#FoundHerWorld – Julia Armstrong D’Agnese

Empowering Exceptional Decision-Making for a Changing Planet

Julia Armstrong D’Agnese built Earth Knowledge around a simple belief: leaders can’t navigate a changing planet without seeing the whole system.

For years, she watched leaders make consequential decisions with only part of the picture.
The data was all there. Climate data. Weather data. Ecological data. Economic data. But it lived in different places, spoke different languages, and rarely arrived in a form decision-makers could use with confidence.
As environmental risks accelerated and global systems grew more interconnected, she saw the gap becoming harder to ignore.


“$44 trillion of our global economy depends on our natural world, which is rapidly changing,” she says. “Yet most leaders navigate this with fragmented data. We built an Integrated Planetary IntelligenceTM platform that delivers the most comprehensive actionable analytics to mitigate risk and maximize opportunity.


That challenge became the foundation for Earth Knowledge, the company she co-founded to help organizations understand how planetary change affects business, government, infrastructure, and investment decisions.
At the center of Earth Knowledge is its Integrated Planetary Intelligence™ platform, a digital twin of Earth that combines environmental, climatic, and economic intelligence into a single, actionable view. Instead of forcing leaders to sift through disconnected datasets, the platform helps reveal how risks and opportunities are connected across entire systems.
It’s an ambitious undertaking, backed by a Science Council that includes globally recognized experts, including Dr. Don Wuebbles, who shares the Nobel Peace Prize for climate science, former National Weather Service Director Louis Ucellini, and other IPCC and NCA authors.


Earth Knowledge analytics and thought leadership are trusted by public and private sector organizations, including the State of California, the World Bank, World Wildlife Fund, TNFD, and Fortune 500 companies, including Eaton and ESRI. Microsoft also selected Earth Knowledge as a top partner in their elite Partner Growth Portfolio.
The work builds on a career spent bridging science, technology, and policy. Julia contributed to the Obama White House Climate Data Initiative, helped launch the Partnership in Resilience and Preparedness (PREP), and led strategic partnerships for the Earth Knowledge Portal, a sustainability platform used by organizations in more than 80 percent of the world’s countries.
In 2024, she was named B2B Women Tech Entrepreneur of the Year.


But the idea driving her work remains remarkably straightforward: the planet is the operating system beneath every economy, supply chain, and institution.
Earth Knowledge exists to help leaders see that system clearly, and make decisions with the world they actually inhabit, not the one they assume exists.

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#FoundHERWorld – Julie Case

Julie Case Watched Enterprises Spend Months Chasing IT Risk Data Hiding in Plain Sight. CadentsIQ Surfaces It in Minutes.

Somewhere in an enterprise IT department, a spreadsheet is being updated. It contains end-of-life notices from three vendors, vulnerability alerts from two industry feeds, and patching requirements that arrived last week via email. Pulling it all together has taken the better part of a month. And by the time it’s done, something will have changed or been missed.


This is the state of IT infrastructure risk management at most organizations today. The failure isn’t due to the technology or lack of data. The information exists, living in vendor portals, security bulletins, inbox threads, and manually maintained trackers. The issue is that the data is fragmented. There is not a single, intelligent system that assembles, scores, and prioritizes the data, so decision-makers know what matters most.


Julie Case has spent her career inside enterprise IT, close enough to this problem to know how much it costs, in time, in exposure, and in the audits and outages that arrive when the spreadsheet wasn’t updated in time.

“Lifecycle and vulnerability data are scattered across emails, spreadsheets, and vendor and industry websites,” she says. “Companies spend weeks and sometimes months pulling this information together. CadentsIQ surfaces this information, and in minutes, we expose the unknown risks and identify what matters most.”


CadentsIQ is the AI-native platform she built to replace that process entirely. It ingests end-of-life notices, known vulnerabilities, and patching requirements across an organization’s IT infrastructure, then applies a risk-scoring and lifecycle intelligence framework that helps CIOs, CISOs, and IT leaders prioritize with clarity rather than scramble with urgency.


Launched in early 2026 and headquartered in the United States, Cadents is in active conversations with early prospects and building toward its first customer milestone. The infrastructure risk problem it is solving is not new. The platform built to finally solve it is.

The data was always there. It just needed someone to make it actionable.

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#FoundHerWorld – Crystal Marie Young

The Invisible Risk Inside the Modern Event

For nineteen years, Crystal Marie Young watched organizations pour everything into the experience, the venue, the flow, the moment a room full of people feels exactly right. What she also watched, quietly and with growing concern, was everything underneath that no one was looking at. The registration platforms hold attendee data. The payment systems are processing donations. The hybrid tools are stitching together in-person and remote, often for the first time, often without a security review in sight.
Nobody was treating events like the high-risk environments they had quietly become.
So Crystal Marie created the kind of company she couldn’t find anywhere else.


Crystal Marie Events, LLC, based in Detroit, is a combination of event strategy and cybersecurity consulting to help non-profits recognize that every successful event carries invisible risks beneath the surface.
Through her CME Event Security practice, Crystal Marie helps organizations protect the things most people never think about until it’s too late: attendee data, donor information, internal operations, and the trust that can take years to earn and a single breach to destroy.

“Events were being looked at with a logistical lens only and not a cybersecurity risk environment,” she says. “I created CME Event Security, the cybersecurity division of Crystal Marie Events, LLC. We help organizations create unforgettable experiences while protecting attendee’s privacy, digital footprint and data through event risk management systems.”


The niche is specific by design, and that specificity is also the challenge. Most of the decision-makers who need her don’t know they need her, not until something goes wrong. Getting in front of them before that moment of panic is the work Crystal Marie is focused on now: shifting toward retainer relationships with organizations that host events year-round, building visibility in the nonprofit and corporate event planning world, and aligning with the associations and platforms where those buyers already gather.


She’s naming a risk category that most of her clients didn’t know to budget for. That’s harder than selling a known solution, and it’s exactly the kind of problem she seems built for.

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#FoundHerWorld – Marcia Tal

Marcia Tal Spent Decades at the Intersection of Customer Data and Corporate Blind Spots. PositivityTech Is What She Built When She’d Seen Enough

The complaint sits in a database somewhere. Filed, logged, and forgotten. What nobody noticed is that it was trying to tell you something.


Long before the negative review, before the churn, before the regulatory inquiry lands on the wrong desk at the wrong moment, there is a customer narrative. A word choice. A tone. A pattern hiding in plain language that, if anyone were paying close enough attention, would have predicted exactly what was coming next.


Most companies collect massive amounts of customer feedback but rarely treat it like usable business data.
Marcia Tal is changing that.


Her platform helps companies analyze reviews, surveys, and customer conversations to uncover patterns, product insights, and blind spots that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Marcia Tal has spent a career at that intersection, the place where what customers say meets what businesses do with it. As Citigroup’s EVP of Decision Management, she built and ran a global analytics function spanning thirty markets, close enough to the numbers to understand what they could reveal and close enough to the customers to understand what the numbers were missing. What she kept finding, buried inside complaint data and customer narratives, was intelligence that organizations were systematically leaving on the table.


“Companies are sitting on a goldmine they barely touch: customer narratives,” she says. “Their mindset is broken; they approach customer narratives as they always have, disconnected from P&L. PositivityTech closes the gap, turning those signals into predictive intelligence and negatives to positives to profit.”


PositivityTech under Tal Solutions LLC is the AI-powered platform she built to change that. Drawing on CFPB customer complaint data and proprietary sources, it breaks down language, derives variables, and ranks risk, surfacing early indicators of regulatory exposure, reputational shifts, and operational vulnerabilities before they show up in traditional metrics. What started as a tool for bank executives and risk leaders is now finding traction with traders, research analysts, and portfolio managers who have recognized what Tal understood years ago: customer narratives are not a service problem. They are a predictive dataset.


Available on Microsoft Marketplace and backed by decades of institutional credibility, PositivityTech is the rare fintech product built not from a gap in the market, but from a gap in how entire industries think.
Marcia Tal has been told she is ahead of her time more than once. She has decided to take that as a timeline, not a limitation.

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#FoundHerWorld –  Laura Massetti

No One Teaches This at Work. Laura Massetti Built the Program That Does.

Laura Massetti spent fifteen years inside organizations watching the same thing happen. A new hire would arrive capable, motivated, and ready. Within months, they’d be struggling, not with their job, but with the unwritten architecture of professional life: how to respond to an email in a way that builds trust, on how to receive feedback without deflating. And essentially, on how to read a room.
She kept writing it in performance reviews, over and over, in different words. And she kept wondering why no one had ever taught it.


The runway that used to absorb this learning is gone. AI raised the floor on what early-career professionals must deliver. Margins tightened. Managers who once mentored now spend those hours covering gaps that the university and onboarding never close. A 2024 survey found 55% of hiring managers had let a recent graduate go, not for lacking skills, but for lacking the operational fluency that no one had ever explicitly taught them.


So Massetti built the operating system she wished had existed. Real Work Ready™ is a structured professional readiness program organized around what she calls the Performance Model Framework™, in which six operating dimensions that managers are already scoring are made visible and teachable for the first time. Members move through a seven-module curriculum, live coaching sessions, and role-play on real workplace situations. The behaviors shift in week one.


“The runway to teach early-career hires the basics is gone. AI raised the bar, margins tightened, and senior operators don’t have hours a week to mentor anymore,” she says. “I spent 15 years writing performance reviews inside fast-moving organizations, then built the operating system to close the gap at scale.”


The hardest part hasn’t been the building. It’s been reaching the right people, the HR and L&D leaders with the budget and the mandate, the ones who already know Gen Z retention is broken and are looking for something that actually works.
Massetti is working to get in front of them. Real Work Ready is, as she puts it, defining a category. She intends to be the one who names it.

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🎬 Watch the ICONS Movie — Meet the women behind the movement. Icons by Women in Cloud
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