Introducing the Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders Class of 2022

The following article was originally published on the Google Blog. Read it HERE.

The challenges faced by women founders is evident. Despite an increase in total venture funding raised by women-led startups in recent years, women founders still secured only 2% of the total amount invested in VC-backed startups throughout the year. In addition, a recent report on women-founded companies in Canada noticed that women technology entrepreneurs travel longer routes from startup to scale-up, with women in the study doing more funding pitches than men and taking longer to raise their Series A financing.

In 2020, we launched Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders to help bridge the gender gap in the North American startup ecosystem, and provide high-quality mentorship opportunities, technical guidance, support and community for women founders in North America.

To date, 24 women-led startups have graduated from the program, but support for women founders must continue. Earlier this year, we announced an open call to applications for the third class of Accelerator: Women Founders, starting in the fall.

We received hundreds of strong applications and, after careful deliberation, are excited to introduce the 12 impressive startups selected to participate in the 2022 cohort:

• Advocatia (Lake Bluff, Illinois): Powers healthcare organizations with the ability to engage and enroll their customers into programs that reduce cost and improve outcomes.
• Arintra (Austin, Texas): Helps hospitals and clinics save time and maximize reimbursement by automating medical coding
• Blossom Social (Vancouver, British Columbia): Canada’s first social brokerage, combining mobile-first stock trading with a social community for investors.
• CIRT Can I recycle this? (Athens, Georgia): Builds software and uses AI to digitize the circularity of products and packaging for the modern world, helping customers go zero waste.
• CyDeploy (Baltimore, Maryland): Provides an intelligent, automated configuration and patch testing solution that positions our customers to make security changes quickly and with confidence.
• Emaww (Montreal, Quebec): Provides the most advanced and least intrusive emotion analytics for websites to better user experience and improve their digital well-being with emotional intelligence.
• Farm Generations (Germantown, New York): Builds fair technology for the future of small farms.
• Hound (Denver, Colorado): A platform for veterinary recruiting, veterinary employee engagement technology and distributing at home veterinary care.
• Generable (New York, New York): Develops best-in-class Bayesian machine-learning models to improve efficiency of oncology drug-development.
• MedEssist (Toronto, Ontario): Transforms local pharmacies into modern healthcare hubs.
•  (Fort Myers, Florida): Converts paper notices and manual processes into automated digital workflows that provide resolution pathways for users to follow.

These startups will join the 10-week intensive virtual program, connecting them to the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology to help them reach their goals and unlock their next phase of growth.

Posted by Ashley Francisco, Head of Startup Ecosystem, North America