10 Hungarian startups with female founders to watch in 2020

With 2019 wrapping up, we listed some of the remarkable female founders from Hungary we came across this year. In general, the CEE region is closing a year of growing startup activities and an improving climate for women entrepreneurs. If you look at the numbers, according to the latest European Startup Monitor, the ratio of female founders in Hungary is 23.7% scoring above the EU average 15.6%. It is definitely ground for some cautious optimism.

Building on this momentum, let’s make 2020 the year of women entrepreneurs!

Activating aspiring female founders to take the leap of faith and start their businesses is a goal we, the support ecosystem, should unite behind. The promise of entrepreneurship as a force to address complex societal challenges can only grow and become more valid by including more diverse entrepreneurs tackling more diverse challenges.

Let’s see the companies!

Hungary may not come into your mind as an entrepreneurial hotbed, still, selecting only 10 companies was a challenge and the list is far from complete. For us, it was inspirational to choose founders from a pool of talent, passion and relentless grit these businesses exhibit. This list proves why it is worth looking at the Central European region for the next big thing.

Here are our picks for 10 Hungarian startups with a female (co-)founder which are worth keeping an eye on:

• BankZee is a family banking solution for Generation Z and their parents. The solution consists of a two-sided mobile banking app and a prepaid card. It is designed to help digital pocket money management, support financial education, and enable children to join a safe financial community. Kata Ludvig is one of the founders with a strong mission to help parents manage family finances and develop financial literacy.
• DreamJo.bs is the next generation job portal. On DreamJo.bs companies are presented accurately, so job seekers can get a better picture of the workplace. On the platform, you can see what a typical day will be like, who your colleagues will be and what the corporate culture is like at the company. Hungary’s largest award for the best workplaces, The Loveable Companies to Work For Award, is also one of DreamJo.bs’s projects. The founders behind are Anett Soti and Maria Balogh-Mazi who has been awarded as the Female Founder of the Year at the Regional Startup and Innovation Day.
• HeatVentors with a dedicated engineer team and 7 years of experience in thermal energy developed a thermal energy storage tank based on phase change material technology called HeatTANK. Rita Farkas and her co-founder started the business as a university research project to investigate thermodynamics and the Phase Change Materials. Since then, the modelling solution is patented and verified with prototypes as well as pilot projects.
• PublishDrive started as a direct response to a personal challenge: founder Kinga Jentetics couldn’t find a reliable way to publish her master thesis. After a ton of work and a bit of magic, she finally published, gaining global reactions and selling in countries like Brazil and China. She launched PublishDrive in 2015 so that others can share their passions, just like she did. PublishDrive is a proud graduate of the Google Developers Launchpad project, a six-month accelerator program in California.
• BOOKR Kids is one of Hungary’s international startup success stories founded by Dorka Horváth. As the leading digital publishing company of interactive books in Central Europe, they are offering not only a wonderful reading tool for kids but also providing full-service solutions for publishing houses in content digitalization, as well as a revolutionary opportunity for educational institutions to take teaching to the next level.
• Antavo is a customer retention technology for retail and fashion delivering personalized, meaningful experiences to foster loyalty in the age of Retail 2.0. Zsuzsa Kecsmar and her team are building a SaaS platform and strategy to create omnichannel customer retention programs for retail, fashion, beauty, lifestyle, and hospitality, primarily in the eCommerce sector.
• Zyntern is a job portal for the next generation of employees. Founder Mirtill Megyeri’s mission is to bridge companies to young job seekers in an easy and user-friendly way. As the founders are experienced HR professionals, they designed a recruitment solution making your sourcing and selection processes more efficient and also helping you to stand out from the noise and build your employer brand through a unique company profile and job postings.
• Kider app’s vision is to become one of the world’s leading family entertainment platforms by empowering parents to spend quality time with their kids and each other. Kider founder Edit Szabo hopes that current providers will step in and improve the quality of their programs, which in turn will create higher standards and more demand from the market as well.
• ArtConscious is an online platform founded by Luca Jakab to represent Central and Eastern European artists and designers in the UK and the international art market. ArtConscious’s vision is to bring visibility and attainability to a part of the art and design world that still, despite its richness and wide artistic talent, often goes underrepresented. To fill this gap in the market by creating a comprehensive picture of the region’s art scene can bring closer the CEE art market to the Western audience.
• Notch, imagined and founded by Eszter Ozsvald, is on a mission to improve the human capacity to visualize, understand, and to better perform a movement. Notch is a wearable sensor network that reconstructs 3D avatars of users from their motions right on their smartphones combined with a software component with an AI engine for motion processing. As ArsTechnica puts it: “3D motion tracking system you’ll actually want to use.”

+1: Low-cost Robotics is at a very early stage, but we couldn’t resist mentioning an emerging talent, Alexa Zsófia Vas, fresh out of high school with a strong social impact mission. With Low-cost Robotics, she develops prosthesis for 6–16-year-old children in a unique fashion and at an affordable price. Wearing such prosthesis prepares children for the use of a bionic prosthesis later on in their life. Besides, she is also launching a DIY robot arm (hello, Ironman!) with the goal of bridging the gap between kids of different abilities from an early age. She is an amazing young talent whose team has just been accepted for K&H Startit incubation programme in Gyor. We are excited to follow her journey!

Inspired by these stories and interested in launching your own business?

Check the GUILD Academy and apply before the 1st Jan, we still have a few spots left!

Make becoming an entrepreneur your New Year’s Resolution!