Accenture announced that 5 women founders have been selected for the 2022 edition of the Women Founders Program. The cohort are Kausambi Manjita (Co-Founder & CEO, mason), Chandralika Hazarika (Co-Founder & Managing Director, Bigthinx), Ketaki Ogale (Co-Founder, BHyve) Nida Sahar Rafee (Founder & CEO, Nife) and Sharmila Saha (Co-Founder & Head of Engineering, Doppelio).
The selected women founders emerged from over 100 applicants to the program and were selected by leaders from Accenture on the basis of product differentiation, disrupt-ability quotient, leveraging of deep technologies, commercial viability and founder profile.
Accenture had launched the Women Founders Program in early February this year, a unique initiative for early-stage women led Indian startups in the B2B deep tech and enterprise SaaS domain. The program aimed to create a more supportive ecosystem for women tech founders and entrepreneurs.
The selected women founders of the 2022 edition of the program will benefit from the equity-free grant of USD 60,000. The program also connects them to Accenture leaders, experts and ecosystem partners. The program will help the selected cohorts to pave their way to greater success through access to tech expertise, global & Indian clientele, mentorship, industry and investor communities and new markets.
The 2022 batch of Accenture Women’s Founders Program include the following women founders:
Kausambi Manjita, Co-founder and CEO of Mason, a no-code store automation engine for modern e-commerce brands and marketplaces. Kausambi is a no-code evangelist and serial product builder, with over 15 years of experience in product development for platforms like Paytm, Myntra etc.
Chandralika Hazarika, Co-founder and Managing Director of Bigthinx, an AI firm focused on fashion retail, wellness, and the metaverse that builds cross-platform digital tools to help profitability and sustainability for fashion retailers. Chandralika also owns a fashion label called Velvet Piano.
Ketaki Ogale, Co-founder of BHyve, a Future of Work SaaS platform that makes an organisation’s collective knowledge accessible in real-time. Ketaki holds an MBA graduate from Fordham University in New York. She has 8 years of experience building products in India and the US.
Nida Sahar is Founder and CEO of Nife.io, a unified public cloud edge platform to manage, deploy, and scale applications securely. A serial entrepreneur and a published poet and writer, Nida has more than 15 years of experience in enterprise infrastructure space working with HPE, Oracle and Dell-EMC. She has built women-centric tech communities in Bangalore. Currently, does pro bono work with startup communities like Startup Leadership Program, IotMatrix and India Deeptech Accelerator
Sharmila Saha is Co-founder at Doppelio Technologies, a test automation platform for IoT applications. She has more than 30 years of work experience in the areas of embedded systems, parallel database systems, wireless protocol stacks, video analytics and IoT. Sharmila is also the co-inventor for three US-granted patents and lead inventor of the patent filed for Doppelio.
Accenture promotes and supports the drive toward greater gender diversity and inclusion. It believes in the potential of technology startup founders and entrepreneurs to create change that benefits society. Increasing women’s participation and encouraging entrepreneurship are key levers for continued economic growth, and nurturing women-led startups are essential to realizing India’s innovation potential. To create a more supportive ecosystem for women tech founders and entrepreneurs, we need to take more steps to break gender constraints and stereotypes.
About Accenture
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