Researchers and Innovators: Showcasing Female-Founded Fintech Achievement
In 2022, Finovate launched its Demo Scholarship Program. The aim of the program is to highlight fintech entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities, as well as fintech startups tackling issues of climate change, diversity and financial inclusion. At each event, starting with FinovateFall in 2022, Finovate awards five scholarships in the categories of environment, social, governance, person of color founded/owned and woman founded/owned.
As Women’s History Month draws to a close this week, we wanted to take a moment to highlight the scholarship winners in the Female Founded/Owned category since our scholarship program launched last year.
Pope
FinovateSpring 2023 Scholarship Winner – Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Pope enables credit risk teams to identify healthy borrowers, optimize credit limits and improve collection results. Pope’s technology provides access to a unified view of end customers’ cash flow and financial profile to help with a variety of use cases, including cash advances, credit building, overdraft protection and more.
Pope was co-founded by Emma Rouf in 2020. Rouf previously co-founded Adazza – a company that built integrations with telecom and mobile money operators in emerging markets, including Africa and Central Asia, to collect and analyze data for analytics and machine learning applications.
Quorum
Winner of FinovateEurope 2023 scholarship – Headquartered in London, UK, and founded in 2018, Quorum offers an end-to-end fundraising and cap table management software solution for private companies. The firm’s technology enables users to raise capital up to four times faster thanks to Quoroom’s investment workflow. Quoroom supports a range of functions, including building an investor pipeline and conducting investor matchmaking and outreach, as well as legal completion and cap table management.
Ulyana Shtybel is co-founder and CEO. Shtybel was named to Inspiring Fifty Europe’s list Top fifty women in European technology for 2022.
TAZI AI
Winner of FinovateEurope 2023 scholarship – Based in San Francisco, California and founded in 2017, TAZI AI is a machine learning platform that enables companies and data scientists to develop ML models for agile decision making. The company received recognition from Gartner as a Cool supplier in core AI technologies for continuous learning, explainable AI and human-in-the-loop technology. TAZI AI won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope this year.
Zehra Cataltepe is co-founder and CEO. A former professor of computer engineering for 17 years, Cataltepe is a member of the Forbes Technology Council, and an Alchemist Accelerator alum, Class of 26.
Debbie
FinovateFall 2022 Scholarship Winner – Based in Miami, Florida and founded in 2021, Debbie is Noom for debt loss. The company leverages behavioral psychology and rewards to help users pay off 3x more debt and enable lenders to recession-proof borrowers. Debbie won Best of Show at FinovateFall 2022 for her app that guides borrowers through a curriculum based on practical financial assignments, offers rewards for successful goal attainment, and makes it easier for borrowers to connect and track all of their debt accounts.
Co-founder Frida Leibowitz is the managing director. A member of the first class of On Deck’s fellows program in 2021, Leibowitz spent more than two and a half years working for Marcus of Goldman Sachs.
Photo by fauxels
