The COVID-19 pandemic has not been friendly to women in the workforce, setting gender parity efforts back by a generation or more, according to the World Economic Forum. However, while the pandemic has been punishing, it has helped bring attention to this widening disparity and caused us to acknowledge and celebrate the businesses, and especially the women, that are breaking gender barriers and striving for a more equitable working world.
For many years, SAP has been committed to eliminating gender inequality in support of our purpose – to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. SAP.iO – SAP’s strategic business unit to incubate, accelerate and scale startup innovation – is one of organizations working to establish equal opportunities for women. To do that, they launched the No Boundaries initiative, the first comprehensive inclusive entrepreneurship initiative in the business software industry. The program ensures that all innovators from all backgrounds are empowered to start-up with SAP. And it’s been a success: since 2019, 50% of the startups that have worked with SAP.iO have a female/underrepresented founder or CXO.
Celebrating Female-Founded Partner Companies on SAP Store
At SAP Store, we have had the privilege of seeing many of those women entrepreneurs launch their solutions on our online marketplace, including:
- Ashley Crowder, CEO & Co-Founder, VNTANA: Ashley always loved engineering and art and 3D/AR/VR combined both of those interests. Her passion for the medium drove her to want to solve the most time-consuming problem: Automatic file optimization and management so creators could focus on creating amazing experiences. As a result, she launched VNTANA and the solution Automated 3D CMS, available on SAP Store.
- Diane Keng, CEO & Co-Founder, Breinify: With her experience working at Apple and Symantec, Diane learned that technology and algorithms are a needed part of the business process in order to launch amazing consumer experiences. Additionally, personalization, especially with a pandemic, must continuously adapt and evolve. These insights drove her to launch Breinify and the solution Breinify AI for SAP Commerce Cloud, available on SAP Store.
- Jan Bruce, CEO and Co-Founder, meQuilibrium: As a successful media executive, wife, and mother, Jan was having difficulty balancing her career with how exhausting and conflicting her life obligations were. With meQuilibrium, she created a tool that not only was useful to her but was also something that could help others – a behavior modification solution to help people manage how they think and react. The meQuilibrium solution, meQuilibrium Resilience Suite, is available on SAP Store.
Other amazing female founders and CXOs with solutions on SAP Store include:
- Sana Salam, Founder and President, Sodales Solutions: Six solutions for regulatory compliance
- Emilia Jevakhoff, CEO, Winddle: Daily Collaborative Platform for Supply Management
- Imogen Low, Co-Founder & CTO, NWO.ai: Consumer Intelligence
- Kirsten Moorefield, Cofounder & COO, Cloverleaf.me: Team Coaching solution for SAP SuccessFactors
- Marie Chevrier, CEO & Founder, Sampler: Digital Product Sampling
- Michelle Bacharach, CEO, FindMine: FINDMINE for SAP Commerce Cloud
- Min Chen, CEO, Wisy: Intelligence
- Olga Kotsur, Founder and CEO, Mercaux: In-store Clienteling, Omnichannel & Data Platform
- Soodeh Farokhi, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, C2RO: C2RO PERCEIVE
- Stephanie Benedetto, CEO & Co-Founder, Queen of Raw: Unused Inventory Onboarding and Sales Integration
- Caitlin MacGregor, CEO & Co-Founder, Plum: Plum
These female entrepreneurs are not only visionaries in their industries but are also delivering innovative solutions that are bettering SAP Store. Yet they aren’t the only strong female leaders powering SAP’s digital marketplace.
