Meet 3 Female Founders who call Berlin Home

The face of the tech world is changing to reflect the various perspectives of user markets worldwide, and that means the gender gap is slowly but surely closing in. Research suggests that having more women in tech would lead to better performance and more diversified products, as well as inspire other women to go for their goals.

Only 9% of Berlin startups have a woman at the helm, which is much less than US counterparts like Silicon Valley and New York. However, in general, the percentage of funding rounds going to female-headed startups — especially in the seed stage — has been steadily increasing globally over the years.

An excellent example of this is Doreen Huber, who founded her first company at age 18 and is now in charge of her fourth company, Lemoncat, an online marketplace for business catering operating in 280 cities in Germany with plans to expand globally. Huber places a lot of value on building her startups with the right people and her rule of thumb is “professionals want to work with professionals”, and it’s this quality over quantity approach to hiring that is fundamental to her startup successes.

Women are also succeeding entrepreneurially in traditional fields, such as the public sector. Janina Mütze, who was featured on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list in 2018, co-founded Civey to deliver representative opinion data to clients. Having garnered financial support from Investitionsbank Berlin’s ProFit program and the European Regional Development Fund, it ended up generating 21 million users within two years, thus becoming Germany’s biggest market research panel. Mütze says that a good network is key if you are a woman pushing for success in the tech scene and that as a product or company, you need to guarantee a certain amount of authenticity — and privacy — in order to gain clients’ trust. She also recognizes the importance of female leaders to set an example.

Emerging tech segments such as Femtech (women’s health products) were once thought of as a niche industry but this convergence of digital health and wellbeing products are now lauded as the next biggest segment within healthcare and have received over $1 billion in funding over the last three years. A pioneer of Femtech is Ida Tin, a Danish entrepreneur who co-founded the popular period and ovulation-tracking app Clue in Berlin, which is now a global success story that is transforming millions of users’ reproductive lives.