Stories Of Entrepreneurial Capitalism Across Our 43 International Editions

Across the planet, our 43 licensed editions span six continents, 69 countries and 31 languages. They share the same mission: celebrating entrepreneurial capitalism in all its forms.

AUSTRALIA

If mining mogul Gina Rinehart’s ideas for economic policy sound familiar, consider that the 71-year-old Australian billionaire (bottom left), the country’s richest person, attended Donald Trump’s November 2024 election victory party in Florida and the presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C. She tells Forbes Australia, “To make Australia great, we need to significantly cut government tape and regulations, cut government wastage and reduce government spending, reduce our record debt and be able to reduce our taxes. The three T’s—reduce tape and tax and increase useful technology.”

BULGARIA

Longtime Silicon Valley tech executive and venture capitalist Bogomil Balkansky hails from the south-central Bulgarian city of Stara Zagora. Now a partner at California venture capital firm Sequoia, he discusses with Forbes Bulgaria his accomplishments since moving to the U.S. for college in 1991. In addition to sitting on the boards of Bulgarian startups, including software company Telerik, in 2019 the veteran of VMware and Google established an accelerator in San Francisco that has supported more than 80 early-stage companies from Eastern Europe.

ECUADOR

Forbes Ecuador profiles the young leader of Banco Guayaquil, a century-old bank that is the fourth-largest in the country. Guillermo Lasso Alcívar, 40, joined the business 18 years ago and says his mantra as chief executive officer is “focus on doing the ordinary extraordinarily well.” Banco Guayaquil grew to assets of $8.7 billion in 2024, with 2,865 employees and 2.5 million customers.

GEORGIA

Nini Mosiashvili and her cofounders at Tbilisi-based Helio AI set out to create software that expedites the resource-intensive process of evaluating job applicants. A key detail: The program needed to be able to read the Georgian language (which has its own unique alphabet)—a capability they say is rare among existing digital tools. Launched in late 2023, Helio is now used by 150 companies in six countries including Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan (in each country’s local language) and has processed 300,000 candidates. It is capable of reviewing 500 applications in less than 15 seconds and assigning a score to each based on relevance to the company’s needs.

ITALY

Inspired by a scene in the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix in which a child contorts metal with his mind, Luca Ferrari says the focus of his Milan-based app developer and tech firm, Bending Spoons, is “to identify and buy companies that could be managed better.” Its acquisitions include WeTransfer, Evernote, Brightcove and Meetup. Annual revenue reached $706 million in 2024, and new funding raised the company’s valuation to $2.6 billion, with 300 million monthly active users across all products.

JAPAN

Ren Ito, Llion Jones and David Ha (above, from left) cofounded Sakana AI in 2023 and have since raised north of $230 million from private investors at a $1.5 billion valuation. The Tokyo unicorn trains AI to conduct scientific research, including collecting information from other language learning models, drafting a manuscript and conducting peer reviews. One investor says he believes in Sakana because “Asia needs and will have an influential new AI trailblazer, and Japan is poised to be that leader.”

MAURITIUS

“We felt all alone in the middle of the ocean . . . and had become too big in a small market.”

POLAND

Since September, Poles have been gripped by the ongoing family drama of broadcast billionaire Zygmunt Solorz. The 68-year-old—who derives much of his $2.6 billion fortune from Poland’s leading pay-TV operator, Cyfrowy Polsat—told Forbes Poland that he removed his three adult children as his beneficiaries in August. In December, news outlets reported that a court appointed an administrator to oversee the entities through which Solorz owns his company, effectively reducing his control. The children reportedly claim that Solorz’ wife is limiting access to their father and making decisions on his behalf.

SOUTH KOREA

Saeju Jeong left South Korea in 2005 with about $5,000 and the goal of starting a business. He arrived in New York and three years later cofounded digital health-tech unicorn-to-be Noom. Now valued at an estimated $1 billion, the company has expanded from a mobile app for tracking diet and weight loss to also offering tools for managing stress, anxiety, diabetes and hypertension. Sales reportedly hit an estimated $500 million in 2023.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Women in the UAE claim the most spots (46) on Forbes Middle East’s list of the region’s 100 Most Powerful Businesswomen. One, 39-year-old Iraqi-American entrepreneur and influencer Mona Kattan, founded and runs a perfume brand in Dubai called Kayali, sold in nearly 2,600 stores in 30 countries. The company recently announced that it is spinning out from parent company Huda Beauty (led by Kattan’s older sister Huda) and will be co-owned by growth equity firm General Atlantic.

VIETNAM

Hanoi-based agricultural conglomerate Tân Long Group hauls in $2 billion in annual revenue producing and exporting cashews, animal feed, rice, pork and more. Chairman Trương Sỹ Bá details his growth plans in an interview with Forbes Vietnam, with an aim for each business unit to hit nine figures per year by 2030.