Project description
Empowering women in deep tech entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship fuels innovation and economic growth, yet women remain significantly underrepresented in Europe’s start-up ecosystem, especially in the booming deep tech sector. With only 10 % of patent applications held by women and less than 15 % of startups launched by women, the gender gap persists. The EIC-funded EmpoWomen project aims to break down these barriers. Focused on the Widening region, it offers a groundbreaking support programme for female founders of deep tech startups, providing acceleration services and up to 60 000 EUR in free-equity funding and vouchers. Partnering with key players like Sploro, Tech Ukraine, Business Angels Europe and Startup Wise Guys, this innovative programme pioneers a path to cultivate the next generation of female tech leaders, addressing the inequality in Europe’s entrepreneurial landscape.
Objective
Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in our economies and societies. New businesses help bring innovations to the market, create the bulk of new net jobs and are an engine of productivity growth. Unfortunately, women remain substantially under-represented as entrepreneurs and are a rarity in Europe. While they represent more than half the population, women account for less than a third of entrepreneurs. Such under-representation of women is not only a matter of inequality.
In the deep tech area, which represents more than a quarter of Europes start-up ecosystem and is now valued at 700b, women obtain only 10% of patent applications in the EU, and less than 15% of start-ups are founded or co-founded by women.
Despite the efforts by the EC, widening area startups are still underrepresented in initiatives like Women TechEU.
EmpoWOMEN TechEU was born to overcome the obstacles of digital and deep tech innovations led by women and improve equality in the entrepreneurship deep tech domain. EmpoWOMEN TechEU will offer a unique programme for scaling up women-led companies from the Widening Area.
The main objective of the project will be to create an exclusive support programme for female founders and entrepreneurs leading deep tech startups from widening-area countries to grow into tomorrows female tech leaders and put women at the forefront of deep tech in Europe.
We will run a programme in two open calls that will provide a unique acceleration programme, free-equity funding, prizes and vouchers for services for 25 selected women-led companies operating in the deep tech sector.
Sploro, Tech Ukraine, Business Angels Europe and Startup Wise Guys, all together with 8 startup associations from the widening area will run this innovative programme which will be the first to support deep tech women-led companies including an acceleration service by SWG, events attendance & investment readiness with direct training from Business Angels and connections with actual VCs.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managemententrepreneurship
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
You need to log in or register to use this function
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-CSA - HORIZON Coordination and Support ActionsCoordinator
31006 PAMPLONA
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.