The global venture capital ecosystem is facing an undeniable paradox. While institutional investors and corporate venture funds are aggressively hunting for breakout deep-tech breakthroughs – from hydrogen energy breakthroughs to next-generation bio-sensing platforms – they consistently overlook one of the market’s most potent alpha drivers: women founders.
Across Europe, less than 3% of venture capital funding flows to female-led startups, a systemic market inefficiency that becomes even more acute within EU Widening countries. This is not a pipeline problem; it is a structural financing gap.
To bridge this divide, the Horizon Europe EmpoWomen programme launched a 24-month, €2 million initiative (November 2023 – October 2025) designed to act as a robust de-risking mechanism for institutional investors. By providing structured acceleration, investment-readiness training, and non-dilutive equity-free funding, the programme set out to prove that equitable development in the European tech sector is not just a social imperative, but a highly profitable commercial strategy.
Now officially completed – with final reporting confirmed and the final financial distributions executed – the results demonstrate how a structured, cross-border framework can transform early-stage technical innovation into highly scalable, investment-ready enterprises.
The Power of the Consortium: Orchestrating an Ecosystem
Executing an initiative of this geographic and technical scale requires seamless operational alignment. The overarching management of the programme was masterfully coordinated by the consortium leader, Sploro. Their professional guidance and operational excellence created a highly functional framework that allowed all partners to maximize their domain expertise.
By combining Sploro’s management with the specialized acceleration and investment-readiness methodology of Startup Wise Guys and the extensive investor networks of Business Angels Europe (BAE), the consortium operated as a unified, balanced ecosystem. Within this structure, TechUkraine assumed a critical role, managing Work Package 4 (Communication, Dissemination, and Exploitation) – a responsibility that required transforming raw technical milestones into compelling, market-facing narratives.
Data-Driven Marketing: How TechUkraine Scaled Global Outreach
The communication and dissemination roadmap was not a static marketing campaign; it was an evolving, data-driven strategy that shifted dynamically from infrastructure building in its first year to optimized, aggressive scaling in its second.
Year 1: Building the Foundations
The initial 12 months focused on establishing a highly recognizable, authoritative digital presence from the ground up. TechUkraine designed a cohesive visual identity, deployed core digital channels, and built baseline community networks across Europe. This foundational phase validated the initial market outreach, driving 170 applications for Open Call 1 and resulting in the selection of the first 11 trailblazing startups.
Year 2: Optimization and Targeted Scaling
Rather than repeating the Year 1 playbook, the strategy for Year 2 was radically optimized based on empirical performance data. Emphasizing a relationship-driven approach, TechUkraine and consortium partners integrated over 100 National Contact Points (NCPs) and regional ecosystem hubs directly into the dissemination pipeline.
This operational shift yielded an exponential leap in performance metrics:
Expanded Volume: Total applications grew by 47.6%, yielding 251 submitted proposals spanning 29 countries.
Enhanced Conversion: Refined messaging and targeted ecosystem engagement doubled the eligible proposal conversion rate to 40.68%, ensuring the evaluation panel reviewed highly qualified, legally compliant deep-tech ventures.
Simultaneously, the narrative strategy expanded to humanize dense technical concepts through multimedia storytelling, utilizing the EmpoWomen Podcast on Spotify and dedicated Heroine Stories. To influence systemic change, the consortium’s public policy research – the EmpoWomen White Paper – was translated into visual infographics and targeted media kits, significantly expanding its reach among European policymakers.
The Leverage Effect: Converting Public Capital into Private Alpha
The ultimate validation of the EmpoWomen programme does not lie in marketing engagement, but in the hard commercial and technical milestones achieved by its participants. Over its lifespan, the initiative engaged 1,761 deep-tech startups, mobilized 89 world-class mentors, and deployed €1,189,962 in direct equity-free funding across two cohorts, supporting 25 startups in total.
Crucially, follow-up data reveals a powerful leverage effect: every €2 of public capital injected into these startups helped unlock subsequent private investment.
A retrospective analysis of Cohort 1, exactly one year post-graduation, illustrates this commercial momentum:
1. Capital Modernization & Venture Funding
IPLEXMED (Portugal): Entered late-stage seed preparations, successfully negotiating a €1M SAFE investment alongside a broader €3.2M seed round.
The Newsroom & GOTECH Antimicrobial: Secured critical follow-on capital and advanced into the final negotiations of major institutional funding rounds, lengthening their operational runways.
2. Technical Readiness & Commercial Deployment
GMZ Enerji (Türkiye): Successfully achieved Technology Readiness Level 9 (TRL 9) for its advanced hydrogen energy membranes and initiated pre-commercial agreements with industrial partners.
Pinky CyberSafe (Moldova): Transitioned from development to market deployment, launching the commercial version of its SME-focused cybersecurity SaaS platform.
P-Agro Minerals (Latvia): Constructed a functional pilot prototype for wastewater phosphorus recovery and successfully secured its first business-case enterprise customers.
Hugup (Poland): Finalized its advanced 3D-knitted pregnancy wellness prototype, clearing the path toward manufacturing scaling.
3. Intellectual Property & Market Validation
IPLEXMED: Filed four distinct patents and successfully executed critical pre-clinical trials.
IQ Biozoom (Poland): De-risked its non-invasive saliva biosensing technology through multiple successful validation studies.
Innosensus (Lithuania): Optimized its gluten-detection biosensors and secured two Letters of Intent (LOIs) from global technology conglomerates.
Astroteq.ai (Poland): Expanded its commercial trajectory, closing major client contracts and strategic partnership agreements for its AI-driven earthquake forecasting platform.
4. International Ecosystem Recognition
The program’s focus on visibility yielded significant professional accolades for its founders. The founder of IQ Biozoom was named Startup of the Year 2025 and featured in the prestigious “Top 15 Most Influential Women in Medicine 2025”. She explicitly noted that the international stage provided by EmpoWomen was the primary catalyst for amplifying her venture’s global visibility.
Given that these metrics reflect Cohort 1 just twelve months post-acceleration, the consortium anticipates a parallel, high-impact commercial trajectory for Cohort 2 over the coming year.
Global Stages and Overachieved Key Performance Indicators
To solidify the market presence of these startups, TechUkraine drove physical dissemination and high-tier ecosystem integration during the program’s second year. This included positioning the Final Demo Day for Cohort 2 as an official high-profile side event at the How to Web conference in Bucharest, and helping Sploro to organize an elite joint delegation with the Women TechEU initiative at the Valencia Digital Summit (VDS).
This sustained operational execution allowed the consortium to comfortably exceed the strict communication and dissemination targets mandated by the European Commission:
Website Traffic: Achieved an average of 1,289 unique monthly visitors, vastly overperforming against the initial European Commission target of 300.
Social Media Engagement: Anchored by a highly active LinkedIn community, the project generated over 7,340 monthly impressions and engineered an organic network of over 3,300 active regional innovation stakeholders.
An Enduring Legacy for the Regional Tech Sector
The successful conclusion of the EmpoWomen project marks a mature operational milestone for TechUkraine. Operating under extraordinarily challenging macroeconomic and regional conditions, the team demonstrated its capacity to manage sophisticated international communication workflows, build resilient cross-border networks, and deliver data-supported, high-tier marketing outcomes within a premier European consortium.
“It was a challenging and ambitious project for us”, reflects Nataly Veremeeva, Director of TechUkraine. “Building a brand from scratch, developing all visual identity and the website, gathering a community, reaching the project’s communication KPIs, and, most importantly – ensuring that all countries of widening areas of the EU are covered and startups are informed about the opportunity – that was a lot of hard and regular work. I am happy to say that we have succeeded.
An additional challenge was to comply with the reporting and all the regulations of the European Commission, since this is a Horizon Europe project, but we are grateful to our project coordinators, Sploro, for educating and guiding us on this path. I believe we were very lucky to get such an experience, preparing us for further opportunities and an important path of integration of the Ukrainian tech ecosystem into the wider EU landscape”.
We extend our deepest gratitude to Sploro, Startup Wise Guys, and Business Angels Europe for an exceptional partnership, and we congratulate the 25 extraordinary female founders who are now scaling their technologies to lead, disrupt, and redefine the European deep-tech landscape.
As public funding initiatives of this scale conclude, a vital market question remains: Will Western venture capital networks seize the momentum and capture the de-risked alpha these founders now represent, or will they allow traditional structural biases to leave this commercial potential on the table? The data suggests that those who move first will capture the market’s most undervalued tech assets.