Open Bionics, the robotic prosthetics startup, and TechSixtyFour, makers of the Gator Watch for kids, are two of the finalists of the Women Startup Challenge Europe, which is coming to London on 3 May.
The wearable tech startups will be competing for a €50,000 cash prize from nonprofit Women Who Tech, plus other prizes like mentoring, legal services and IBM cloud services, alongside eight other finalists at City Hall.
Female founders Samantha Payne (Open Bionics) and Colleen Wong (TechSixtyFour) will be pitching alongside Caritta Sepak of Tespack, which wants to power smart clothing with solar charging, and Alexandra Grigore from Simprints, which is building a cheap biometric fingerprint scanner that could help 1.5 billion people get a formal ID.
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The panel of judges is made up of Baroness Martha Lane Fox, founder of Doteveryone & Lastminute.com; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; Marie-Laure Sauty de Chalon, CEO of aufeminin, and Rajeeb Dey, founder of Learnerbly. The event will be hosted by London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
The competition is the first international version of the Women Startup Challenge held in New York, this year with a strong VR and AI focus. In February, Didimo's Veronica Orvalho took home the top prize of $50,000 for her company's software for transforming photos into 3D avatars in two minutes.
Second place went to Spirit AI, which is working on making interactions with characters in VR more human and third place went to Addicaid, a wellness platform tackling addiction.
If you want to attend the London event on 3 May, you can buy tickets here.
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