Meet the 15 women building Europe’s next set of tech startups to watch.
The tech industry’s gender gap is well documented, and yet we know that there are more and more women who have technical expertise and the drive to start their own business. We’ve made it our mission to increase the gender balance ratio on each Entrepreneur First programme and we’re excited to work with the 15 women joining EF6 ready to change the face of tech and inspire the next generation of female founders. Between them they’ve worked at tech companies such as Apple and Microsoft, published research papers in Information Systems, Machine Learning and Sensor Networks from some of the world’s leading institutions, and have domain expertise in industries in from Health to Fashion. Several are raising families as well as working on their ideas. They’re all leaving careers to build a startup; over the next six months they’ll meet a cofounder, develop their ideas and build tech products that solve real problems. We’re excited to see what they create with our help — watch this space.
Kira (@kirakempinska), UCL PhD looking to apply machine learning techniques to social problems.
Kira has a background is in Applied Mathematics and Machine Learning. She has a MEng in Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol and has worked at BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre where she developed machine learning techniques for maritime anomaly detection. After graduating Kira started a PhD in Security and Crime Science at UCL, addressing security and crime issues using machine learning approaches. Her current project is run in collaboration with the Metropolitan Police and aims to optimise police behaviour by modelling their interactions with criminals.
“I want to work on a product that uses machine learning and Big Data to aid us in our everyday lives. I’m brainstorming various applications at the moment, from an AI agent that can support student counselling services, to an algorithm that can automatically detect fraudulent auctions on services such as eBay.” — Kira
Svetlana (@SBozhko), Back End Engineer looking to work on stream data processing.
Svetlana has an MSc in Software Engineering and worked on research in the field of stream data processing and big data. At the same time, she has been working as a server-side software engineer for 4 years in 3 companies. She is also one of the creators of a widely-listened to podcast about software engineering, DevZen.
Nina (@ninajlu), University of Pennsylvania graduate using machine learning to build an individualized recommendation engine.
Nina graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a joint degree in Computer Science and Finance. She is a former Apple and Microsoft intern, where she automated the iOS beta release process for developers and built a crowdsourced platform for handwriting machine learning algorithms. She also has experience in tech investment banking at Morgan Stanley’s Menlo Park office.
“I’m interested in the promise of machine learning applications on non-traditional industries and am currently working on an individualized recommendation engine for decomposing multi-factor travel destination selection decisions into mathematics” — Nina
Katarzyna (@kasiastreich), functional programmer with expertise in linguistics.
Katarzyna has two degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. She is interested in different programming paradigms (functional, logical), and after her third year at the university she started a job as an Erlang programmer to develop media solutions. Then she took part in Google Summer of Code 2014. Now she cooperates with Polish Academy of Sciences to create an Electronic corpus of 17th and 18th century Polish texts. She’s helped them build tools needed for morphosyntactic analysis of baroque Polish language and has written a web program in Django for correct morphosyntactic tagging.
Poonam (@pooyadav), Cambridge Senior Researcher with expertise in Social Computing.
Poonam is a computing researcher at the University of Cambridge. Her first degree in computer science engineering was followed by a Master degree in Intelligent Systems, a PhD in Distributed Sensor Systems and a Postdoc in Social Computing (Imperial College London). She has also got opportunities to work as a computing researcher at IBM Watson research labs, NY and US Army Research Lab, Maryland, USA. Now she’s looking to apply her expertise in building an immersive and collaborative scientific-learning platform at EF.
Ana (@anaburman), health informatics specialist looking to apply technology to women’s healthcare issues.
Ana’s background specialises in Information Security. She worked for several years with one of the big 4 consultancy firms working in their R&D team in association with Microsoft and Cisco to develop and deploy security solutions. After a career break to raise a family, Ana completed a PhD in Information Systems with focus in healthcare. She’s currently exploring the intersection between health and technology, focusing on solving women’s health issues through applications of technology.
Sheenu (@sheenuchawla), Masters degree in Commerce with majors in Information Systems looking to develop a consumer product that can utilise upcoming technologies
Sheenu has a Masters degree in Commerce with majors in Information Systems and started her career as a software analyst. She co-founded her first startup, Sush Mobile (a New Zealand based enterprise mobile specialist company) in 2008, later acquired by a publicly listed finance company in 2015. She exited the company to take on the next challenge in her entrepreneurial journey. Now she’s looking to apply her expertise in mobile and growth to build a consumer-facing product at EF.
Zara (@ZaraTam), Cambridge graduate and civil engineer looking to build smarter connected cities using predictive analytics.
Zara completed her undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering in several places — Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Imperial College London. Last year, she finished her Land Economy MPhil at the University of Cambridge. In between her 2 degrees, she obtained the professional qualification as a Chartered Engineer, with 4-year experience from planning, design to construction at a global consultancy. Zara wants to build better and smarter cities that are truly connected, and help businesses to streamline their operations and asset management using real time data with predictive analytics and dynamic optimisation.
Stephanie (@whereisfuture), Imperial graduate working on a data platform for satellites.
Stephanie is currently a code-writing solutions architect, working on a satellite data platform. She’s been designing software, coding and managing software project delivery in startups and multinational companies. Her side projects include Citizen Inventor (a citizen science/maker community) and Space Town Hall (a programme to explore space technologies and alternative education). She graduated with a MEng Electronics and Electrical Engineering from Imperial College London where she worked in collaboration with a Fashion PhD on creating wearable electronics for expressing emotions,.
Suzie (@5u2iea), Computer Science graduate is looking to identify innovative ways to gather data to solve a problem.
Suzie graduated from an interdisciplinary arts and sciences programme from Amsterdam University College majoring in Computer and Information Science. She has worked for a variety of tech startups in Silicon Valley, Amsterdam and Budapest. Suzie is passionate about smart cities and has specialist knowledge in data mining, UX and building dashboards.
Sarah-Jane (@Sarah_Jaaane), Imperial graduate looking to solve language-retention for adults.
Sarah-Jane studied Mathematics at Imperial College London and has been working as a Front End Developer for the last 4 years for startups such as Songkick and Desktop Genetics. Sarah-Jane has a deep interest in language learning and retention; she grew up bilingual in English & Italian and experienced the problem of language retention first-hand. She’s currently exploring ways to minimise the impediment of learning as an adult using Neural Commitment Theory.
“I want to put my energy and passion into building my own company and idea, not someone else’s”. — Sarah-Jane
Mahtab (@mahtabgol), Full Stack Developer interested in the intersection of music, interactive arts and tech.
Mahtab studied Design and Music Technology and learned how to code as part of her research (which focused on signal processing, interface design, HCI, mapping, and experiment design). Her MA thesis involved developing methods to map musical performance gestures to sound synthesis in digital musical instruments. After graduating Mahtab worked first as a full stack developer and then as a big data developer for companies such as DailyMotion and BandsinTown, a live music company. Mahtab has a deep interest in music and interactive arts and is interested in working on the intersection with technology.
Chryssa (@ChryssaTs), solving the problem of styling for online retailers.
Chryssa studied International Relations and Diplomacy before moving to London to work in the oil and gas marketing industry. Unsatisfied with current styling solutions offered by online retailers, Chryssa turned her attention to developing an online personal stylist recommendation engine (SuitsMe). SuitsMe is a machine learning based SaaS product for retailers to make VIP personal shopper services accessible to their customers. She speaks six languages and has a deep interest in linguistics.
Phoebe (@PhoebeHugh_), insurance specialist building UK’s first artificially intelligent insurance advisory app.
Phoebe began her career at Aviva, the largest UK insurer, where she worked in a number of roles across commercial, high net worth and direct including underwriting and product development. During this time she gained qualifications with the Chartered Insurance Institute. She decided to quit in 2015 to learn to code and pursue building her own insurance startup. Brolly is a personal insurance concierge which uses AI to provide a smart advisory service to users. Phoebe also co-founded Ambition First, a diversity and inclusion initiative that supports emerging business talent from the grassroots up
Louise, doctor building an online network for medical professionals.
Louise graduated in Medicine from the University of Manchester and is a junior doctor. She’s building DocSyn, a private professional network for doctors. She experienced the problem she’s solving first-hand when she found a lack of online networking and training options for junior doctors. Louise already has hundreds of interested users in her network and is running a sold-out conference for doctors later this month.
We just kicked off our sixth cohort at Entrepreneur First. For each cohort we select 100 aspiring founders who want to build tech startups to solve hard problems. If you’re interested in joining our next batch (starting September 2016), you can find out more at joinef.com/apply
