I am a 24-year-old Afghan girl who went from sewing clothes at home to becoming a professional software engineer at GitStart. A lot of women around me have lost faith in having a career because we’re gradually losing our rights, from getting banned from universities to not being able to ride public transport alone. I’m sharing my story to provide hope to those around the world in similar or worse situations.

“Dates and timezone logics are crazy hard. It’s hard to put in hours how much time GitStart saved us, but a lot. And a lot of peace of mind. Our core engineering team can work on hard and important tasks.” — Peer Richelsen, Cofounder and Co-CEO of Cal.com

Can you imagine having your entire future disappear right in front of your eyes? That's exactly what happened to 20 million women when the Taliban took over Afghanistan about a year ago. I couldn't just sit back and do nothing, so I started an investigation. What I learned proved horrifying.

Neo led the round alongside Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, Google VP Parisa Tabriz, Andela founder Iyinola Aboyeji, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Instagram VP Maria Zhang, Circle CTO Li Fan and VP Yongsheng Wu, Robinhood VP Surabhi Gupta, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, GitHub technical advisor Omoju Miller, Gigster founder Debo Olaosebikan, BloomTech founder Austen Allred, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, Airbnb co-founder Nate Blecharczyk, Mike Schroepfer and others.