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The publication sifts through online submissions – which they say amounts to roughly 20,000 submissions across the US, Asia and Europe – and reach out to industry connections and former honorees to identify influential people in the fields.<\/p>\n
A team of expert judges then evaluate the candidates, assessing them on a range of factors, such as funding, social impact, inventiveness and more. According to their stats, more than $900 million has been raised in funding by the list’s European honorees, with 27 the average age of those included.<\/p>\n
Kennedy was included in the Retail & Ecommerce list. Best known for her charming and engaging videos featuring her granddad, Billy, Kennedy launched The Smooth Company in 2022 and built a following through a clever social media strategy and high-quality, accessible products.<\/p>\n
The brand is best known for their Smooth Stick, a product for taming flyaways and baby hairs without crunch, grease or stickiness.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old entrepreneur, Forbes writes, “invested her $12,000 house deposit to launch The Smooth Company from her bedroom. Leveraging eight years of beauty industry experience and a degree in entrepreneurship, she used TikTok to generate over 150 million organic views”.<\/p>\n
“The Smooth Company’s hair-taming products are now sold in 92 countries and stocked by major retailers including Brown Thomas, De Bijenkorf and H&M.”<\/p>\n
Kennedy shared the news on Instagram, writing: “Genuinely the craziest email to EVER get!! I am lost for words right now but so so grateful! this is such a dream come true.<\/p>\n
“I’ve wrote down getting on the Forbes 30 under 30 list as a goal every single year since I started The Smooth Company and I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s just happened.”<\/p>\n
![\"LONDON,](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/00243a95-614.jpg\"\/)
\n\u00c9anna Hardwicke attends the “Saipan” UK Premiere during the 69th BFI London Film Festival at the Vue West End on October 13, 2025 in London<\/p>\n
Actors \u00c9anna Hardwicke and Hazel Doupe were included in the Entertainment category. Doupe has already built a stellar career, having won the IFTA for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Marian Price in the Disney+\/Hulu series Say Nothing, and the upcoming Apple TV+ series The Wanted Man, where she stars opposite Hugh Laurie and Thandiwe Newton.<\/p>\n
Hardwicke made his breakout in Normal People, following it with standout performances in. Most recently, he portrayed Roy Keane in Saipan.<\/p>\n
Laura Murphy founded Oatco, an energy brand aiming to redefine food-to-go through oat-based products, in 2024 and has been named in the Arts and Culture category. The brand introduced the UK’s first single-serve resealable high-protein overnight oat pouch, and in 2025 secured investment offers from three Dragons on Dragons’ Den.<\/p>\n
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\u00c1ine Murphy, the creator behind Young Irish Budgeter (YIB), an educational and personal finance brand tackling the gender wealth gap, was named in the Media and Marketing category. Her posts cover everything from credit interest rates to investing and her upcoming financial literacy platform already has 2,000 on the waitlist.<\/p>\n
Donnacha Fitzgerald is the founder of Origenity, which uses AI to build new cells with desired traits and precisely steer the genome. Based in San Francisco, the company is currently designing tougher T-cells that resist exhaustion during cancer therapy.<\/p>\n
Aghogho Okpara founded Achieve with Aghogho, a social impact organization supporting students from underserved backgrounds worldwide. Having been rejected from medical school five times before gaining admission, Okpara became interested in how access often outweighs ability. In its first year the company has already worked with 5,000 young people across more than 45 countries.<\/p>\n
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Billy O’Hora is the youngest Director of Partnerships ever at the ATP Tour, the global governing body of men’s professional tennis, where he works across 58 tournaments in 29 markets. In the past, he has held a similar role at Chelsea F.C., working on global partnerships with brands like Nike, Hilton, Unilever and MSC Cruises.<\/p>\n
Jack Cregan is the founder of Paymend, a Dublin-based revenue recovery platform that helps businesses convert failed card payments into completed sales. It does this by acting as merchant of record and assuming transaction risk, and in 2025 the company recovered $53 million in failed payments with a 25-person team across six countries.<\/p>\n
A lecturer at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Rachel Beatty collaborated with researchers at MIT to develop a first-of-its-kind implant that can detect immune attacks and adjust to overcome them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00c1ine Kennedy, the founder of the viral Irish beauty brand The Smooth Company, has been named in Forbes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-401557","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}