Three Scottish-based female business founders are celebrating after winning top honours at this year AccelerateHER Awards.
Rachel Jones of SnapDragon, Lina Gasiunaite of Biotangents and Corien Staels of Staels Design were winners of the 2019 awards which recognise female business founders in a leading role in companies with strong global growth potential.
The winners were chosen from a field of 68 applicants and announced at Barclays' Eagle Lab in Edinburgh’s Codebase . They have earned a free place on trade missions to Dubai and Berlin where they showcase their business and meet key industry contacts and investors.
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Jones is founder of Edinburgh-based SnapDragon Monitoring, a business that fights fakes by monitoring online markets for IP infringements. The company has raised significant finance and increased its staff from four to 26 people in the last year. The panel of judges praised her ‘absolute drive’ in growing the business and were impressed by SnapDragon’s 98% success rate in delivering for its clients.
On the same day, Snapdragon was named Innovator of the Year at Business Insider's Made in Scotland Awards.
A founder and director of Biotangents , Gasiunaite is one of the key people behind the company which has created low cost infectious disease diagnostic technology system for farming livestock. Targeting a global market worth $2.6 million, Biotangents aims to expand into diagnosing infectious diseases in pets and, potentially, humans. This week the Penicuik, Midlothian, company secured £1.5 million of new investment through its second round of fundraising which included finance from Investing Women.
Stael Design, creator of WheelAir , an air filtration system for wheelchair users, was founded by managing director Staels. The Glasgow company is targeting its internationally patented product offering at a significant proportion of the world’s 150 million wheelchair users.
The AccelerateHER judges commended Staels, who features in Business Insider magazine 's 20 Women to Watch this month, as an ‘impressive founder’ who has attracted international level board members to support her ambitious growth plans.
This year’s programme also honoured Dr Carla Brown, the founder and director of Game Doctor, with its Rising Star award. This new category recognises a female company founder with a great early stage business idea.
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Jackie Waring, CEO of Investing Women which runs the AccelerateHER Awards programme, said: “I would like to congratulate this year’s winners who have succeeded within a very competitive field where we had our highest-ever number of applicants for scalable international businesses.
“Our winners are dynamic females who play a key leadership role in innovative companies with huge global growth investment potential. The forthcoming trade missions to Berlin and Dubai, where they have secured complimentary places, will help them in achieving that aim.
“We continue to see a significant impact from the AccelerateHER Awards with finalists from the four years we’ve run the competition securing more than £11 million of investment since getting involved in the programme.”
