Meet the WE Innovate Alumni
WE Innovate has supported over 500 women. Here are just a few examples of our programme alumni.
Dr Angela de Manzanos Guinot and Kerry O’Donnelly Weaver
FA Bio
As runners-up of WE Innovate 2015, FA Bio was awarded £17,500 from the UK Research and Innovation Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Innovation Grant Scheme.
In 2022, CEO Angela de Manzanos was invited by the Prime Minister to attend a Downing Street Spring Showcase celebrating the best of British business. In 2023, they secured £4 million in Series A (fourth round) venture funding from Plug and Play Tech Center and earlier this year raised a further £5.3 million to further develop and commercialise its soil microbe mapping technology.
Dr Olivia Ahn
FLUUS
After winning WE Innovate in 2017, Dr Olivia Ahn, CEO and founder of Fluus went on to win the Mayor's Entrepreneur Competition, was nominated in the Young Achiever category for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards UK and in 2022 won the NatWest Chairman’s Award. Fluus, which created the world’s first flushable period pad, will soon be closing a crowdfunding campaign, having raised more than £830,000.
In 2022, Olivia was one of the first alumni to sign the Imperial Entrepreneurs' Pledge. The Imperial Entrepreneurs' Pledge is an opportunity for student and alumni founders to “pay it forward” by pledging to make a philanthropic gift to Imperial in the future to support the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators.
Dr Claire Trant
Untap Health
After competing in WE Innovate 2022, Untap Health raised £119,867 in seed funding from undisclosed investors and later £1.37 million of pre-seed funding in a deal led by 7percent Ventures.
Untap Health was the Tech Innovation winner at the Stage Two competition in 2023 and pitched at Impact Week held at OGR Tech in Turin. In September 2023, Untap Health announced it had been selected by TechCrunch as one of the healthtech Startup Battlefield 200 companies.
Stiliyana Minkovska
Matrix
In 2023, Stiliyana won the WE Innovate programme with Matrix, a 21st century replacement of the speculum. A digitally enabled device designed for patient comfort and self-use in a clinical setting.
The idea for Matrix first came to Stiliyana during her Master’s in Healthcare and Design at Imperial and the Royal College of Art. During the course, she secured a Hackspace grant to produce an early prototype of her concept.
The project developed further when she submitted her idea to the FemTech Lab – an accelerator specialising in women’s health and wellness. She secured one of 12 places on the autumn 2022 cohort and was awarded an equity-free grant of £10,000 at the end of the programme, which she invested in obtaining a patent.
Shortly afterwards, she had the opportunity to raise her profile as a guest speaker at the Radical Health Festival in Helsinki, which focuses on digital transformation in healthcare.
Matrix has since won an Innovate UK Transformative Technologies grant and aims to create a prototype demonstrator.
Selly Shafira
Banoo
Selly co-founded Banoo, an Internet of Things water-quality technology to fish farmers, in 2020 while a student on Imperial College Business School’s MSc Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management course.
In June 2022, the startup won the top prize of £15,000 on Imperial Enterprise Lab’s WE Innovate women’s entrepreneurship programme.
Since winning WE Innovate, Selly has relocated to Indonesia to grow and implement Banoo which is already successfully impacting the work of fishing communities.
Selly has forged valuable partnerships and was visited by the Indonesian representative for the United Nations. Selly was invited to attend the launch of the AIS Business Acceleration in Jakarta and has secured placed on numerous accelerators including WINNER by USAID, Blue Finance Accelerator by UNDP and Instellar Indonesia.
Georgina Denis
PSi (SURU Together)
Georgina’s startup journey began in 2020, when she and co-founder Niccolo Pescetelli developed a platform for organisations to leverage stakeholder intelligence and improve decision-making called PSi (People Supported Intelligence).
The platform uses advanced AI conversation analytics and collective intelligence science to generate meaningful insights, and was recently used to hold a live online debate on abortion access with 208 Republicans and Democrats in the USA.
In 2021 Georgina won €55,000 in EU funding and the first prize in the WE Innovate final. Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength, pitching at the Stage 2 European finals and being used to hold collective intelligence events for customers like the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical company Merck.
Clara Best
Saved
Clara made it to the WE Innovate Final in 2022 with Saved: Insect-based food such as cereals, pasta and snacks, leveraging insects' high protein content and nutrients.
Since being supported by WE Innovate, Clara has gone on to win The Grocer New Product & Packaging Bronze Award and exhibit at numerous food exhibitions and conferences including the Royal Entomological Society IAFF Conference and the YFood Insight & Innovation Day.
Clara's products are now available in over 60 health food stores across the UK, across numerous UK universities and on Amazon, and she has forged partnerships with wholesalers.
Saved has also been featured in national media including The Financial Times and The Telegraph.
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