Sumaya Kazi is an internationally recognized innovator, leader, speaker and award-winning entrepreneur. For her passion and success around her endeavors, Sumaya has been recognized by BusinessWeek as one of America's "Best Young Entrepreneurs," CNN as a "Young Person Who Rocks," Silicon Valley Business Journal as a "Woman of Influence," and most recently by UTNE Reader Magazine as one of "50 Visionaries Changing Your World."
She has been featured in over 150 newspapers, magazines, radio interviews, and television spotlights in top-tier outlets such as Newsweek, BusinessWeek Magazine, CNN, ABC News and Washington Post. Sumaya frequently speaks at professional conferences and educational institutions inspiring audiences on topics such as entrepreneurship, non-profit work, intrapreneurship, young professional issues, social media, diversity and technology.
Sumaya is the CEO & Founder of Sumazi, where her team is building the technology that intelligently connects you to the people you don't know butshould, people that can potentially change your world. Sumazi was selected from over 1,000 international applicants to compete at the prestigious TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield where they won the Omidyar Network award for "Startup Most Likely to Change the World". Previously, Sumaya founded The CulturalConnect, an online media publishing company dedicated to spotlighting young success across different ethnic diasporas. The CulturalConnect was grown from one weekly e-magazine to five weekly e-magazines and has published over 800 interviews of awe-inspiring young professionals in the for-profit and not-for-profit industries to a readership in over 100 countries. Each weekly magazine delivered accessible, must-read profiles of the professional world's often overlooked population of driven, innovative, progressive and successful under-35 leaders to an expansive subscriber base of up-and-coming individuals of the same type.
Additionally, Sumaya is on the steering committee for the San Francisco Muslim Women's Giving Circle, a social justice and philanthropic organization.
