The Aurora Tech Award - Winners!
The Aurora Tech Award has officially recognized its 2025 winners, announcing its top five outstanding female tech founders. Established in 2021 by the global mobility and urban services platform inDrive, the award seeks to level the playing field for women entrepreneurs by awarding them with cash prizes and other crucial resources to help them scale their ventures.
The 2025 Aurora Tech Award winners are:
First Place: Solape Akinpelu, founder of HerVest, (Nigeria) – is a fintech platform providing financially underserved women in Africa with access to savings, impact investing, and credit, particularly for smallholder female farmers.
Second Place: Loretxu Garcia Arraztoa, Nido Contech (Chile)– develops nature-based materials to reduce costs and environmental impact in the construction industry.
Third Place: Shreya Prakash, FlexiBees (India) addresses a critical global challenge: low female workforce participation. The platform connects experienced women professionals with businesses through flexible, project-based, and remote work models, creating a win-win solution for both talent and employers
Fourth Place: Laura Velásquez Herrera, Arkangel AI (Colombia) uses artificial intelligence to tackle preventable diseases through early detection. Their AI SaaS platform transforms medical data into AI algorithms without requiring coding expertise.
Fifth Place: Leonie Korn, UpLeap (Switzerland) is an AI-driven platform revolutionizing medical training through interactive, hands-on simulations.
The winners of the Aurora Tech Award 2025 will receive cash prizes of $30,000, $20,000, $15,000 for first, second, and third place and per $10,000 for fourth and fifth places, respectively.
Each finalist will gain exclusive access to the right investors, industry leaders, and strategic partners — the people who can move the needle on their business. But that's not all. They'll also tap into inDrive's expertise, team, and global network, giving them the support and resources needed to accelerate their growth, secure funding, and scale globally.
The flagship event, held in Cairo from April 11-13, brought together the top 10 finalists from around the world — women building market-defining ventures — to compete for the main award prizes.
This year's shortlist featured groundbreaking innovators from MENA, LATAM, Central Asia, and APAC, whose startups span diverse industries, including artificial intelligence, fintech, and health tech. The 2025 edition of the award saw an unprecedented 2,018 applications from 116 countries, doubling the number of submissions from the previous year.
The final stage of the competition took place within the regional SHE CAN conference, hosted by Entreprenelle, a leading Egyptian organization dedicated to empowering women through education, training, and entrepreneurial support.
"The Aurora Tech Award isn't about representation for the sake of it — it's about backing the highest-potential founders building real companies. These women aren't here because of their gender. They're here because they're building businesses investors should care about. If the table wasn't built for them, they didn't wait for an invitation — they built their own. Aurora exists to make sure they get the capital, platform, and network to take it further.", said head of the Aurora Tech Awards Isabella Ghassemi-Smith.
You can learn more about the Aurora Tech Award 2025 winners by visiting https://www.auroratechaward.com/winners, or the Aurora Tech Award Linkedin.