Upeka Bee, founder and chief executive officer of DianaHR, has been named to Inc. magazine’s 2026 Female Founders 500 list, which recognizes women entrepreneurs across the United States for business performance and innovation.
Bee is recognized in the human resources industry category. She founded DianaHR after serving as head of engineering at Gusto HR, a U.S.-based HR software company.
DianaHR offers what it calls an artificial intelligence-powered HR-as-a-service platform aimed at small and mid-sized businesses, or SMBs. The platform automates routine HR tasks and assigns each client a human specialist to coordinate service and provide expertise when needed.
What the platform does
The company says its platform automates most HR activities, saving business owners more than 15 hours a week and reducing HR costs by 60 per cent, according to the company. Rather than building an internal HR team, SMB owners can rely on the platform to handle functions including payroll, compliance, benefits, and employee onboarding.
DianaHR recently launched what it describes as the first production-grade agentic onboarding system, designed to automate the employee onboarding process with minimal human involvement.
Growth and funding
Bee recently secured a $3.7-million (all figures U.S.) seed funding round led by SNR Ventures. Since the product launched, the company has doubled revenue each quarter. DianaHR has also doubled its workforce and continues to hire to meet rising demand.
“I founded DianaHR with the belief that HR should scale with a company’s growth, not slow it down,” Bee said. “Small and mid-sized businesses don’t need more dashboards, they need an intelligent layer that works across their existing tools, combining human expertise with autonomous AI agents to get real HR work done.”
About the list
Inc. selects its Female Founders 500 honorees through a multi-round process that evaluates both financial metrics — including revenue growth, funding, and sales — and qualitative factors such as innovation and social impact. The 2026 honorees collectively generated approximately $12.3 billion in 2025 revenue and have raised $12.2 billion in total funding, according to Inc.
“Each year, we are increasingly amazed by the extraordinary leaders on our Inc. Female Founders 500 list,” said Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc.
