In the very early days of Sifted, before we launched our website, our all-female team of reporters had a conversation I won’t forget.
Our homepage, we decided, wouldn’t look like other tech websites’ homepages. Our homepage would feature women.
In an industry where just 12% of funding goes to female founders, all-male panels are all-too common at conferences and the majority of podcast hosts and guests are men (then, and now), we decided to do things differently.
If we needed a comment from a VC for an article, why not ask a female VC? If we could choose between a picture of a female interviewee in an analysis piece, or a male interviewee, why not choose the woman? And if we were asked to moderate a panel without a single woman on it, say 'no'.
‘You can’t be what you can’t see,’ as the saying goes — and we wanted the brilliant women working in Europe’s tech ecosystem to be seen.
Fast-forward six years, when Station F director Roxanne Varza and Sistafund investor Alice Groth asked me if Sifted wanted to work with them on a list of 100 female rising stars in Europe, it was an immediate ‘yes’.
Our goal was to highlight women building incredible companies, landing career-making deals, working on breakthrough technology and leading regulatory, policy and cultural change.
The challenge was never going to be to find them: it was to narrow them down.
2,500+ nominations
From Sifted readers alone, we had over 2,500 nominations from all corners of the continent, working in a huge range of roles and companies.
We also assembled an all-star nomination committee of leading industry figures across the continent: Cherry Ventures partner Sophia Bendz; Angel Academe founder Sarah Turner; Pleo CTO Meri Williams; 20VC partner Julien Codorniou; TinyVC partner Philip Moehring; Bek Ventures managing partner Cem Sertoglu; European Women in VC founder Kinga Stanislawska; Acurio Ventures general partner Kate Cornell; Kima Ventures general partner Alexis Robert; 10x Founders investor Nicolas Schoenenberger; Entrepreneurs First partner Coralie Chaufour; and Sista operations director Marie Millet.
The nominees included community builders, industry pioneers, top scientists and hugely impactful angel investors. They included women who were the first-ever ‘X’ in their field, who are driving forces behind their companies and supporters of other women around them.
But we couldn’t choose them all.
Over the summer, we whittled those thousands of names down to a shortlist of 200 for our fantastic judges: Wise cofounder and Plural partner Taavet Hinrikus; Starling founder Anne Boden; Slush CEO Aino Bergius; Pigment cofounder and CEO Éléonore Crespo; 2hearts cofounder Gülsah Wilke; EU Inc cofounder and Factory CEO Simon Schaefer; and HV Capital general partner Rainer Märkle.
Our jury then slimmed the list further to give us our final 100.
What did we learn? Europe isn’t short of amazing female tech leaders. It’s just sometimes lacking the spaces to celebrate them in.
Today, we present you with the 100 women our judges believe are having the most impact in their field and are most deserving of recognition this year. Find the full list here.
Thank you to our nomination committee and judges. Thank you to Cherry Ventures, Partech and Eurazeo who kindly sponsored the celebration dinner for the list. And, of course, thank you to all the Sifted readers who took the time to nominate an amazing woman they know.
Next year we hope to be back with an equally impressive list — and in the meantime, I can’t wait to see every single one of this year’s women appear on a podcast or panel soon!
