5. min read
10 Inspiring Female Tech Founders in Berlin
Meet the women disrupting the tech scene in Berlin
With an impressive €19.7 billion invested in 2021, the future of Germany’s startup scene is bright. Yet according to the latest Startup Heatmap Report, only 18.04% of founders in Berlin are women. In a startup scene dominated by men, women founders often struggle to get investors to back their ideas. And not because they aren’t good.
The need to shout about women breaking those glass ceilings, especially those in tech, is still there. And we are going to keep doing just that.
Here is a list of 10 inspiring female founders in tech in Berlin. Could you be next?
1. Jessica Holzbach
Current role: Co-Founder & CEO at Pile
Co-founder of Germany’s Penta business bank, Jessica Holbach has Forbes 30 under 30, Capital 40 under 40, and Founder of the Year by German Startup Association under her belt.
Her latest venture is cashing in on the crypto wave with Pile, a crypto-as-a-service platform, that helps fintechs and neobanks to integrate crypto offerings.
2. Dagmar M. Schuller
Current role:
AudEERING is the innovation leader on intelligent audio engineering. Their emotionally intelligent technology can detect over 50 emotional states and traits, making voice, as a natural resource, usable for an everyday benefit for humans and health. With Dagmar M. Schuller as CEO and co-founder, audEERING boasts an impressive track record, winning the Innovation Award Bavaria 2018, named European Top 5 Deep Tech company for Digital Wellbeing by EIT Digital, and winning the VDE Bayern Award and the Vision Award in 2019.
3. Darja Gutnick
Current role:
After a stint in academia, Darja Gutnick quit her Ph.D to start her first company. Then another, then another. Her third company, Berlin-based startup Bunch, is on a mission to help every manager become a great leader by using data and psychology to deliver two-minute personalised leadership tips. Want to hear from the woman herself? Gutnick also hosts a weekly podcast, Teams at Work, with over 50k millennial & Gen Z listeners.
4. Deborah Choi
Current role: Founder at Founderland
As a five-time founder, building businesses is second-nature to Deborah Choi. Having founded a fashion e-commerce brand, a digital parenting magazine, an innovation agency for venture-backed startups, and a plant-care platform, her latest venture is social enterprise Founderland, which supports women of colour business owners in Europe.
5. Kave Bulambo
Current role: at TalentDiverse EU
Moving to Berlin from South Africa, one thing that stood out to Kave Bulambo was the lack of diversity in tech. Taking action, she founded My Career Path, a leadership and career development organisation for women and underrepresented professionals. Under the same umbrella, she launched TalentDiverse in 2020, a hiring platform.
6. Anna von Stackelberg
Current role: Co-founder & CBDO at Doctorly
After more than 10 years working in the creative sector, in 2017 Anna von Stackelberg joined Archil Eristavi, Nicklas Teicke, and Samir El-Ami in founding healthtech startup Doctorly. Modernising Germany’s medical system with a cloud-powered platform, the startup takes practice efficiency to a whole new level and lands von Stackelberg a well-deserved place on our list of top female founders.
7. Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer
Current role: Founder & CEO at FrauenLoop
As the founder and CEO of Berlin-based non-profit organisation, FrauenLoop, Dr. Stefflbauer addresses the marginalisation of immigrant, refugee, and working mothers from the technology industry. Named one of Female One Zero’s ‘Changemakers: 10 Women Who Make A Difference’, she is passionate about broadening access to technology and the impact of AI adoption on marginalised communities.
8. Maria Meier
Current role: CTO & Co-Founder at Phantasma Labs
Maria Meier is in the business of self-driving cars. With a masters degree in computer science and a successful career as a backend engineer, Meier also has winner of the 2019 SheLovesTech competition to add to her CV.
Does the name sound familiar? Xena was fortunate enough to pick Meier’s brains in an interview earlier this year (read here).
9. Dr. Anna Lukasson-Herzig
Current role:
Giving search the power of sight, Anna Lukasson-Herzig’s Berlin-based startup Nyris has developed an image search engine SaaS that finds products and objects in images within less than a second. Co-founded with her brother, the company already counts large companies such as Lidl, one of the largest grocery chains in Europe, and Daimler as customers. The young tech venture already has several awards to its name and is one of the first German start-ups in the Google funding program and part of the Microsoft ScaleUp program.
10. Amine Ünal
Current role: Technical Advisor & Co-Founder at ZkSystems
Coding since the age of 12 and building her first website at the age of 13, Amine Ünal is a software developer at heart. While working at T-Systems on projects for Adidas, ThyssenKrupp and Airbus, she faced the problem of intricate IT integrations first-hand. And so, with co-founder Diana Rees, ZkSystems was founded enabling easy and secure entry into equipment-as-a-service for leading industrial manufacturers.
