International Women's Day 2021 | Meet our female Founders who are shattering glass ceilings

In celebration of International Women’s Day on Monday 8th March 2021, we’d like to celebrate five incredibly innovative and inspiring women who we at SETsquared Bath have had the honour of supporting in recent years.

---

Parimala Shivaprasad

Founder of Retra / SMDR

Parimala graduated from the University of Bath with a PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2019 and was involved in the Student Enterprise activities at SETsquared Bath from her first year. She went on to win the Business Plan Competition, followed by Dragon’s Den 2 and our Alumni Innovation Award with her business idea Retra, which is a flower waste recycling initiative. Currently, Parimala is a University of Bath researcher and an entrepreneur working on sustainable chemical processing and is commercialising her research and her start up to upcycle flower waste in India. Along with Dr Emma Emanuelsson-Patterson, the pair’s current project, SMDR - The Spinning Disc Mesh Reactor, creates chemicals and APIs by reacting chemicals with enzymes on a spinning cloth-covered plate, like a vinyl record has recently won funding of £68,500 from Innovate UK to commercialise the reactor and market it to pharmaceutical companies following its 12-year development. Find out more here.

Parimlala also strongly campaigns for supporting and retaining women engineers in the field of engineering and technology. Parimala told us, “Retra wouldn’t be possible if not for SETsquared Bath and I am very proud to be associated with the incubator for the wonderful work they do to support entrepreneurs at all levels. This association has opened up new opportunities and connections which have been very useful for the progress of my enterprise and my development as an entrepreneur. I have received mentorship from student entrepreneur mentors and the resident entrepreneurs for over 3 years now, who have been a constant source of support throughout the journey. I look forward to continuing mine and Retra’s journey with SETsquared Bath in the future as well!“

---

Nicola Chilman

Co founder & COO of EZ Education / Doodle Learning

Before starting EZEducation, Nicola gained over 10 years of experience teaching and became a Director at an Education Centre in Bath. In 2012 she co-founded EZ Education / DoodleLearning and held a Chief Operating Officer position. EZ Education were long standing members at SETsquared Bath between 2014 - 2020 and it’s been wonderful watching and supporting this exciting and disruptive tech for good business.

Doodle Learning develops programs that are aimed at supporting learners aged 4-14 years from all round the world. Their programs are delivered via an app which uses an algorithm based technology that keeps learners engaged and, according to research conducted by Bath University, helps massively at preventing learning loss. The mobility of their programs have allowed EZ Education to deliver their programs in some of the poorest areas of Lagos, Nigeria, helping to raise standards in Maths teaching in the area.

EZ Education won the SPARKies 2019 “The Good Award” as well as a few pitching competitions, including a Runner-up position at KPMG Best British Mobile Startup 2016 at the Mobile World Congress. In 2019, the company was valued at over £6m after selling a 8% stake for £500k through an equity fundraising.

---

Nia Simson

Founder & CPO of Compact Cane

Nia (meaning ‘Purpose’) is an award-winning human-centred design engineer with a heart for helping clients solve business problems through meaningful purposeful design. She is a talented Master in Design Engineering, graduating from University of Bath with a first-class MEng degree, and with nearly two years' hands-on experience working with world-leaders in product design. Nia was awarded our Alumni Innovation Award and was funded to start her company, Compact Cane for a year at SETsquared Bath.

She has built and led Compact Cane - a tech startup developing discreet augmented reality mobility aids for people living with sight loss - from conceptualisation to commercialisation over the last two years, raising £55k investment from University of Bath, SETsquared and Bethnal Green Ventures, Europe's leading early-stage tech-for-good VC.

---

Dana Lattouf

Founder and CEO of Tickitto

Dana graduated from the University of Bath ( Business Studies) and gained some experience as a Business Analyst and as a Technology Consulting Analyst before founding Tickitto, which gained her a place in the Female Founders Cohort at Google for Startups Resident. Dana was awarded an Alumni Innovation Award as well as membership here at SETsquared Bath where she was funded to develop her start up with the support of SETsquared. Dana drew into her personal experience as a passionate traveller to come up with the business idea behind Tickitto.

Tickitto aims at helping travellers save time when booking tickets during their travels whilst also helping the leisure industry and travel companies to build external collaboration capabilities to scale their reach. Tickitto is a platform which aims to give travellers access to not only book flights, but also buy tickets to local events by offering configurable front-end interfaces.

Seedcamp was the leader of Tickitto’s pre-seed round that managed to secure them more than £500k. Tickitto intends to use the funds to scale up its engineering team. Having already partnered with some of the biggest names in the world of entertainment, tour, and activities it will be exciting to watch what’s to come for Dana and her team post-pandemic when the world’s travel industry reopens!

---

Georgia Stewart

Co founder & CEO of Tumelo

Having previously studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and worked in Asset Management firms and environmental organisations, Georgia has proven her passion for sustainable investing and helping investors making an impact on climate change and other environmental challenges.

Whilst members at SETsquared Bath, Georgia co-founded Tumelo where she currently serves as a Chief Executive Officer. Tumelo delivers a software that aims at helping investment firms improve their client engagement by showing retail and pension investors the companies they own and empowering them to ensure their funds are allocated responsibly. Earlier last year, Tumelo joined forces with Legal & General Investment Management in a partnership that will give the members of one of the largest funds managers in the world the chance to have a say in some of the social and environmental issues related to the companies they own.

In 2020, Tumelo received a £1m investment that raises the estimated value of the company to almost £10m.

---