December 7th will mark the end of the season 1 of Tech4Eva. It has been a long story and it is the beginning only.
Tech4Eva's story started in September 2020 with a beautiful view on a restaurant deck in Lavaux, close to Lausanne, a great bottle of white wine and my friend Lan Zuo, from EPFL Innovation Park: "Why don't we setup an accelerator for women's health".
That was the easiest part of the job. The hardest was to convince "short-visioned" people of the value of doing this. By principle, we could expect a "No", and with these people, "showing is selling". In 3 months we did set up the accelerator following the lean startup principles. I documented this here:
Nikoroe
The season 1 of Tech4Eva received 110 startups divided in 3 categories: early stage, growth and community.
Lan and her team made an amazing work at crafting an agenda and running it over the year: workshops, roadshow, focus groups,... The Tech4Eva name is known from San Francisco to Tokyo.
In 2021, the Tech4Eva startups raised $33.7MM and as of today they claim to expect an other $26.2MM within the next 3 months. This is excellent but it needs more structure and this is what will keep me busy in 2022, aside but close to Tech4Eva.
Startups CEOs' feedbacks are overly positive :
Embr Labs has participated in many accelerators, and the Tech4Eva experience has been one of the most valuable experiences to date. In addition to excellent exposure and mentoring, it is refreshing to participate in a program that is dedicated to the #FemTech space to allow companies to accelerate learning and growth. -Elizabeth Gazda, CEO Embr Labs
I am proud but mostly happy to have co-founded and co-directed this program in 2021, to have bent a few rules to make it happen in time. As for most successful businesses, it will attract convoitise, and many people will come and tell long pitches about how they congratulate themself about such a success, be sure of that.
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