Creating Your Own Category, With Babba Rivera

03/17/25 • 45 min

Babba Rivera, the founder and CEO of clean-beauty company Ceremonia, is a cover subject of Inc. magazine’s 2025 Female Founder issue. Her heritage is both an inspiration and a driving force for her brand.

When Babba Rivera was growing up, her Chilean family moved to Sweden to escape the brutal Pinochet dictatorship. She spent her early career working at startups in both Sweden and the U.S., at Uber and at the luggage upstart Away, where she was director of marketing. During that time, Babba was spending an hour every morning styling her hair with really “toxic, unhelpful products.” As a Latinx woman, she didn’t see any products that were designed with her heritage or type of hair in mind. So, in 2020, she founded Ceremonia, an aspirational natural-ingredient brand that seeks to fill a void in the beauty market for her fellow Latinx consumers.

For Inc. magazine’s Female Founders 2025 series, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom sat down with Babba to chat about her background and where the seeds for Ceremonia took root. They discussed how Babba felt that working at Uber in her 20s was like getting paid to go to business school, how she created a knowledge exchange with another founder to learn about the beauty business, and how her company’s product development is constantly evolving with the help of customer feedback. Joining Diana is Inc. editor-at-large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, as well as special guest Cate Luzio, founder and CEO of Luminary.

Additional research and information:

Inc.’s 2025 Female Founder List

Visit: Ceremonia

Additional research and information:

Inc.’s 2025 Female Founder List

Visit: Ceremonia

Previous Episode

Build Your Own Door, With Reshma Saujani

Half of Americans live in child care deserts. For many more, child care is unaffordable. Paid leave for parents is far from universal. Reshma Saujani is on a mission to change all this.

Reshma is best known for having founded Girls Who Code in 2012 during her run for the U.S. Congress. She has raised $100 million and taught 670,000 girls programming skills over the past decade. Now, Reshma has turned her sights on building her second nonprofit, Moms First, which focuses on making women’s lives better in the workplace through paid family leave, improved child care, and pay equity for moms. Today, Moms First is a community of 1.1 million.

For Inc. magazine’s Female Founders 2025 series, Inc. editor-at-large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin sits down with Reshma to chat about how she is bringing everything she learned from scaling Girls Who Code into her new venture, the potential lasting impact of the war on DEI programs, and the ongoing fight against the rising cost of child care in this country. Along with Inc. executive editor and co-host Diana Ransom, Luminary founder and CEO Cate Luzio joins the conversation as a special guest.

Additional research and information:

Inc.’s 2024 Female Founder’s list (2025 out soon!)

Read more about Reshma and Moms First (previously The Marshall Plan for Moms) at Inc.com: https://www.inc.com/rebecca-deczynski/marshall-plan-for-moms-mothers-day-ad-flexible-work-policies.html

Check out My So-Called Midlife with Reshma Saujani Podcast

Visit: Moms First

Visit: Girls Who Code

Next Episode

Run Your Own Race, With Cate Luzio

Former finance executive Cate Luzio founded and self-funded the professional-network platform Luminary in late 2018 with the mission to uplift, upskill, and propel women and allies forward through all phases of their professional journeys. Luminary is a gender inclusive B2C and B2B global professional education and networking platform. Today the company has more than 15,000 members globally across 30 countries and leads more than 20 workshops, programs and events each month in person and virtually.

Not only did Cate appear on our Female Founders list in 2019 and 2021, but in 2024 and this year she also joined our Female Founders board of advisers and helped review the 2025 list.

Our hosts, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom and Inc. editor-at-large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, sit down with Cate in a special roundtable discussion to wrap up our Female Founders 2025 series. They chat about the state of women in entrepreneurship, why women are the masters of bootstrapping, and how founders–and we as a culture–can look beyond funding for metrics of success.

During the roundtable chat, Cate highlights some of the founders who stood out to her this year, including LTK’s Amber Venz Box, Chelsea Hirschhorn of Frida Baby, Rosanna Berardi of her eponymous immigration law firm, and Beleaf Medical’s Mitch Meyers. Cate shares some of their inspiring stories, which cross many business sectors in historically male-dominated industries such as tech, engineering, and climate. She says these women entrepreneurs are changing the pattern, and are “saying, ‘No, I'm in this, and I'm building amazing companies to change the world.’”

Additional research and information: Inc.’s 2025 Female Founder List

Read more about Cate at Inc.com: There’s a boom in female founders right now

Cate Luzio on the Female Founders 2021 List of 100

Visit: Luminary

**and a correction at minute 32:34 Cate says LTK's cofounder and president's name is Amber Benz Vox. Her name is Amber Venz Box.