The Finalists of the Women Startup Challenge Europe are...

by Startacus Admin

Startacus takes a look at the 10 women-led startups, announced as the finalists of the Women Startup Challenge Europe.

A month or so ago, we wrote about The Women Startup Challenge Europe - a pitch competition that showcases and funds innovative, women-led tech startups that are solving problems for people, businesses, and the planet.

Organised by Women Who Tech, and held in partnership with Craig Newmark, founder of the Craig Newmark Philanthropic Fund and craigslist, the top 10 best applicants have now been selected to pitch their startups on stage at London’s City Hall, on May 3rd, 2017. With a world-class judging panel of Baroness Martha Lane Fox, Jimmy Wales, Rajeeb Dey MBE and Marie-Laure Sauty de Chalon and 10 fab women-led startups set to pitch, the Women Startup Challenge Europe looks set to make an entrance and real impact, in just its inaugural year. 

So without further ado, the 10 women-led startup finalists are:

Pitching Founder: Kristina Tsvetanova of BLITAB®

BLITAB® is the world’s first “tablet” for the blind, creating tactile text and graphics. The award-winning  BLITAB® tablet empowers blind users to learn, work, and play with one mobile device, to have digital access to information in real time.

Pitching Founder: Elsa Hermal of Epicery

Epicery is an app that allows people to order fresh food online directly from local artisan shops, with one-hour delivery. The best butchers, fishmongers, cheese makers, organic fruits and vegetables, pastries of your city are now available on-demand and delivered to your door at your convenience.

Pitching Founder: Dr Maria Chatzou of Lifebit

Lifebit is creating the operating system of genomics. Our unified framework system enables insightful real-time genomics analyses by making them easy to deploy, portable across clusters and clouds, scalable no matter the size of the data to be analyzed, reproducible, and more time and cost-efficient.

Pitching Founder: Samantha Payne of Open Bionics

Open Bionics, an award-winning robotics startup, is revolutionising the healthcare industry by using 3D scanning and printing to create advanced, affordable, and stylish bionic limbs. They’re turning children with limb differences into bionic superheroes.

Pitching Founder: Ivana Ojukwu of See Fashion

See Fashion is a discovery platform that helps fashion brands identify new trends and buying opportunities in their market. They collect data from their designer’s e-commerce site and marketplace to provide highly segmented and contextualised product insights in real-time.

Pitching Founder: Alexandra Grigore of Simprints

Simprints has developed an inexpensive biometric scanner, mobile app and cloud platform, that could become the first source of providing identity to the 1.5B people who do not have formal IDs. By using people’s fingerprints to accurately link them to records, Simprints aims to create a world where lack of identity is never the reason why anyone is denied the services, care, and rights they deserve.

Pitching Founder: Rhona Togher of Sound Bounce

Sound Bounce is an acoustic metamaterial, which provides significantly improved noise attenuation when compared to conventional materials. Sound Bounce can be integrated into automotive, aerospace, construction, and many more industries to drastically reduce the impact of environmental noise.

Pitching Founder: Colleen Wong of TechSixtyFour

TechSixtyFour delivers unique and innovative technologies that have a positive impact on family life. Their product, the Gator watch, is a wearable mobile phone and tracker made for young children.

Pitching Founder: Caritta Seppa of Tespack

Tespack provides mobile energy creation on the move with its smart clothes and Smart Wear. Combining state-of-the-art connectivity features, Tespack technology solves the biggest problems of smart clothing, battery life, and connectivity. Tespack’s clients range from Vodafone to the United Nations to General Electric.

Pitching Founder: Kate McLaughlin of We got Pop

POP is the marketplace for film and TV Production. POP’s mission is to enable productions to book, manage, and pay for all people and services required to make their show seamlessly through one beautiful, integrated platform. POP is introducing innovative technology that brings efficiency to an industry surprisingly reliant on laborious, manual, old school processes.

Good luck to the ten finalists from team Startacus!


Talking european wide startup pitching competitions - why not take a look at upSTART - The Startup Pitch Event held at Digital DNA. Applications are now open - there's a £50k winners fund, including £10k hard cash!

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Published on: 3rd April 2017