Leila Janah

Current Company

Sama — Founder & CEO

Talent Is Universal, Opportunity Is Not

Leila Janah founded Sama (originally Samasource) in 2008 with a radical premise: that people in the world's poorest communities had the same cognitive abilities as anyone in Silicon Valley — they just lacked access to the global digital economy. By creating a platform that connected marginalized workers in East Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean to digital tasks like image annotation, data labeling, and content moderation, Leila Janah built a new model for poverty alleviation that gave people jobs, not charity.

Born in New York to Indian immigrant parents, Leila Janah grew up in a modest household and earned a scholarship to Harvard. A summer spent teaching English in rural Ghana as a teenager changed the trajectory of her life — she saw firsthand that poverty wasn't a function of ability, but of access. That conviction drove every venture she launched, from Sama's impact sourcing model to LXMI, an ethical luxury skincare brand that sourced ingredients from women's cooperatives in Uganda.

A Legacy That Outlasts Its Founder

Leila Janah passed away in January 2020 at age 37 from epithelioid sarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer. By the time of her death, Sama had moved over 50,000 people above the poverty line and become one of the largest training-data providers for AI companies worldwide — the workers she employed were literally teaching machines to see, read, and understand the world. The company she built continues to operate, now valued at over $1 billion.

Leila Janah's legacy extends beyond Sama. She authored the book Give Work, articulating her philosophy that dignified employment is the most effective and sustainable form of poverty reduction. Her model proved that social impact and commercial viability aren't mutually exclusive — that you can build a profitable business while centering the economic empowerment of the world's most marginalized people.