Sallie Krawcheck isn’t your average financial executive. She’s been called “the most powerful woman on Wall Street” and also—by some less imaginative peers—“too bold, too opinionated, too female.” She took all of it, flipped the script, and built her own empire: Ellevest, a financial platform tailored specifically to women.
Because while Wall Street was busy handing out the same cookie-cutter advice, Krawcheck asked the uncomfortable question: Why are women still underinvested in 2025?
The answer, she found, was decades of systemic exclusion—and a financial system never designed with women’s lives in mind. Longer lifespans. Gender pay gaps. Career breaks for caregiving. All real. All ignored.
So, in 2016, after leading Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and Smith Barney, Sallie launched Ellevest—not as a pinkwashed budgeting tool—but as a full-stack investing platform built around real women’s realities. Think: goal-based investing, career coaching, money courses, and portfolios that account for gender-based salary curves.
Today, Ellevest manages over $1.5 billion in assets, has raised more than $100 million in funding, and is one of the few fintech startups thriving in a volatile post-COVID market. Why? Because women trust it—and more importantly, they see themselves in it.
Krawcheck didn’t just build a company. She built a movement.
From day one, Ellevest’s message was clear: This isn’t about getting better at money. It’s about changing money itself. The platform offers everything from IRAs to ESG investing to workshops on salary negotiation—all while pushing for financial inclusion with content that doesn’t assume women are clueless, but recognizes they’ve been left out of the conversation for too long.
In a recent interview, Krawcheck said: “It’s not that women aren’t risk takers. It’s that they’re smart risk takers. We invest differently. And guess what? That’s a strength.”
Her mission goes beyond markets—it’s political. She uses her platform to call out the wealth gap, rally for parental leave, and demand that financial institutions disclose diversity data. She’s not lobbying. She’s leading. Loudly.
And she’s not doing it alone. Ellevest’s team is 75% women and over 50% people of color. It’s not a tokenized workplace—it’s a proof of concept. A world where money, power, and leadership look a whole lot different.
At a time when only 19% of investment advisors in the U.S. are women, Sallie Krawcheck isn’t trying to fit into the boys’ club. She’s burning it down—boardroom by boardroom, app by app.
Because for her, it’s simple: when women have money, they have power. And she’s making damn sure they get both.
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