Katherine Olives
Many of you are familiar with our partnership with Standard Chartered Bank, and the track they support (Women+Tech4NYC). In partnership with Standard Chartered, increasing the number of women founders in NYC (and supporting them) remains a core initiative of the Zahn Center. Last year, we achieved gender parity in our competition (a rise from a mere 17% women just three years prior). This year, women represent at least 60% of our cohort! To close out Women's History Month, we'd like to take a minute to call out the startups that are either founded solely by women, or have women on the founding team. And as you can see, it's nearly every team (the others are strong allies–The Coach, Stage One, and WiseWatch looking at you!).
- Adon (formerly HolesNYC): a fitness shirt that tracks muscle movement to help you achieve the best results when you lift weights
- Design & Disorder: a sleek wearable for individuals with hearing loss to help them identify the sounds around them
- Sugar-Tat: a wearable technology that monitors diabetes without having to prick your finger
- Fruition: an app that enables students to enhance their success through personalized study plans
- Gesture-Controlled Robot: a robot controlled via hand gestures made by the user, meant to enhance quality of life for people with disabilities
- olacare (formerly Olahealth): a customizable sexual/reproductive health app for the LGBTQIA+ community
- STEM Hive: a platform for young girls to engage in STEM, receive community mentorship, and gather cryptocurrency rewards based on academic or social achievements
- Study Space: smart co-working spaces for students to improve their studying experiences
- Beyond the Margins: bettering education for marginalized groups
- It Hurts: a local, community-driven social enterprise dedicated to eradicating female genital cutting by empowering young activists through education & art
- Rising Phoenix: an organization that aims to help survivors of sexual assault reclaim their lives
- MarkGen (formerly EMAC): a platform that uses machine learning tools to handle multivariate relationships to simulate market data and provide accurate risk assessments for financial products
- GetUp: an app that makes exercise fun and helps to motivate individuals to form healthy physical activity habits
- PopIt: a digital idea board that allows to organize screenshots, photos, and links in one place to better achieve goals, build skills, and learn about various topics
The reason we end Women's History Month with this call is that even though NYC is the best place for female founders, and even though programs like ours exist to inspire more young women to pursue entrepreneurship and tech, there are still hurdles for these young women to climb. For example, even as the number of women-led businesses grow at an unprecedented rate, a mere 2% of all Venture Capital goes to female founders.
What can you do? Speak up & sponsor. If you can get into rooms that she can't, make sure that you're her greatest advocate.