Today, Friday 8 March, we celebrate International Women’s Day – a global event to raise awareness of gender biases and to highlight the importance of forging a more gender-inclusive world. With #BalanceforBetter as the theme of this year’s International Women’s Day we thought it would be a good opportunity to reflect on the successes SETsquared Bristol have achieved in improving gender diversity among our founder members, as well as recognising the improvements that still need to be made.

In 2016, Rosie Bennett, Centre Director of SETsquared Bath authored an internal briefing paper on Increasing gender diversity at SETsquared incubation centres, prompted by the lack of women as founders or co-founders in the SETsquared partnerships. Prior to this report, SETsquared Bristol had three business members with women founders. We followed the actionable steps within the paper, and as of March 2019 we now have 23% women founders, an increase in 150%

Helen Tanner from Xavier Analytics winning Success of the Month at SETsquared Bristol’s February Connect Networking event

We continue to run initiatives to support our women founders and to encourage more diverse applicants, including a Women’s Founders Forum every quarter, and working to increase the number of women panellists on our Business Review Panels and mentor pool. Although progress has been made, there is still a long way to go for gender parity within the technology industry.

We are pleased to introduce our most recently joined women founders at SETsquared Bristol:

Dr Charlotte Bermingham – Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Vitamica

Charlotte has a background in physics and has been researching how to rapidly detect antimicrobial resistance for several years. Working with Co-founder Paul Meakin, their latest venture, Vitamica, is developing a novel diagnostic technology to test pathogenic bacteria for susceptibility to antibiotics within one hour.

Diana Finch – Managing Director at Bristol Pound

Diana Finch and the Bristol Pound team

Diana has experience in finance management, as well as experience managing and directing several companies. In 2012 Bristol Pound was launched and today it is the UK’s largest local currency. Their aim is to create a more resilient and sustainable independent business sector in Bristol and, in turn, a fairer and more inclusive local economy.

Helen Lloyd – Co-founder and Creative Director of Xavier Analytics

Helen is also the Front End Director of web development agency Hatch Apps who, alongside her colleagues Rich Nicholson and James Hulse, partnered with accounting agency FD Works to create Xavier Analytics. Xavier is a toolkit of intelligent data clean-up, bookkeeping and compliance tools designed for Xero Professionals. The business was recently awarded our Success of the Month Award for winning an Innovate UK R&D grant

Helen Tanner, Founder of Data Cubed

Helen Tanner – Founder of Data Cubed

Helen’s career started in the corporate world, with experience spanning oceanography, meteorology, wealth management, insurance, and equity. She now runs Data Cubed, a data lab designed to help make smarter business decisions, and create new products and services using data.

Rachael Brigham – Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of iXport

Rachael has over 20 years in Financial Services/Credit Card experience aligned with specialities in product development and project management. In 2018 alongside her Co-founder, Lyle De Groot, they set up iXport: a simple, affordable, one-step e-commerce trading platform for all businesses, but with a keen focus on helping SME’s to import and export goods with ease.

Stephanie Campbell, Co-founder of Okulo

Dr Stephanie Campbell – Co-founder and CEO of Okulo Ltd

Stephanie is a senior NHS optometrist with a PhD in vision science. Together with Dr Luke Anderson they co-founded OKULO to address unmet needs in the industry; home monitoring and remote diagnosis. Their vision is to reduce blindness by making eye care available to everyone with a smartphone.

Tanya Kelly – Co-founder and Company Director of Synterest

Tanya has an expertise as well as extensive experience working in hospitality, having worked at KPMG as a Global Tourism and Hospitality Consultant for four years, as well as most recently co-managing the Priory Inn in Tetbury for fourteen years, alongside Synterest Co-founder David Kelly. Their latest venture Synterest aims to create game-changing solutions to address the challenges in the hospitality industry with their product TableTiger.

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