In May 2025, Supernovas joined the Female Founders Experience (FFX) in Vienna for the fourth consecutive year, reinforcing a strong and ongoing partnership with the team behind one of Europe’s most relevant events focused on female entrepreneurship and investment.
This year’s edition also marked the third Supernovas Investor Breakfast, a targeted gathering for women investors across Europe. While most Supernovas activities take place online to ensure accessibility across the continent, these in-person sessions provide crucial space for informal networking, community building and direct exchange.
The 2025 event was structured around three audience tracks (Startups, Investors, and Leaders) combining dedicated sessions with shared plenaries. Discussions covered a wide range of topics, from stress management and productivity tools to board effectiveness, wealth planning, and the persistent structural barriers women continue to face in accessing capital.
Evidence, challenges and the funding landscape: insights from Supernovas
One of the central moments of the event was a plenary session on inclusive investment, featuring Ana Alcaine (EIT Manufacturing, Supernovas) and Lisa-Marie Fassl (Co-founder of Female Founders and Managing Partner at Fund F). With around 100 attendees, the session explored both the challenges women face in accessing capital and the broader systemic factors that shape funding outcomes in Europe.
Drawing on data from the 2023 Supernovas report¹, Ana highlighted that scale-ups with at least one female founder increased their Enterprise Value (EV) by 6.5x between 2017 and 2022, compared to 5.5x for the broader sample. Yet, female-only founding teams still receive a small share of venture capital investment.
The session examined several contributing factors:
- The underrepresentation of women entrepreneurs, often linked to limited exposure to role models and low encouragement in formal education settings.
- A sectoral mismatch, where the sectors that receive most VC funding for scale-ups (fintech, enterprise software and health) have relatively low female founder participation in scaleups1.
- Persistent investment biases, partly due to the limited decision-making power of women within VC firms. While 16% of General Partners (GPs) in Europe are women, they control only 9% of investment capital².
- The importance of supporting more female founders to become investors, a dynamic more common in the US but still emerging in Europe.
A greater diversity, both in gender and across other dimensions, among entrepreneurs who are able to raise capital might enable a better use of talent and more inclusive innovation across the continent.
Despite growing evidence that diversity enhances business outcomes, structural barriers remain. This is why initiatives like Supernovas and events such as FFX are essential, not only to highlight persistent challenges, but to catalyse action through data, visibility and shared dialogue.
Ana also presented Supernovas’ impact-oriented approach, noting the impressive VC fundraising record of the programme participants in the past 3 years. Still, as detailed in the 2024 Supernovas report³, startups with female-only or majority-female founding teams are more likely to rely on public, incubator or non-profit funding, reflecting continued disparities in access to private capital.
The session concluded with a call for stronger collaboration across networks, institutions and funding bodies. With a focus on both entrepreneurs and investors, and coverage of VC and angel investment, Supernovas is uniquely positioned to act as a connector and amplifier within the ecosystem.
Strengthening collaboration across the ecosystem
The FFX event and the Supernovas Investor Breakfast offered a valuable platform to bring together investors, entrepreneurs and ecosystem players who share a commitment to reshaping innovation through inclusion.
Throughout the discussions, participants reaffirmed the need to break down systemic barriers, improve access to capital for underrepresented founders, and build more inclusive investment frameworks that reflect the diversity of talent in Europe.
Supernovas remains one of the few European initiatives that supports the ecosystem from both sides, strengthening opportunities for women entrepreneurs and investors alike. As the programme continues to expand its network and deepen its local presence, partnerships like the one with Female Founders will remain central to achieving long-term impact.
References
- Supernovas: Women Founders in European Deeptech Startups, 2024
- Supernovas: The Landscape of Women-Founded Scaleups and Investors in Europe, 2023
- EU Women in VC: Achieving Superior Returns with Gender Diversity in European Venture Capital Firms, 2023 (co-sponsored by Supernovas)
