Robert Cortright, Founder and Executive Chairman of DriveWealth, was named an EY US Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 New York Award winner.
This recognition reflects a career spent dismantling the barriers that have long kept everyday investors from participating in the world’s most powerful capital markets. A serial entrepreneur who previously won the regional EY award in 2009 for co-founding FX Solutions, which opened global foreign exchange trading to retail investors for the first time, Cortright saw the same structural exclusion playing out in US equities. High share prices, geographic limitations, and legacy infrastructure were keeping millions of people around the world from owning a piece of the companies they used every day. In 2012, he founded DriveWealth to change that.
What followed was more than a decade of category-defining innovation, including the introduction of fractional share trading. The concept, pioneered by DriveWealth, is now ubiquitous across the global investing industry, enabling investors to buy as little as a penny of a stock.
“This recognition is a reflection of the incredible team at DriveWealth and the partners who believed in our vision when fractional investing was still just an idea,” said Cortright. “We’ve spent over a decade building the infrastructure that allows investors, no matter their financial status, to build diversified portfolios that compound over time. With many leading stocks trading at $500 per share, $1000 per share, and higher, fractional investing removes a key barrier to participation and long-term wealth creation. That is the power of fractionalization, and we’re just getting started. The next chapter of investing will be more open, more global, and more seamlessly woven into everyday life than anything we’ve seen before.”
Today, DriveWealth is a global B2B financial technology platform providing Brokerage-as-a-Service to more than 100 institutions serving millions of investors across 30+ countries, processing up to 10 million trades per day and averaging billions in daily notional value. DriveWealth powers the always-on financial infrastructure that gives every investor, regardless of geography, income, or background, the ability to participate in markets and build long-term wealth.
Now in its 41st year, the Entrepreneur Of The Year program honors business leaders for their ingenuity, courage and entrepreneurial spirit. It celebrates original founders who bootstrapped their business from inception or raised outside capital to grow their company, transformational CEOs who infused innovation into an existing organization to catapult its trajectory and multigenerational family business leaders who reimagined a legacy business model to strengthen it for the future.
Regional winners were chosen by an independent panel of past winners, top CEOs and business leaders. Judges assessed candidates on long-term value creation, entrepreneurial spirit, purpose-driven commitment, and significant growth and impact.
As a New York award winner, Cortright will now be considered by the national judges for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 National Awards, which will be presented in November at the annual Strategic Growth Forum®, where high-growth CEOs, Fortune 1000 executives and investors converge to shape the future of business. The National Overall Award winner will move on to compete for the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™ Award in May 2027.
