CLEMENTINE JACOBY

Age: 29 • Cofounder, Recidiviz

“I left Stanford thinking I would be a professional circus performer,” says Jacoby, who spent time teaching acrobatics in a Brazilian gang-diversion program. That experience led her to cofound a company in 2018 that took a more systemic approach to criminal-justice reform. Recidiviz aggregates and standardizes fragmented data across prisons, probation and parole. When Covid-19 began sweeping through prisons, North Dakota used Recidiviz to identify those eligible for early release, track their release’s impact on public safety and reduce its prison population by 25% in a month. The company has attracted over $10 million in funding from the likes of Jim Breyer, Bill Ackman and Ashton Kutcher. “We incarcerate more people and for longer than any country in the history of the world,” Jacoby says. “And right now there’s bipartisan alignment to unwind mass incarceration.”

JUDGES: Jean Case, chairman, National Geographic Society; Cheryl Dorsey, president, Echoing Green; Hugh Evans, cofounder, Global Citizen (Under 30 Class of 2013); Randall Lane, chief content officer, Forbes