Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in our economies and societies. New businesses help bring innovations to the market, create the bulk of new net jobs and are an engine of productivity growth. Unfortunately, women remain substantially under-represented as entrepreneurs and are a rarity in Europe. While they represent more than half the population, women account for less than a third of entrepreneurs. Such under-representation of women is not only a matter of inequality. In the deep tech area, which represents more than a quarter of Europe’s start-up ecosystem and is now valued at €700b, women obtain only 10% of patent applications in the EU, and less than 15% of start-ups are founded or co-founded by women. Despite the efforts by the EC, widening area startups are still underrepresented in initiatives like Women TechEU. EmpoWOMEN TechEU was born to overcome the obstacles of digital and deep tech innovations led by women and improve equality in the entrepreneurship deep tech domain. EmpoWOMEN TechEU will offer a unique programme for scaling up women-led companies from the Widening Area. The main objective of the project will be to create an exclusive support programme for female founders and entrepreneurs leading deep tech startups from widening-area countries to grow into tomorrow’s female tech leaders and put women at the forefront of deep tech in Europe. We will run a programme in two open calls that will provide a unique acceleration programme, free-equity funding, prizes and vouchers for services for 25 selected women-led companies operating in the deep tech sector. Sploro, Tech Ukraine, Business Angels Europe and Startup Wise Guys, all together with 8 startup associations from the widening area will run this innovative programme which will be the first to support deep tech women-led companies including an acceleration service by SWG, events attendance & investment readiness with direct training from Business Angels and connections with actual VCs.

With our project, we aspire to explore novel ways to capture, preserve, curate, organise and communicate sets of unstructured entrepreneurial experiences, stories, narratives with an emphasis to those of younger audience that is addressing the challenge of (self)employability, so that they can constitute a shared resource that people can augment, and that individuals as well as institutions can delve into, to find inspiration for new ways of conceptualising and promoting entrepreneurship, and how these new ways can be reflected into every-day practices and policies, and foundations for visions of our common European future.