Once a year, the world pays honour to the formerly known “weaker sex”. Fortunately, by now history has proven, that everything but this attribute is true. Women have not only shaped the past and disrupted the male paved path, but also added indispensable values such as empathy and perseverance to a male dominated world.

Yet, talking about powerful women, most of us would think of Madame Curie, Anne Frank or Malala Yousafzai – apart from Angela Merkel. Although time and women’s role in society have changed, very often they do not receive the recognition they actually deserve.

Exactly for that reason we would proudly like to present our astonishing female founders and emphasize their extraordinary projects and achievements.

Dominique Waddoup from Birdshades: Birdshades developed a transparent, high-tech window coating to save billions of birds worldwide from deadly collisions with glass surfaces of buildings. 

Claudia Schabauer from DocTec: DocTec combines modern IoT and BigData methods with a unique arrangement of high quality environmental sensors and data management in order to offer the best environmental measurement and documentation technology. 

Romana Dorfer and Silja Kempinger from Factinsect: Factinsect is a software based on artificial intelligence for automated fact-checking that helps to assess the credibility of information from the Internet.

Ines Wöckl from Flasher: Flasher, is an easy-to-use, IoT-enabled safety wearable for riders of micro-mobility vehicles (i.e., bicycles, e-bikes, e-scooters, Segways, etc.) designed to tackle a wide range of safety issues that these traffic participants face. 

Paola Belingheri and Fabiana Milzer from IceKing: IceKing's mission is to create a virtuous cycle between sustainable tourism on glaciers and scientific research, to tackle important challenges facing our society, including climate change, water, and energy management.

Sara Carniello from K3lab: K3lab provides an all-in-one sorting tool for packaging waste, to enable recycling in rural or isolated regions and foster conscious waste management.

Jelena Slobodnjak from SmactY: Smacty is a IoT hardware communication platform. They support companies with development, deployment and scaling of IoT applications and devices. 

Recently incubated in the SPG family are Patrizia Melpignano from POCorel, Julia Schadinger from REELOQ and Anna Harrer and Sophia Harrer from Smart Gearing.

Elaheh Momeni-Ortner from eMentalist: The eMentalist is an automated data scientist, which identifies opportunities and trends for your investments and your business before they become obvious.

Tamara Kögl from Greenhive: Greenhive is the vision of farmers to live unburdened with the development and offering of an autonomous airborne plant protection unit that supports farmers in an economic manner using modern technology.

Charlotte Ohonin from NORGANOID: NORGANOID provides a pioneering organ-on-a-chip platform, enabling accelerated drug screening and development. 

Victoria Dejaco from simplify.art: simplify.art provides an intuitive database for archiving art. It is the first interoperable system on the market, giving artists, galleries and collectors the chance to cooperate smoothly and share content within a system which facilitates communication and sales.

Margarete Metter from STAP: STAP is developing specialised monitoring solutions with seamless indoor and outdoor tracking.Systems are designed especially for airports to increase safety, security and efficiency in regard of rules from IATA, ICAN  and EUROCONTROL.

Katerina Sedlakova from WAIBROsports: WAIBROsports has developed a wearable that enables blind, visually impaired athletes and hobby athletes to independently practice outdoor sports. Thus, activities, such as running and cross-country skiing are made possible for everybody. 

Editorial note: At SPG and ESA BIC Austria, one of our credos is diversity! Neither do we make a difference regarding gender, race or religion, nor do we compare our valued start-ups with one another. This article merely wants to express our respect for our female founders on the international women’s day.