The influence of Amazon on the startup ecosystem extends far beyond its own operations. Former Amazon employees have leveraged their experience at the e-commerce giant to build some of the most successful technology unicorns—companies valued at over $1 billion—spanning diverse industries from grocery delivery to enterprise software. Their Amazon DNA, characterized by customer obsession, operational excellence, and data-driven decision-making, has proven instrumental in creating transformative businesses. These are some startup unicorns founded by Amazon employees.
Instacart
Founded: 2012
Founder: Apoorva Mehta
Amazon Role: Supply Chain Engineer
Apoorva Mehta founded Instacart in 2012 after working as a supply chain engineer at Amazon. His experience with Amazon’s fulfillment operations proved invaluable when he identified a gap in the online grocery market. The inspiration struck when Mehta, staring at his empty refrigerator in his San Francisco apartment, realized that while consumers could order almost anything online, groceries remained stubbornly offline.
Before Instacart succeeded, Mehta had attempted 20 different startup ideas after leaving Amazon in 2010. His persistence finally paid off when he built the first version of the Instacart app in just three weeks. The company’s breakthrough came when Mehta missed the Y Combinator application deadline but managed to secure a meeting by using his own app to deliver a six-pack of beer to a Y Combinator partner—a creative move that earned him admission to the accelerator’s 2012 batch.
Instacart went public in September 2023 at a $9.9 billion valuation, transforming Mehta into a billionaire with a net worth of approximately $1.3 billion. The company now serves more than 14,000 U.S. cities and has delivered over 900 million orders since its founding.
Flipkart
Founded: 2008
Founders: Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal
Amazon Role: Software engineers
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal had both graduated from IIT Delhi, and had found themselves working at Amazon in Bangalore. At that point, they had an idea — Amazon didn’t yet operate in India, and the duo felt that they could build a similar service in the country. They quit their Amazon jobs and founded Flipkart in 2008. The followed Amazon’s playbook exactly — they started off with books, and slowly added other products. In 2014, Amazon finally began its operations in India, but it was too late — Flipkart by then was already a major player. The two companies slugged it out in India’s bruising e-commerce wars, and just as it seemed that Amazon was gaining the upper hand, Walmart swooped in and acquired Flipkart at a valuation of $21 billion. Both Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal exited Flipkart as billionaires, and Amazon continues to compete with Walmart-owned Flipkart in India’s e-commerce space to this day.
Twilio
Founded: 2008
Founder: Jeffery Lawson
Amazon Role: Product Manager for Amazon Web Services
Jeff Lawson co-founded Twilio in 2008 after spending time as one of the first product managers for Amazon Web Services (AWS). At Amazon, Lawson witnessed firsthand how offering infrastructure as a service could be transformative. “This whole idea that you can offer infrastructure as a service was kind of mind-blowing,” he told Forbes in a 2016 interview.
Lawson’s experience at Amazon profoundly shaped Twilio’s culture and operations. He imported critical practices from Amazon, including the focus on customer-first principles and the practice of writing long-form memos instead of relying on PowerPoint presentations for decision-making. These “write it down” practices became core to Twilio’s operational DNA.
Twilio went public in June 2016 in one of the year’s most successful tech IPOs, with shares surging 92% on the first day of trading. The company provides cloud-based communications infrastructure, enabling developers to embed voice, text, video, and other communications features into their applications through simple API calls. Lawson served as CEO until January 2024, building the company into a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
Quora
Founded: 2009
Founders: Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever
Amazon Role (Cheever): Software Engineer
Charlie Cheever co-founded Quora in June 2009 with fellow Facebook engineer Adam D’Angelo. Before Facebook, Cheever worked at Amazon after graduating from Harvard, where he had developed a database for fellow students to locate their classmates’ dormitories—a project that partially inspired Mark Zuckerberg’s FaceMash.
Quora was created to address a fundamental question: Why isn’t there a place on the internet where questions can be answered by people who actually know the answers? The platform distinguished itself through its commitment to quality, implementing strong moderation policies and attracting high-profile users who provided authoritative responses.
The platform officially launched in June 2010 and quickly became popular among the tech community, eventually achieving mainstream adoption. Quora reached unicorn status and continues to operate as a leading question-and-answer platform, with D’Angelo remaining as CEO. Cheever stepped back from day-to-day operations in 2012 to pursue other ventures, including co-founding Expo, a platform for mobile app development.
ThoughtSpot
Founded: 2012
Founder: Shashank Gupta (co-founder)
Amazon Role: Principal Engineer
Shashank Gupta co-founded ThoughtSpot in 2012 alongside six other co-founders, including Ajeet Singh (CEO). Gupta brought his search experience from both Amazon and Yahoo to help develop ThoughtSpot’s innovative natural language search over data feature, which allows users to query business data using simple search terms rather than complex SQL queries.
At Amazon, Gupta gained deep expertise in building large-scale systems and search infrastructure. He later used his automated data quality experience from Meta (Facebook) to inform ThoughtSpot’s approach to data observability and quality.
ThoughtSpot achieved unicorn status in 2018 when it raised $145 million in Series D funding at a valuation exceeding $1 billion. The company has since raised additional funding, reaching a $4.2 billion valuation. ThoughtSpot’s AI-powered analytics platform enables non-technical users to conduct self-service data analysis, democratizing access to business intelligence across organizations.
PagerDuty
Founded: 2009
Founders: Alex Solomon, Andrew Miklas, and Baskar Puvanathasan
Amazon Role: All three co-founders worked as software engineers at Amazon
PagerDuty was born from the founders’ direct experience with Amazon’s on-call culture. When Amazon shifted from a monolithic code base to a microservices architecture, engineers became responsible not just for writing code, but for deploying, managing, and fixing their systems in production. This meant carrying a pager and being on “pager duty” when issues arose—a practice that inspired the company’s name.
The three University of Waterloo graduates founded PagerDuty in Toronto in February 2009 after recognizing that other companies would need similar on-call management tools as they adopted DevOps practices. They initially bootstrapped the company with modest goals, joking that their dream was to reach $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue and retire to drink champagne on a beach.
After being accepted into Y Combinator on their fourth attempt, PagerDuty raised $1.9 million in seed funding in 2010. The company went public in April 2019 and now serves over 10,000 customers globally, including major enterprises. The platform has become essential infrastructure for IT operations teams managing digital services.
Notably, founder Alex Solomon demonstrated exceptional self-awareness by stepping down as CEO in 2016 to bring in Jennifer Tejada, recognizing that the company needed different leadership skills to scale to the next level.
Convoy
Founded: 2015
Founders: Dan Lewis and Grant Goodale
Amazon Role: Lewis was General Manager of New Shopping Experiences; Goodale was a software development manager
Dan Lewis and Grant Goodale left Amazon in 2015 to found Convoy, a digital freight brokerage startup aimed at disrupting the analog, fragmented trucking industry. Lewis had been responsible for Amazon’s shopping experience innovations, while Goodale managed software development teams.
The co-founders applied insights from Amazon’s logistics operations to create a platform that matched truck drivers with shippers through a mobile app, eliminating the need for phone calls and faxes. The vision was to reduce waste, increase capacity utilization, and improve earnings for truck drivers while lowering costs for shippers.
Convoy attracted heavyweight investors including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Marc Benioff, and Al Gore, reaching a peak valuation of $3.8 billion in 2022. However, despite raising over $900 million in funding, the company faced challenges from a freight recession and the capital-intensive nature of the business. Convoy ceased operations in October 2023, with its assets acquired by Flexport for $16 million. The company’s story serves as a cautionary tale about timing and the challenges of achieving profitability in low-margin industries.
Workato
Founded: 2013
Founder: Dimitris Kogias (co-founder)
Dimitris Kogias co-founded Workato in December 2013 alongside Vijay Tella (CEO), Gautham Viswanathan, Harish Shetty, and Alexey Timanovskiy. The founding team had previously worked together at TIBCO Software, where they developed BusinessWorks, an integration platform that became the foundation for Workato.
Workato provides an enterprise automation platform that enables companies to integrate applications and automate business workflows. The platform combines integration platform as a service (iPaaS), robotic process automation, and business process automation capabilities, all wrapped in a low-code/no-code interface accessible to both IT and business teams.
The company achieved unicorn status and raised $200 million in January 2021 at a $5.7 billion valuation. Workato supports integration with over 1,000 applications and has become a leader in the enterprise automation space, serving businesses that need to connect their increasingly complex technology stacks.
Upwork: The Freelance Marketplace
Founded: 1998 (as Elance)
Founder: Srini Anumolu (co-founder)
Srini Anumolu co-founded Elance in 1998 with Beerud Sheth and Sanjay Noronha in a Jersey City apartment. While Anumolu’s specific role at Amazon is not well-documented, the company he helped create would eventually become one of the world’s largest freelance marketplaces.
Elance initially focused on fixed-price project work before merging with oDesk (founded in 2003) in 2013 to form Elance-oDesk. The combined entity was rebranded as Upwork in 2015. The platform connects businesses with freelancers across more than 5,000 skill categories, from software development to graphic design to writing.
Upwork went public in October 2018, raising $187 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. By 2017, the platform reported 14 million users across 180 countries with $1 billion in annual freelancer billings. The company has played a significant role in the growth of the gig economy, providing infrastructure that makes remote work more accessible and efficient.
BOOM Supersonic
Founded: 2014
Founder: Blake Scholl
Amazon Role: Software Engineer
Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic in 2014 with the goal of making high-speed travel mainstream and enabling a new world of human connection, starting his career at Amazon as a software engineer where he developed software for personalized and automated merchandising. By age 24, he was responsible for initiatives that generated $300 million in revenue.
After leaving Amazon, Scholl co-founded mobile technology startup Kima Labs, which was acquired by Groupon in 2012. His love of aviation and frustration at never having the chance to fly on the Concorde led him to pursue an ambitious dream: reviving supersonic commercial flight.
In 2025, Boom Technology became the first private American company to build a crewed plane that flies at supersonic speeds. The company is developing the Overture airliner, designed to fly at Mach 1.7 and carry passengers across oceans in half the time of conventional aircraft. With orders from United, American, and Japan Airlines, Scholl aims to make sustainable supersonic travel mainstream using 100% sustainable aviation fuel, targeting passenger flights by 2030.
Chronosphere
Founded: 2019
Founders: Martin Mao and Rob Skillington
Martin Mao, co-founder and CEO of Chronosphere, previously held roles at leading tech companies including Uber, Microsoft, Google and Amazon. He and co-founder Rob Skillington first met at Microsoft and later worked together at Uber, where they built M3, an open-source metrics engine that became the foundation for Chronosphere’s platform.
Chronosphere reached unicorn status in less than three years, announcing a $200 million Series C round in 2021 that propelled its valuation past $1 billion. The company later raised an additional $115 million in growth funding at a valuation of $1.6 billion.
Chronosphere provides cloud-native data observability software that helps companies using cloud-native architecture monitor their data. Reaching unicorn level with a team of only 80 people in just 2.3 years placed Chronosphere in the top 10 fastest B2B SaaS unicorns ever, according to Pitchbook.
Function of Beauty
Founded: 2015
Co-Founder: Joshua Maciejewski
Amazon Role: Operations Manager
Joshua Maciejewski worked as an Operations Manager at Amazon from August 2015 to April 2016. He co-founded Function of Beauty in 2014 (launched 2015) alongside MIT grad Zahir Dossa and cosmetic chemist Hien Nguyen.
The company created a revolutionary approach to beauty products: allowing customers to customize their own shampoo, conditioner, and other hair and skin care products based on their individual needs and preferences. Instead of choosing from pre-made formulas, customers fill out a questionnaire about their hair or skin, and Function of Beauty creates a unique formula just for them.
Function of Beauty has raised over $247 million in six rounds of funding, with the last one in January 2022. The company has expanded from its direct-to-consumer website to retail partnerships with Target and Sephora, demonstrating the mainstream appeal of personalized beauty products.
Gupshup: Conversational Messaging Platform
Founded: 2004
Co-Founder: Rakesh Mathur
Amazon Role (Mathur): Founder of Junglee, acquired by Amazon
Rakesh Mathur is a serial entrepreneur who had sold his startup Junglee to Amazon. He co-founded Gupshup (originally called Webaroo) in 2004 with Beerud Sheth and others to address the fragmented state of mobile communication.
Gupshup raised $100 million in a Series F round from Tiger Global Management in 2021, taking its total valuation to $1.4 billion. The company helps over 100,000 businesses and developers build messaging platforms and delivers over 6 billion messages per month across more than 30 messaging channels.
The company initially focused on SMS messaging before pivoting to become a comprehensive conversational AI platform. Gupshup provides tools for businesses to create AI-powered conversational experiences across WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and other messaging channels.
Jet.com: E-Commerce Innovator
Founded: 2014
Founder: Marc Lore
Amazon Role: CEO of Quidsi (acquired by Amazon)
Marc Lore was the CEO and co-founder of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com, which was sold to Amazon in 2011 for $545 million, and Lore then worked for Amazon for over two years.
In 2014, Lore founded the eCommerce company Jet, and Walmart bought Jet.com less than a year after launch in a deal valued at $3.3 billion. Jet distinguished itself through dynamic pricing that adjusted based on shopping cart contents and customer choices, offering lower prices when customers opted for slower shipping or waived return rights.
Though Jet.com itself was eventually discontinued as a standalone site, the acquisition proved transformative for Walmart’s e-commerce capabilities. Lore became president and CEO of Walmart U.S. eCommerce from 2016 to 2021, helping accelerate the retailer’s digital transformation.
Outreach: Sales Engagement Platform
Founded: 2014
Co-Founder: Manuel (Manny) Medina
Amazon Role: Employee number three on Amazon’s AWS team
Manny Medina co-founded Outreach in 2014 and now serves as CEO, and prior to Outreach, Manny was employee number three on Amazon’s AWS team. He also led the Microsoft mobile division from launch to $50M in annual revenue.
Outreach started as GroupTalent, a recruiting platform that was struggling financially. The co-founders were about two months away from being out of cash when they decided to pivot, building an AI engine that could send out emails with personalised messages and follow up on responses.
In just five years, the company got a billion-dollar valuation and became a unicorn, doubling revenue every year for four years. Outreach reached a $4.4 billion valuation after raising $200 million in 2021. The platform now provides sales engagement tools that help companies optimize every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle.
Qumulo: File Data Management
Founded: 2012
Co-Founder: Neal Fachan
Amazon Role: Designed and led development of advanced database technologies at AWS
Neal Fachan brings 15 years of systems software experience to Qumulo, and at Amazon Web Services, Neal designed and led development of advanced database technologies. Prior to Amazon, Neal was Distinguished Engineer at Isilon, where he provided technical vision for Isilon’s award-winning OneFS clustered file system.
Qumulo was founded in March 2012 by Neal Fachan, Peter Godman, and Aaron Passey, all of whom previously worked at Isilon, a storage platform that was acquired by EMC.
Following its Series E funding round of $125 million in July of 2020, Qumulo achieved “unicorn” status at a valuation of more than $1.2 billion. The company develops storage software for file-based data that can be deployed both on-premise and across cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Remitly: Digital Remittances
Founded: 2011
Co-Founder: Josh Hug
Amazon Role: Led Shelfari at Amazon after acquisition
Josh Hug co-founded Shelfari, a private social cataloging website, and served as its Chief Executive Officer from May 2006 to August 2008 prior to its acquisition by Amazon, and following the acquisition, Josh continued to lead Shelfari at Amazon.com, Inc. from August 2008 to October 2011.
Josh Hug founded Remitly in 2011 with Matt Oppenheimer and Shivaas Gulati. The company was inspired by Oppenheimer’s experience working for Barclays Bank in Kenya, where he witnessed the difficulties immigrants faced when sending money home to their families.
Remitly announced an $85 million funding round in July 2020 that pushed its valuation to $1.5 billion. The mobile platform eliminates forms, codes, agents, and excessive fees typically associated with international money transfers. Remitly went public in 2021, becoming one of the largest independent digital remittance companies based in the United States.
Starburst: Data Analytics Platform
Founded: 2017
Co-Founder: David Phillips
David Phillips is one of the co-founders of Starburst, along with Martin Traverso and Dain Sundstrom. In October 2019, Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom, and David Phillips, the original founders of the Presto project at Facebook, joined Starburst.
In January 2021, Starburst raised $100 million, propelling it to a tech unicorn valuation of $1.2 billion, with the round led by Andreessen Horowitz. In February 2022, Starburst raised a $250 million Series D round that brought the company’s valuation to $3.35 billion.
Starburst provides a data analytics platform built on Presto (now Trino), an open-source distributed SQL query engine. The platform enables organizations to query data across various databases and cloud platforms, making data instantly actionable without moving it to a centralized location.
Conclusion
These founders have taken Amazon’s principles and applied them to diverse industries, from logistics and communications to knowledge sharing and enterprise software. While not every venture succeeds—as Convoy’s story illustrates—the track record of Amazon alumni in creating billion-dollar businesses demonstrates the lasting impact of the company’s culture and training ground for entrepreneurial talent.
As the startup ecosystem continues to evolve, Amazon alumni remain among the most sought-after founders and operators, with their experience viewed as strong indicators of potential success in building and scaling technology companies.