Today is International Women’s Day and to celebrate we thought we would do a little analysis of the list of top 100 trending startups and Young Tech Companies for 2017 to celebrate the companies in that list that were founded or led by women.
By way of background, Techboard is a data company that tracks the progress of Australian Startups and young Tech Companies and produces a number of data products based on the data we collect. Our current products include our monthly ranking of trending Australian startups and young technology companies, “the Month in Aussie Startup and Tech” and our Quarterly Funding Reports tracking a broad range of funding data. We currently have over 2000 companies in our searchable directory and database and we are constantly adding to that number.
We began collecting data to identify the extent to which the companies we were monitoring were trending to enable us to produce our ranking. We monitor 19 ‘data points’ in 11 categories ranging from social media stats, no of employees, web rank, amount of news coverage and views from our panels of experts. Each company is scored on each category and then ranked on their total score. For our first National Techboard Award on 30 November 2017 we prepared a weighted ranking taking scores from each of the monthly rankings for 2017 in order to identify the top 10 companies and top 10 up and coming companies. After the awards we published a list of the top 100 trending companies.
I should stress that the metrics that Techboard tracks do not indicate how successful or profitable a company is. What we pick up on is how visible or noticeable a company is and many of the metrics are certainly indicators of growth or progress… particularly when looked at over multiple periods as is the case with our top 100 ranking.
We have spent some time researching the companies on that list to see how many of the companies represented were founded and/or led by women. Our research indicates that that 17% of the top 100 trending companies were founded and or led by women, with 14% both having at least 1 female founder who is also in a leading ‘c’ level role and four companies whose entire founding team were women. Of those 17 companies only 5 appeared in the top half of the ranking. Only one out of 43 listed companies in the top 100 had a female founder.
It is important to note that one of Australia’s best know Startups, Canva which was co-founded by Melanie Perkins announced a $40 million capital raise giving it a valuation of over $1BUS after we had finalised the top 100 ranking.
Here is a list of the 17 Female Founded Companies and their positions in the Techboard top 100 of 2017.
| Company | Rank | Notes |
| Power Ledger | 3 | Co-Founders Dr Jemma Green (Executive Chair) (see interview) and Jenni Conroy. Topped a monthly ranking in August 2017 Won Techboard’s top ranked company in our WA Techboard Awards. |
| Hyper Anna | 23 | Co-founder and CEO Natalie Nguyen topped Techboard’s ranking of Data Analytics companies |
| AirWallex | 33 | Co-founder and COO Lucy Yueting Liu |
| Tap into Safety | 45 | Co-founder and CEO Dr Sue Bahn |
| Formalytics | 47 | Co-founder Holly Ade Simpson |
| Canva | 54 | Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins |
| Expert360 | 58 | Co-founder Bridget Loudon (CEO) See interview and Emily Yue |
| Mon Purse | 59 | Co-founder and Co-CEO Lana Hopkins |
| Kanopy | 62 | Founder and CEO Olivia Humphrey |
| Shoes Of Prey | 65 | Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Jodie Fox |
| The Daily Edited | 66 | Co-founder and Creative Director Alyce Tran |
| iCetana | 75 | Inventor and Co-founder Svetha Venkatesh |
| UrbanYou | 84 | Co-founded by Noga Edelstein (CEO) and Elke Keeley |
| Diversifly | 86 | Founder and CEO Lucie Hammond |
| Feedmee | 90 | Co-founder and COO Brenda Lai |
| Aurora Labs | 95 | Co-founder Jessica Snelling |
| AgriDigital (Full Profile) | 100 | Co-founder and CEO Emma Weston |
Historically Techboard has not been tracking gender data on founders so we may have missed one or more companies from the top 100 that have female founders. Going forward, our intention is to produce more extensive, periodic reports on female founded companies, using our extensive data sources.
We would love to produce more extensive and periodic reports on the female founded companies in our database, including tracking funding from a wide range of sources including, VC, angel, grants, ASX, ICO etc. As such we are keen to speak with interested individuals or organisations who would like to explore partnering, contributing, being interviewed or co-funding this work. If you are interested please get in touch.
Some great interviews:
Revolutionising the Consulting Profession: Techboard speaks with Bridget Loudon
