Four women-led startups will receive a total of $6 million to scale their innovations from Microsoft’s venture capital arm, Mayfield, and Pivotal Ventures, an organization founded by Melinda Gates.
The organizations on Wednesday unveiled this year’s winners of the Female Founders Competition, a program designed to expand access to capital for women entrepreneurs. Microsoft said last year that it would award $2 million each to two B2B enterprise startups and grant $1 million awards to two “deeptech” companies.
In the deeptech category, a UK startup called iLof that is building a cloud-based library of disease markers using AI earned one of the awards. The other will go to Huue, a biotech startup developing non-toxic, environmentally sustainable dyes in San Francisco.
Deployed — a UK company building software that helps freelancers better define the scope of their work — landed one of the enterprise awards. The category’s other winner is Webee, a Sunnyvale, Calif., startup making a no-coding analytics toolset for manufacturing and supply chain operations.
