VMPL
New Delhi [India], April 17: The Aurora Tech Award 2025 has officially recognized this year's top five outstanding female tech founders at its grand finale, held in Cairo from April 11-13. The flagship event brought together the top 10 finalists from around the world -- women building market-defining ventures -- to compete for the main award prizes. Shreya Prakash, co-founder and CEO of FlexiBees, has secured third place in the Aurora Tech Award 2025--a prestigious global prize celebrating women-led technology startups.
FlexiBees addresses a critical global challenge: low female workforce participation, particularly in India and beyond. 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.
This year's shortlist featured groundbreaking innovators from APAC, MENA, LATAM and Central Asia, 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. Since its inception in 2015, SHE CAN has become one of the MENA region's most influential industry events, attracting over 7,000 attendees annually.
Before the winners were announced, the top 10 finalists -- the top 0.5% from a multi-stage global selection process led by VCs -- pitched their ventures to a cross-functional jury of investors, operators, and public sector leaders. This wasn't a showcase. It was a high-stakes, high-conviction environment designed to surface one thing: which founders have the clearest path to building market-defining companies.
Everything about the event was intentional -- from investor access to a strategic dinner with Egypt's tech ecosystem. Aurora is more than a pitch stage. It's a launchpad built to give top-tier founders what they need most: recognition, capital access, and the right people in the room to shape what comes next
"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.
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 Velasquez 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.
"Supporting female entrepreneurs in overcoming barriers and building strong networks is essential. Through the Aurora platform, we aim to attract future investment, boost visibility, and foster strategic partnerships. Our mission is to drive systemic change in emerging markets like MENA, closing the gender investment gap. The Aurora Tech Award is not just an accolade --it's a launchpad for the next generation of unicorn founders," said Evgenia Matrosova, Chief Growth Officer, Head of Ride-Hailing at inDrive.
"FlexiBees winning the third prize at the Aurora Tech Awards 2025, from among 2018 global applications and 10 finalists, is about more than just an award. It is a validation of our business and our vision, to create a new way of working with choice and flexibility at its heart and that enables the underserved talent pool of women professionals and small & medium businesses globally to find each other.
We are thrilled with this recognition, with the community that Aurora Tech has created, and the experience of meeting so many powerful yet purposeful individuals in the last week from inDrive. Aurora Tech is special, it puts its money where its mouth is, in creating access to opportunity for women founders, who are building for purpose, at scale." Shreya Prakash, Co-founder & CEO, FlexiBees.
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.
For more information on the Aurora Tech Award 2025 winners, visit Auroratechaward.com or visit our Linkedin.
About the project
The Aurora Tech Award, an initiative of inDrive, is a global award for the boldest tech founders building scalable, high-potential businesses, who just happen to be women. But this isn't just about recognition--it's a launchpad. Aurora provides winners with direct access to the right investors, industry experts, and a global network--everything they need to scale faster, grow smarter, and dominate their industries. It's not just a competition, it's a partnership that accelerates success and opens doors to the resources that truly matter.
inDrive operates in over 888 cities in 48 countries. Driven by its mission of challenging social injustice, the company is committed to having a positive impact on the lives of one billion people by 2030. It pursues this goal both through its core business, which supports local communities via a fair pricing model; and through the work of inVision, its non-profit arm. inVision's community empowerment programs help to advance education, sports, arts and sciences, gender equality and other vital initiatives.
inDrive is a global mobility and urban services platform. The inDrive app has been downloaded over 300 million times, and was the second most downloaded mobility app in 2024. In addition to ride-hailing, inDrive provides an expanding list of urban services, including intercity transportation, freight delivery, task assistance and courier delivery. For more information visit www.inDrive.com
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