Women Disrupting Tech

Discover how Onside.io CPO Yulia Farber is building an alternative iOS app store with her team, recovering from burnout and learning to work as herself without changing who she is. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, hosts Dirkjan Hupkes and Kristina Altukhova talk with Yulia Farber, Chief Product Officer at Onside.io , an alternative app store for iOS. Yulia walks through her path from mark...

New tech trends keep coming. Pandium's Cristina Flaschen explains why customer conversations beat the hype. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Cristina Flaschen, founder and CEO of Pandium, about building infrastructure that lets B2B software companies offer integrations. She entered tech through a sales job and has no computer science degree. We cover how she tested the mar...

Only 20 to 30% of event surveys get filled out. So how do organizers find out what landed with the audience? In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Vanessa Williams Saleh, founder of Attenlyx, who led global event strategy across 36 countries at Mars. We explore how she turned 12 years in event strategy into event technology that reads audience response with Emotion AI, and why AI b...

Caregiver burnout starts building when the care a hospital team shares falls to one family member at home. In this episode, Dr. Ashley Blackington, an occupational therapist and the founder of Dovetail, describes what happens after discharge, how that can lead to caregiver burnout and how she is building Dovetail to make it easy for people who need help and caregivers to ask for help and spread th...

In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Veroniek Vermeulen, founder of Silatha, about why women's health is still expected to be left at the office door. Veroniek trained as an engineer in a field where 80 percent of her peers were men, and spent years trying to fit into a workplace that wasn’t suited for women. She founded Silatha to replace that silence with psychological safet...

Every day, women make safety calculations - which route to take, where to sit - that never show up in the data. What happens once that invisible data gets collected? In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Anniek van Veldhuizen, CCO and co-founder of MyHives, about turning daily, unmeasured safety experiences into objective, actionable data. Anniek and her co-founder Nelson built MyH...

More than half of Dutch citizens live with a chronic disease, and over 70% of supermarket products are ultra-processed. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Anke Kuik, co-founder and CEO of FLTRD, about turning a personal interest in nutrition into a tool that helps people navigate the supermarket. Anke walks me through the science behind PureScore, why popular nutrition labels ca...

Juliette is the creator of the AI Flower Framework and founder of the AI Flower Foundation. She spent a year mapping how AI could impact her job as an engineering manager, and discovered why so many AI pilots don’t scale. She turned what she found into an open-source AI framework that maps 152 IT activities against 25 levels of AI capability to show what evolves, fossilizes, or stays human work. W...

Karianne Kraaijestein spent years building resilience through sport, from gymnastics to indoor climbing to yoga, before starting triathlons at 47. Now she's the founder of Adaptive, a coaching platform for female endurance athletes navigating a different kind of endurance test: the hormonal transition. In this episode, we talk about her own journey in endurance sports, why she is focusing on w...

Only 3% of people who show up to an event went looking for it. The other 97% came because someone they trust was already going. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Elise Mol, co-founder of Bash, a platform that helps event organizers turn ticket buyers into a community-driven marketing engine. We explore why exclusive early access beats public discounts, why the events industry i...

A third of a GP’s working week goes to admin, and 42% of UK GPs say they want to leave the profession within five years. Dr. Hannah Allen left clinical practice to fix that, and now leads clinical strategy at Heidi, an AI scribe used by clinicians in over 110 countries. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Dr. Hannah Allen, Chief Medical Officer at Heidi, about what happens when y...

One in eight women in the Netherlands must choose between food and tampons. Sophie Haccou bootstrapped CupHub to close that gap, and is about to launch the crowdfunding campaign that could take her full time. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Sophie Haccou, co-founder of CupHub, about building a hardware startup from a university design project to a live crowdfunding campaign....

50% of women over 40 will experience some degree of pelvic organ prolapse. Most still manage it with a device that has barely changed in decades. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Mirjam Weemhoff, urogynecologist and co-founder, and Bart van Diepenbeek, CEO, of Saturn Pelvic Health. Together they built FlexSupp, an adaptable pessary built to replace the one-size-fits-all device...

Our healthcare system wasn't designed for the 21st century. It is a century-old model built in an era without AI, designed to rescue sick people instead of keeping people healthy in the first place. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, host Dirkjan Hupkes talks with Dr. Robin Blackstone about healthcare innovation, AI in medicine, and what real health system reform actually requires. Whet...

One in three women will experience incontinence in her life, yet the options have stayed stuck at pads or surgery. Leonie van de Kamer is building the option in between. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Leonie van de Kamer, CEO and co-founder of Certain, about a patient-controlled device placed in the urethra for female stress urinary incontinence, positioned between disposabl...

Meditation and sleep apps are not fixing women’s health. Karen Berg explains why femtech needs real clinical answers instead. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Karen Berg, partner at Healthy Capital, a venture capital fund investing in digital health, about her path from law and investment banking into impact investing, and why she thinks femtech needs to move past wellness app...

Only 2% of VC funding reaches female founders. Nithya Ruff argues the problem doesn’t start at the pitch table. It starts with how girls are raised and who gets to make investment decisions. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, host Dirkjan Hupkes talks with Nithya Ruff, former Head of Open Source at Amazon, chair of the Linux Foundation board, and LP in funds focused on South Asian women and...

More than 90 FemTech companies in the Netherlands are working to close the gender health gap. Most didn’t know the others existed. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Maaike Steinebach and Sophie van Dijk, co-founders of FemTech NL, the organization connecting FemTech companies across the Netherlands. We talk about why the ecosystem has been so fragmented, and what FinTech has al...

Most fitness apps are built to track everything. That's exactly why people stop using them. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Zoe Pineau, co-founder of Fitly AI, about how she lost 150 pounds through macro tracking, spent six years building a traditional fitness app that didn’t break through, and then rebuilt from scratch in one month using AI. We explore why friction kills...

Most founders build their financial position in the wrong order. By the time the exit arrives, the decisions that mattered most have already been made under pressure. In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, I talk with Ana Herrero-Wallace, financial independence coach, former US-licensed equities trader, and founder of AdaInvest, about why financial independence is not an exit outcome but a tool...

Most brands are optimizing for search engines that fewer people are using. Rachel Gilley, CEO of Clarity Global, is tracking what happens when your customers stop Googling and start asking AI instead. In this episode, Rachel breaks down Generative Engine Optimization: why it matters, what it costs brands that ignore it, and how a consistent message across every touchpoint is now a technical requir...

FemTech represents a trillion-dollar opportunity. So why do all-female teams receive just 2% of early-stage venture capital? Beata Wandachowicz-Krason has spent years researching what is holding FemTech back — the funding gaps, the cultural taboos, and the structural misalignment between how healthcare systems are built and what women’s health actually requires. In this episode, she breaks down wh...

The solar panels going up on rooftops everywhere are solving one problem, and quietly creating another. This episode is for female founders, women in tech, and anyone building at the intersection of sustainability and deep technology. Host Dirkjan talks with Andjela Bozinac, co-founder and CEO of Renovo Recycling. Andjela is building a modular, chemical-free system that uses Physical AI and roboti...

Most fertility apps look at your past cycles and make a prediction. Sabrina Nowicki built something different. Sabrina is co-founder of Cyclisity, the digital companion to Taking Charge of Your Fertility — the bestselling book written by her aunt, Toni Weschler. What started as an annual lunch celebrating her first period became a mission to bring body literacy to women worldwide — and to build an...

“I don’t need to be an expert on any of these topics… that’s what I have my colleagues for.” — Izzy Sayers What if the real obstacle for female founders isn’t a lack of knowledge, but the idea that they have to know it all themselves? This episode is for female founders and women in tech who want to scale without needing to know everything themselves. Host Dirkjan talks with Izzy Sayers, who leads...