10 women-led companies in deep tech
By WILD: Your body. Your data. Act on it — starting with endurance athletes
Believe it or not… It hasn’t been that easy to compile this list. We should see much more of these soon! A great initiative we strongly support and who helped us is Women in AI: bringing together the too-small community supporting females in deep Tech.
We’re also great advocates of it — if you’re in AI, female or not, join our next PeakAI: a group of AI researchers and founders climbing peaks! The next one will be in the Dolomites.
Those are some of the women who truly inspire us, through their leadership, daily lives, management of their companies.
GTN brings innovation to the world of drug development. Nowadays it is very costly and challenging to bring a new drug to the market that does not imitate an already existing drug. This is where GTN comes in. With its exceptional patented technology, GTN aims to use machine learning and quantum physics to revolutionise the search and discovery of drug-like molecules. Not only that but GTN could also apply its technology in other areas such as materials science, food and cosmetics.
Noor has a remarkable tech background. She worked with machine learning, artificial intelligence and data mining at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, with a special interest in degenerative models. She is very recognised as she has won several awards and grants for her research. Noor started GTN at EntrepreneurFirst.
2. Agne Kazakeviciute — Sensum Tech
Premature birth occurs in 10% of pregnancies where risk is always a factor. Premature birth costs a lot of money for governments all around the worlds because of the healthcare costs that come with it. There were no current methods to predict premature birth until Sensum came along. Sensum is a software company which can predict premature labor days before it occurs. It uses statistical and machine learning techniques in order to save future lives.
Agne has a Masters in medical statistics and a PhD in statistical science from University College London. During her PhD, she spent two years working with biomedical data at A*STAR Singapore. She’s published five papers in top statistics and engineering journals. Agne started Sensum at EntrepreneurFirst
3. Marie Outtier — Aiden
Aiden is an artificially intelligent marketing analyst. Marketers spend several hours a week searching for meaningful data. However, there is high risk of inefficiencies in the search for useful data depending on the complexity of the task. Aiden helps marketer by aiding them in making better and more precise decisions using a combination of A.I. and marketing expert-system.
Marie is a passionate entrepreneur with great interest in technological trends, specifically Artificial Intelligence. Marie got her Master’s degree in Marketing from Kedge Business School and speaks fluent German and French.
4. Alice Zhang — Verge Genomics
In Verge Genomics, they find drugs to treat brain diseases by using human genomics data to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and Parkinson’s disease. More than 40 million people in the world suffer from Alzheimer’s disease which will make Alzheimer’s one of the largest medical problem without a cure. Shockingly, drug discovery is still not as effective as it could be and neuroscience is still filled with assumptions and guesses. At Verge, the goal is to take the guessing out of drug discovery. Verge has found a way to map out hundreds of genes that cause disease and find drugs that target all of them at once. Through a combination of Human Genomics, Systems Biology and Stem-cell Modeling, Verge has developed a drug discovery engine. This engine aims to find drugs that reverse the disease rather than just creating the symptoms.
Alice graduated from Princeton University magna cum laude with high honors in Molecular Biology. Alice has had a great interest in systems biology research for several years now, working at the National Cancer Institute, the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University, and UCLA. Alice was named as a Forbes 2017 30 Under 30 Featured Honoree.
5. Rana el Kaliouby — Affectiva
Nowadays, people spend more time interacting with their technological gadgets (phone, tablet, laptop) than with human beings. Affectiva is a company focused on bringing emotional intelligence to technologies. Emotional A.I. is a multibillion dollar industry which can revolutionize many industries such as media and advertising, research, retail, healthcare, education, to name a few. Affectiva’s goal is to bring emotional intelligence to the virtual world via emotion recognition technology.
Rana is an entrepreneur, scientist and Co-founder of Affectiva. She received a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Electronics and Business Administration from American University as well as a PhD in Computer Lab from the University of Cambridge. As one of the few women leading an A.I. tech company, she is very passionate about women in tech.
6. Elena Mustatea — Bold Health
Bold Health is an online platform that aids individuals with long term conditions. It helps improve the physical and mental health of users with the the teaching of mental tools such as stress reduction techniques as well as behavioral medicine. Depending on the specific treatment an individual is seeking, Bold Health adapts to the person by providing a customized treatment plan to suit the person’s unique needs and goals. The virtual therapeutics offered, are supported by licensed medical professionals at any time and any place the user may need them. Living with a chronic illness sometimes disturbs the person’s everyday life and prevents him from living life to the fullest. Being in control of one’s body and mind can offer countless benefits such as reduced vulnerability to depression and anxiety, as well as reduced stress, improved sleep and more energy.
Having experience as an investment banking analyst, Elena started her career as a venture capital investor at VC. She started Bold Health at Zinc VC, the platform for building new tech companies that solve the developed world’s toughest social issues, the first mission being to improve women and girls’ emotional and mental health. Elena graduated from Dartmouth College with Bachelor’s degree in Economics, Environmental Studies and International Studies.
7. Carol Reiley — Drive.AI
Thousands of Americans die in car accidents every year where most of the time the accidents are caused due to human error. The Drive.ai team believe that the technology they use can potentially revolutionize industries and save lives. Drive.ai is a startup that creates A.I. software for autonomous vehicles using deep learning. The company is focused towards building an artificial intelligence system for an autonomous vehicle in order to make the vehicle ‘smart.’
Carol has been a roboticist for the last two decades in surgical robotics. Carol has strong interest in the development of intelligent robotic systems that can help people in performing skillful tasks more accurately. Clara obtained her Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Santa Clara University and her PhD in Computer Science and Robotics from John Hopkins University.
8. Lorena Puica — I am Yiam
iamYiam is a people business focused on Preventive & Personalised Health — everyday and lifelong. iamYiam platform is here to leverage state of the art preventive health and molecular research, Reinforcement Learning (Ai) and digital technologies to empower people everywhere to personally take charge of their health with the help of Syd their personal Ai partner — everyday and lifelong. Syd can be there for people to help them better manage their health risks — with the final goal of reducing these health risk factors in a sustainable manner and increasing people’s quality of life everyday and lifelong. To date they have reduced health risks of CVD, Obesity, Stress/Mental Health, MSD and improved the quality of life by up to 61% for people in 32 countries, aged 2 to 77, 52% female and 48% male.
Born in Romania to father quantum physicist and mother entrepreneur, Lorena has achieved 5 degrees in mathematics, economics and finance, published a book on Microfinance as a tool for empowering individuals towards Sustainable Growth, created a decade-long career in strategy and investment management with global institutions working with portfolios of over £200billion while also being a extreme athlete with 2 world record events. Following 7 years of personal health challenges Lorena founded iamYiam.com as a Preventive Precision Health platform poised to leverage research, ML technology and creativity to empower 1bn people to take charge of their health everyday and lifelong. She’s a Speaker at World Government Summit ( https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org ) , Global Wellness Forum ( https://www.globalwellnesssummit.com ) , UK Government Missions Globally , amongst others.
9. Hannah Burrow — Kiroku
Highly skilled jobs require precise records. Kiroku is a smart note taking online platform designed to suit professional services such as medical services. Kiroku is developing a technology that understands a conversation between a medical practitioner and a patient in order to create expert language. Kiroku can listen to a conversation and create clinical notes saving considerable amounts of time in the process. With Kiroku, records are needed but recording them is no longer.
Hannah is an accomplished dentist who has worked in the public health industry practicing in hospitals. Hannah went to University of Bristol where she got her Bachelor’s of Dental Surgery. She is supported by Entrepreneur First and several other important names of the startup world.
10. Benedetta Arese — Oval Money
Oval Money is an app that aims to teach people to be wiser about their money everyday. Oval helps users by educating them in better ways to save money as well as developing healthy spending habits. It evaluates an individual income expenses and uses smart data analytics to enable him to make better financial decisions. It tracks daily expenses and gives the user a complete picture of his spending habits. Oval further allows the user to link all bank accounts and credit cards so with each purchase there is a specific record tracked and categorized automatically.
Benedetta is an avid runner and numbers enthusiast with great interest in the tech world. She obtained her Bachelor’s in Economics from Universita Bocconi and her MBA in Media & Entertainment, Entrepreneurship and Finance from NYU Stern School of Business.
We’re building WILD, your wellbeing and training companion. WILD focuses on amateur runners, cyclists and swimmers specifically, or “Endurance athletes” — by endurance, we mean any distance above 5km running, and by athlete, we mean anyone with a body, as Phil Knight (the founder of Nike) puts it. Endurance athletes typically gather vast amount of data (from their wearables, phones, and potential blood, stool tests), pro-actively want to improve themselves, and have a short reward loop (from action: training on Monday to reward: race on Sunday).
The team has a mix of Tech and business background: AI engineers, Neuroscience PhD, ex-bankers and hedgies, and avid athletes: ex-team GB, 100km trail runner, half ironman, or ice water swimmer. WILD was started at Entrepreneur First, and is backed by angels fascinated by sports, senescence and data.
We’re hiring!
