Creating Your Own Category, With Babba Rivera

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 Read more about Babba and Ceremonia at Inc.  Visit: Ceremonia