Women in fintech: 12 leading female-led startups in Europe

The startup ecosystem in Europe is quite diverse. As of now, women in technology are under-represented and not event get the same level of recognition that men have. Of course, the gender gap that has been followed for decades or even centuries is to be blamed for this.

However, the scene witnessed a transformation of late with several female tech entrepreneurs taking leadership roles. These female-founded startups are bringing about a positive change in the business world. While a handful of women-led startups are striving hard towards boosting other aspiring women in the business world, here we list 12 female-led startups in Europe as listed by EIT Digital Accelerator’s ‘Women in Deep Tech – European Landscape 2019’ report’s Digital Finance category.

Futrli (UK)

Founders: Hannah Dawson
Funding: €4.8 million
Founded year: 2014

Why its hot: Futrli is on a quest to move the needle on the small business economy. It spans over 130 million small businesses across the world. The core product dubbed Futrli Advisor supports over 45,000 businesses and 1,000 accountants across 130 countries. With time, it an ideal tool for accountants with reporting, forecasting, business planning, and scenario modelling. This was followed by Flow, the first Futrli Platform product suite.

Features Analytics (Belgium)

Founders: Cristina Soviany
Founded year: 2014

Why its hot: Feature Analytics has developed eyesDES AI technology and platform for predictive modelling and anomaly detection. For this, the company has transposed the AI-based principles coming from cancer tissue characterisation in ultrasound imaging. With these, the company delivers the complete surveillance solution for detecting market abuse in Capital Markets and Foreign eXchange. Its solution operates in Live Mode, Big Data environments, and batch processing.

omni:us (Germany)

Founders: Eric Pfarl, Harald Gölles, Martin Micko, Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss, Stephan Dorfmeister
Funding: €31.7 million
Founded year: 2015

Why its hot: omni:us is an Artificial Intelligence as a Service provider for cognitive claims management. It is fully built on a data-driven approach and transforms the way insurers interact with insured parties. The company provides all the necessary tools and data to make fast, empathetic, and transparent claim decisions while reducing loss adjustment expenses and improving operational efficiency.

Cerebreon Technologies (Ireland)

Founders: Gillian Doyle, Kenneth Doherty
Funding: €230k
Founded year: 2016

Why its hot: Cerebreon Technologies provides deep learning technology platforms to the insolvency and debt industry. It automatically processes and analyses the insolvency documents and administers and predicts the final outcome of debt recovery. It also improves the net margins for stakeholders. The core product of Cerebreon Technologies extracts, validates, and processes unstructured insolvency data and documents to minimise operating costs, forecast portfolio recovery, improve accuracy, and more.

Kaiko (France)

Founders: Ambre Soubiran, Pascal Gauthier
Funding: €5 million
Founded year: 2014

Why its hot: Kaiko, which was formerly known as Challenger Deep is a digital assets data provider that covers top cryptocurrency exchanges. The startup collects, normalises and distributes cryptocurrency and provides raw and aggregated data that is needed to gain a competitive advantage in the market. The company has a team with expertise in finance, data science, and distributed systems to optimise work.

Active Asset Allocation (France)

Founders: Adina Grigoriu
Funding: €4.1 million
Founded year: 2010

Why its hot: Active Asset Allocation is a completely independent fintech company, which has specialised in the management of portfolio risks and optimisation of investment strategies for asset managers and institutional investors across the world. The company provides a range of services such as portfolio analysis, risk-based asset allocation advice and more. It provides ongoing reporting for clients so that they can measure progress and reach their objectives.

Everledger (United Kingdom)

Founders: Leanne Kemp
Funding: €28.6 million
Founded year: 2015

Why its hot: Everledger is an independent tech startup, which helps businesses surface and converge asset information with a symphony of secure technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, intelligent labelling, and the Internet of Things. The company supports partners and makes them resilient and sustainable. Notably, Everledger has been recognised with several awards for its achievements.

INZMO (Germany)

Founders: Meeri Rebane, Risto Klausen
Funding: €3.8 million
Founded year: 2015

Why its hot: INZMO is an advanced fully-digital insurance platform that creates value and enhances the experience of insuring for all parties involved in all key stages. They help insurers to become digital, corporates to increase their value proposition with insurance, and customers to enjoy the instant experience in managing their insurance. The company has gained recognition and investments for its innovative solutions.

Bankingblocks (Netherlands)

Founders: Daria Rippingale, Fabien Boursin
Founded year: 2016

Why its hot: Bankingblocks is a wholesale provider of banking solutions for the fintech and payments industry. The company offers purpose-built financial solutions for companies in the industry so that they offer such services to their customers. Bankingblocks provides services such as acquiring, alternative payments, banking services, card issuing, foreign exchange, etc. It uses blocks that clients can select, arrange and connect to, as per their requirements.

Fluidly (United Kingdom)

Founders: Caroline Plumb OBE
Funding: €14.5 million
Founded year: 2016

Why its hot: It is important for businesses to have a clear picture of the financial future as it might be hard to make decisions without the same. This is where Fluidly helps businesses with its Artificial Intelligence-powered intuitive cashflow management platform. It lets businesses know what exactly the future holds for them and how to optimise the same by providing automated cash flow forecasts in the span of minutes.

AQMetrics (Ireland)

Founders: Geraldine Gibson
Funding: €2.7 million
Founded year: 2012

Why its hot: AQMetrics provides integrated compliance and risk management software to fund asset managers, administrators, broker/dealer companies, and investment managers. The platform delivers risk profiling and monitoring, data management, compliance workflows, and all reports accessible in one place. With AQMetrics, companies understand their risks and also exhibit greater compliance with regulations unlike before.

Nephelai (France)

Founders: Eleonore de Vial, Romain Mangeret, Jérémy Dupré, Xavier Guénard
Founded year: 2018

Why its hot: With Artificial Intelligence at the service of transaction management, Nephelai addresses the problem of data entry errors that lead to losses. The company provides solutions that reduce their consequences by identifying errors while entering the order management system. It does this with state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms that are focused on helping financial institutions reach operational excellence and also save substantially.

Main image picture credits: omni:us

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