Viva Technology: The Female Founder Challenge

May 15, 2019 | Invest in France

From the 16th until the 18th of May will be held in Paris, one of the biggest conferences for start-ups and innovation in Europe, Viva Technology. 9,000 start-ups, 1,900 investors and more than 100,500 people are attending the event. In this context, the Female Founder Challenge has been launched. This article is based on Maddyness’s exclusive interview with some of the organisers of this competition.

The Female Founder Challenge

In partnerships, Viva Technology and 50inTech have organised this competition for female start-up entrepreneurs. Even though a gender-mixed team is by 63% more performant than a start-up co-founded only by men, women represent only 15% of co-founders and receive just 7% of venture capital. Caroline Ramade, founder of 50inTech explains to Maddyness that: “the access to funding is today’s major impediment for female entrepreneurship in tech. The Female Founder Challenge represents for us more than a mere competition to gain visibility as 60 start-ups co-founded by women from all over the world are going to be matched with relevant investors during office hours and 10 of them will be pitching in front of an international jury-panel of investors to raise for the first round of seed capital or series A”.

The 10 finalists: la crème de la crème

In total, 390 applications coming from over 54 countries have been received. Out of these applications 60 start-ups were first selected by international funds like Atomico, Ventech and Jane VC to participate to Viva Technology and meet more investors. After a second round of selection, Viva Technology et 50inTech reveals to Maddyness in exclusivity the 10 finalists invited to pitch during Viva Technology on the 17th of May:

Allure System: uses digitization and artificial intelligence to automatically generate ready-to-wear photographs allowing e-merchants to produce visuals without resorting to a shooting.
Baarb: is a search assistant for global travel brands capturing with AI what travellers care about the most for their trip and so offering the most relevant choices at the of top of their search results.
Good-Loop: converts advertising funds into free funding for charities, while offering 50% to 75% better performance for the advertiser.
Kannelle: allows to easily create professional and corporate videos from a smartphone.
Lili.ai: assists your team and project management with risk detection, job tracking and knowledge capitalisation.
Medsaf: ease the process of buying and managing the drug supply chain management to hospital and pharmacist in Africa.
ObjectBox: is an object-oriented database, built uniquely for IoT and Mobile devices and bringing edge computing to small devices.
Pangian: is a platform to find remote jobs and be part with a chat to a network of remote workers.
TeamEQ: transforms companies into high-performance living systems and improving team engagement and well-being thanks to their organisational management solution relying on AI.
Wishibam: proposes a solution of management and multichannel digitalisation of retails to enhance customers’ experience.

The winning start-up will be invited to deliver a speech at the Women’s Forum Global Meeting in Paris, get a pass for the Women’s Forum of Singapore, receive a coaching by Inwibe and a stall at the Viva Technology conference of 2020.

Women are in tech

During the interview, Maddyness asks: “What is the best answer to give to those that say that there is no female entrepreneur in tech?”. Caroline Ramade replies that this competition is exactly there to achieve this goal: “It [the competition] is exceptional and the best answer to anyone arguing that there is no female entrepreneur in tech. They are all striving to raise funds. So, the real success is if several of them actually manage to raise capital funds thanks to the Female Founder Challenge.” Julie Ranty, the co-manging director of VivaTech, adds: “The strength of this challenge is to see that many investors are aware of the funding inequality that affect start-up created by women. This awareness is essential; this is why for the 4th edition of VivaTech we are taking action for female entrepreneurs and young women who want to get a career in tech or sciences”.

Viva Technology is the ideal place to engage conversation on key issues and on the future of the tech world. In this context, the importance of the Nordic countries is highlighted. A workshop on the on the theme of “why the new Nordic scale up generation will be more effective?” is taking place on the 16th of May at 10:00 and everyone is welcome to join us there!