European female-founded startups raised €7.5B in 2025 across 1,307 companies, a 19% jump on 2024 and just ahead of the broader market's 18%. Five reached unicorn status that year, bringing Europe's running total of female-founded unicorns to 29. The pipeline is real and compounding. Here are 12 of the founders worth watching this year, across deeptech, climate, AI, space, quantum, biotech, femtech, and consumer health.
1. Claire Novorol, Ada Health (Germany)
Ada Health is a medically-led AI symptom assessment and health-navigation platform used by millions of patients worldwide, and one of the first medically validated AI health products to come out of Europe. Founded in Berlin in 2011, it was diagnosing rare conditions back when most consumer health apps were step counters, and has raised around $187M to date.
Claire Novorol co-founded Ada and serves as Chief Medical Officer. She is an NHS paediatrician and Cambridge-trained geneticist, and the company's clinical-first DNA comes straight from her: the idea started when she diagnosed a baby's rare genetic condition and realised how badly clinicians needed better decision-support tools.
2. Alice Pelton, The Lowdown (UK)
The Lowdown is the world's first review platform for contraception. Users rate and review pills, IUDs, implants, and injections, alongside medically-reviewed content, comparison tools, and a missed-pill calculator, and the platform now owns one of the largest datasets in the world on the lived experience of contraception. It started in 2018 as a side project pitched as "Tripadvisor for contraception," went through Entrepreneur First for its pre-seed, and has since expanded into fertility and broader women's health.
Alice Pelton is co-founder and CEO. She built the company out of her own frustrating search for contraception that didn't wreck her mood, and met her technical co-founder David Pratt at Entrepreneur First.
3. Alix de Sagazan, AB Tasty (France)
AB Tasty is a global experimentation, personalisation, and feature-management platform for product and marketing teams, with clients including L'Oréal, Disney, Puma, and Audi. The company is profitable, runs 300+ employees, raised a $40M Series C, and in November 2025 launched Evi, an agentic AI that runs the full experimentation loop from hypothesis to variant generation to post-test analysis. It has also acquired AI personalisation player Epoq to deepen its stack.
Alix de Sagazan is co-founder and CEO. She started the company with childhood schoolmate Rémi Aubert, runs it from New York, and sits on the French Tech board.
4. Hélène Huby, The Exploration Company (Germany / France)
The Exploration Company is building Nyx, a reusable European space capsule for cargo and eventually crew, plus lunar vehicles and what it says will be Europe's biggest rocket engine. It has grown from 4 to 400 employees in four years, raised around €225M from tier-1 European VCs (including a €150M Series B in November 2024 that was Europe's largest-ever space-tech round), and signed roughly €850M in contracts, including work with Vast and Starlab Space. It is the closest thing Europe has to a credible private space transportation company.
Hélène Huby is founder and CEO. She came from Airbus and ArianeGroup, where she was VP of Space Strategy on the Orion European Service Module, then left a senior corporate role to build a private alternative from scratch.
5. Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Nu Quantum (UK)
Nu Quantum builds quantum networking infrastructure, the hardware and control systems that let quantum computers connect at scale, which is the hard prerequisite for distributed quantum computing. A spinout from the University of Cambridge, it raised a $60M Series A in 2025 and has been doing the unglamorous industry-building work the sector needs, launching the Quantum Data Alliance and co-founding industry group UKQuantum.
Carmen Palacios-Berraquero is founder and CEO. She is an award-winning quantum physicist who wrote a book based on her PhD research, and one of very few women globally building at this layer of the quantum stack.
6. Lubomila Jordanova, Plan A / Diginex (Germany)
Plan A is a SaaS platform for corporate carbon accounting, decarbonisation, and ESG reporting across 19 global frameworks, used by more than 1,500 companies. In January 2026 it was acquired by Diginex (NASDAQ: DGNX) for around €55M, and days later its founder was named CEO of Diginex itself, making her the rare European climate founder who ended up running her acquirer rather than disappearing into a corp dev team.
Lubomila Jordanova founded Plan A in Berlin in 2017 after a career in investment banking and fintech across Asia and Europe. She also co-founded the Greentech Alliance, a community of 3,500+ climate startups connected to 350+ advisors.
7. Carlota Pi Amorós, Holaluz (Spain)
Holaluz is a 100% renewable electricity provider in Spain that installs solar panels on consumer rooftops and lets households sell their excess energy back. Listed on Spain's Alternative Equity Market since 2019, it now serves 325,000+ customers with 12,500+ photovoltaic installations under management. 2024 nearly broke the company after it exited the gas business and consumer solar demand softened, but it closed €22M in fresh capital and signalled cash-flow positivity for early 2025, which is the unglamorous half of the climate-tech story most decks skip.
Carlota Pi Amorós is co-founder and executive president. She is an industrial engineer who has run the company since founding it in Barcelona in 2010 with two co-founders.
8. Danila De Stefano, Unobravo (Italy)
Unobravo is an online psychology platform that matches users with vetted psychologists for video therapy across Italy, Spain, and France. It has 9,000+ psychologists, 400,000+ patients, 300+ employees, and millions of completed sessions. Insight Partners led a €17M round in 2022 that was their first investment in an Italian company, and Northzone backed the growth round in 2023.
Danila De Stefano is founder and CEO. A Neapolitan psychologist, she started Unobravo in 2019 offering remote therapy to Italian expats in London who couldn't access culturally fluent care, and then COVID pulled in the rest of Italy.
9. Caroline Walerud, AirForestry (Sweden)
AirForestry builds large autonomous drones that selectively harvest mature trees from above, leaving the forest floor and surrounding ecosystem untouched. Backers include Sveaskog, Europe's largest forest owner, alongside Northzone and others, with a €10.3M seed in 2024 and a €2.6M convertible in early 2026 ahead of a Series A.
Caroline Walerud co-founded the company and stepped into the CEO seat in December 2025 after it hit key product milestones. She also co-founded Volumental, the 3D body-scanning tech behind Adidas and Nike fit, and runs Walerud Ventures, which backed AirForestry from day one.
10. Lilian Schwich, cylib (Germany)
cylib recycles lithium-ion batteries with a process that recovers more critical materials, including lithium and graphite, at a smaller environmental footprint than the dominant pyrometallurgical approach. It raised a €55M Series A from World Fund and Porsche Ventures, putting one of Europe's most strategic supply-chain bets behind a woman-led heavy-industry hardware company. Europe's battery independence story doesn't work without recycling, and cylib is a flagship of it.
Lilian Schwich is co-founder and CEO. She did her PhD at RWTH Aachen specifically in battery recycling and materials engineering, so she has actually run the science the company is built on.
11. Katharina Unger, LIVIN farms (Austria)
LIVIN farms makes industrial insect-farming technology that turns food companies' organic waste into high-value insect protein for animal feed on-site, using modular factory units. It operates Vienna's first zero-waste insect factory and has six active plant construction projects across Europe with another ten in the pipeline. The company started in 2015 with a desktop mealworm farm called the Hive, which won a Red Dot Design Award, and has since pivoted entirely to industrial.
Katharina Unger is founder and CEO. She is a Fulbright Scholar and an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35, and has been building in waste-to-protein since long before alternative protein was fashionable.
12. Karoli Hindriks, Jobbatical (Estonia)
Jobbatical is a relocation and immigration platform that automates the most painful parts of cross-border hiring, paired with in-house immigration experts. It has relocated 6,000+ workers for companies like N26 and TravelPerk and raised over €20M from Union Square Ventures, Inventure, Swiss Post Ventures, and others.
Karoli Hindriks is founder and CEO. She personally pushed Estonia to launch its now-famous digital nomad visa in 2018 by walking the proposal into the Interior Ministry herself. She also became Estonia's youngest patent holder at 16 and the youngest MTV CEO ever at 23, and in 2020 the EU Council named her one of the 8 most inspiring women in Europe.
Funding and market figures: Female Innovation Index 2026, Female Foundry (published 3 March 2026). The report covers both female-only and mixed-gender founding teams across 20 European countries. Company-level figures drawn from public reporting and company sources.
Our editorial team continuously expands these rankings. If you'd like to suggest a company for our next update, submit a nomination → hello@thetopvoices.com