Mary Barra, Indra Nooyi, Meg Whiteman, Kiran Mazumdar, Yang Lan, Corinne Vigreux, Just a few names of women that are leading the most successful companies in the world like HP, Biocon, Sun Media, GM, PepsiCo, Xerox and TomTom. It’s this power to lead with foresight, ambition, entrepreneurial and innovative zeal that The Next Women Summit will be celebrating on June 12.
The program consists out of the presentation of TheNextWomen 100, TheNextWomen to Watch and the TheNextWomen Pitch Competition.
A few days before the grand summit, June 9, the semi-finalists will contend for a spot in the finales of the most celebrated female startup pitch competition in Europe. The most innovative female startup founder will receive a convertible loan of 10.000 from TheNextWomen CrowdFund and mentoring from TheNextWomen top100 entrepreneurs. Previous winners of TheNextWomen Pitch Competition Printr, Vastari, & Plugify raised between a half and three quarters of a million within 9 months.
The pitch competition is designed for early-stage startups from around the globe to gain exposure and valuable feedback from the industry’s best female entrepreneurs, investors and experts.
The startups are asked to gather Facebook likes as a part of the people’s choice vote. The people’s choice points will be added to the points startups get from the jury. So like the startup that you think is the most innovative and promising one and help us promote female entrepreneurship.
You can vote until June 8, 24:00 hours CEST.
Here are with further ado, the semi-finalist of the NextWomenPitch Competition 2017. Start voting!
Bellamy Gallery (The Netherlands)
“Buy less, buy good, look good & love our environment.” That’s founding tenet of the retail startup Bellamy Gallery. Founded by veteran retail executives Mireille van der Sprong and Imke Bens the startup focuses on offering high quality and affordable ‘key pieces’ that can be easily combined with the rest of your wardrobe.
Read the full profile of Bellamy Gallery and vote.
Clevergig (The Netherlands)
Clevergig is a HR tech startup that builds ‘clever’ software solutions for the gig-economy, hence the name Clevergig. The value proposition is to enable companies to easily manage their flexible workforce, and to give workers the freedom to work whenever they want, for whom they want. Clevergig is co-founded by Elvire Jaspers and Michel Pilet.
Read the full profile of Clevergig and vote.
Faqta (The Netherlands)
According to the founder of Faqta, Anouk Binkhuysen, the current school material of children is boring. Children want to learn in a more adventurous and attractive way and that’s why she started Faqta. Her mission is to help primary schools with learning method that facilitates a transition from teacher-oriented learning to child-oriented learning.
Read the full profile of Faqta and vote.
HANX (United Kingdom)
The male condom is the single most effective contraceptive that protects against sexually transmitted infections. But still buying condoms is difficult for women, taboo and embarrassing. The condom market is in addition male-dominated and targeted. The mission of HANX founder Sara Welsh is to change this. She has therefore developed HANX: the first luxury male condom designed uniquely with women in mind.
Read the full profile of HANX and vote.
Khaloom (India)
Global textile brands most often produce their fabrics in emerging economies and produce an increasing amount of textile waste. The startup Khaloom intends to combat this by collecting post-production textile waste and up-cycling it into fabrics via traditional spinning and weaving techniques. The founders of Khaloom are Rubie van Crevel and hailing from India Prasanna Colluru.
Read the full profile of Khaloom and vote.
LifeSense (The Netherlands)
1 in 3 women suffer from urine loss after childbirth and 6 out of 10 never dare speak about it. The smart protective underwear and exercise app Carin of LifeSense aims to solve this problem. The Carin set teaches women how to train their pelvic floor muscles. Women see results in 2-4 weeks and are cured in 6-8 weeks. Julia van Zanten is co-founder as well as creative lead of LifeSense.
Read the full profile of LifeSense and vote.
SimplyEdit (The Netherlands)
SimplyEdit has built a platform that removes the need for development skills for website development. The design skills of the designer suffice as he can ‘simply edit’ his designs with knowledge of HTML and CSS. Lizanne Overkamp is the CEO of SimplyEdit’s parent company Muze.
Read the full profile of SimplyEdit and vote.
Smartify (United Kingdom)
Smartify is a platform for the discovery and sharing of art. The ‘Shazam and Spotify of art’ uses advanced image recognition to instantly identify artworks and returns engaging text, audio and video information through Smartify app and augmented reality. Smartify is founded by Anne Lowe.
Read the full profile of Smartify and vote.
Sprinklr (The Netherlands)
Today a large number of people live in urban areas. And this number will increase. Unfortunately in ‘the urban jungle’ as Sprinklr’s founder Suzanne van Straaten calls it everything is a bit too grey. People like and try to add more green to their life by buying plants. Sprinklr’s goal is to ease this process for the lazy plantsperson’s among us via an app that helps you buy the one you want and more importantly keep them alive.
Read the full profile of Sprinklr and vote.
Swipeguide (The Netherlands)
SwipeGuide is a startup that intends to take the still ‘analog’ world of product guides and manuals online. That is, above and beyond a pdf. The startup has built a platform that empowers companies and their employees to create interactive and visual step-by-step instructions that are published instantly to mobile devices. The founders of Swipeguide are Willemijn Schneyder and Daan Assen.
Read the full profile of Swipeguide and vote.
Vava Coffee (Kenya)
Vava Coffee a social enterprise that has a network of over 30,000 small-holder farmers in different regions of Kenya that produce speciality coffee. Launched almost eight years ago the company has the mission to fight against the dominant market dynamics that favours buyers and consumers have at expense of producers. A practice that contributes to low incomes and poverty in farming communities. Vava Coffee is founded by Vava Angwenyi.
Read the full profile of Vava Coffee and vote.