CEO of SHI International, a technology services provider that grew from a small software reseller into one of America's largest women-owned businesses. With an estimated fortune of $8 billion, she ranks fourth overall among America's richest self-made women, up from fifth in 2025.

Born in Bangkok, Thailand, to South Korean parents, Lee grew up in South Korea before moving to the U.S. as a teenager. She studied biology and economics at Amherst College before becoming the first Korean woman to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1985.

Before entering the technology industry, she worked at Procter & Gamble and American Express. In 1989, Lee and her then-husband, Leo KoGuan, purchased a small software reseller for less than $1 million and developed it into SHI International.

Under her leadership, SHI expanded into a global IT provider, supplying software, hardware and technology services to major corporations including Boeing and AT&T. The company now generates approximately $16 billion in gross annual sales and serves around 17,000 customers. Lee owns 60% of the business, while her former husband holds the remaining 40%.

Despite building a multibillion-dollar enterprise, Lee has maintained a relatively low public profile and a management philosophy emphasizing employees and customer relationships. She has described how Buddhist teachings helped her manage expectations, uncertainty and professional challenges. In a 2025 Forbes interview, Lee also expressed concern about the speed of AI development and its potential to disrupt businesses, urging entrepreneurs to adapt while managing financial risks.

4. Jayshree Ullal

Ullal, 65, is the CEO and chairperson of Arista Networks, a major U.S. supplier of networking equipment used by cloud computing companies and AI data centers. Her estimated fortune of $6.8 billion places her seventh among America's richest self-made women overall.

Born in London and raised in New Delhi, India, she moved to the U.S. for higher education, earning an electrical engineering degree from San Francisco State University and a master's degree in engineering management from Santa Clara University.

She began her career at Fairchild Semiconductor before joining AMD and later Cisco Systems, where she rose to senior vice president, overseeing a business generating approximately $10 billion.

Her rise through Silicon Valley was not without setbacks. In a 2025 interview with Arm CEO Rene Haas, Ullal recalled being laid off from Fairchild after declining to relocate for work, an experience she described as humiliating. The setback influenced her approach to managing employees. She later joined AMD, where she moved beyond engineering into product planning and business development.

In 2008, she left a senior position at Cisco to become CEO of Arista, then a startup with fewer than 50 employees and no revenue. She helped transform Arista into a major supplier of high-performance networking technology, connecting servers and processors used in large-scale cloud computing and AI systems.

Arista went public in June 2014 and subsequently grew into a company with a market valuation exceeding $100 billion, according to Arm's profile of Ullal. It generates more than $9 billion in annual revenue, while Ullal owns an estimated 2% stake.

5. Weili Dai

Dai, 64, is the Chinese-born cofounder of Marvell Technology, a U.S. semiconductor company whose chips are used in data storage, networking and computing infrastructure. With an estimated fortune of $4.7 billion, she ranks 13th among America's richest self-made women overall.

Born in Shanghai, China, Dai played competitive basketball before moving to the U.S. at 17. She arrived with limited English proficiency but went on to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she met her future husband, engineer Sehat Sutardja.

In a 2021 interview with Authority Magazine, Dai recalled growing up with a strong interest in mathematics, science and sports. She said the idea of starting their own technology company emerged during a conversation at their kitchen table, when she encouraged her husband to gain more experience before launching a business.

In 1995, they established Marvell with Sutardja's brother, Pantas, using approximately $350,000 in family funding. The company initially developed chips for computer hard drives before expanding into networking and communications technology.

While her husband focused on chip engineering, Dai helped shape Marvell's business strategy and became its public face, according to a 2013 Los Angeles Times profile. She became chief operating officer in 2006, the same year Marvell acquired Intel's mobile phone chip business for $600 million, marking a major expansion just 11 years after its founding.

Dai and her husband left their executive positions in 2016 following an internal accounting investigation that found no fraud. She subsequently pursued new technology ventures, including AI company MeetKai and Singapore-based semiconductor packaging company Silicon Box.