Monaco will host HERS Monaco, a new summit dedicated to female tech founders, on Friday 23rd October, as organisers set out to tackle one of the most stubborn imbalances in start-up finance: in Europe last year, all-female founding teams received just 1.2% of venture capital funding.
The one-day event, billed as the Female Tech Founders Summit, grew out of the K2MATCH Investor Lounge, the Monaco pitching event founded by Badr Moudden and Alexandros Dohn that brings selected start-ups face to face with investors, family offices and venture capital firms. For its tenth edition, K2MATCH chose to dedicate its programme to women.
From inspiration to investment
The organisers are clear that the problem is not a lack of role models. “The challenge is no longer inspiration. It is access to capital, to networks, to markets, to decision-making circles,” they say.
The figures support the point. According to PitchBook data published in December, the share of European venture funding going to all-female teams fell in 2025 to its lowest level in nearly a decade. HERS Monaco puts the global figure at around 2%, or one to two dollars in every hundred.
What began as a satellite event to the Investor Lounge has since become a joint venture between Karen Aliprendi of KA Partner, Chika Yamamoto of Crossbie and the K2MATCH team of Badr Moudden, Freya Choi and Alexandros Dohn.
Panels, pitches and a gala
The day opens with two panel discussions on capital. The first, ‘The Billion Spot’, asks why Europe’s female tech founders remain under-capitalised, while the second, ‘Closing the Funding Gap’, looks at the internal and external obstacles founders face.
Speakers include Georgia Pont Garcia of Alkimia Capital, a private capital firm active in Monaco and Andorra; Florence Bavanandan, COO of Launch Africa Ventures and General Partner of the Botswana Tech Fund; angel investor Katrina Victoria Gumaya, founder and chairman of KVG Ventures; Pascale Caron, founder and CEO of Yunova Consulting and co-author of ‘EntrepreneurIA’; early-stage investor Ksenia Edsall, a former manager at Deloitte UK; and Maissa Ballout Shamshoum, CEO of Hasoub and an investor with the Falcon Innovation Fund.
In the afternoon, a shortlist of female-led start-ups will each have five minutes to pitch, followed by questions from a live jury. The day closes with a gala dinner, where the top three will receive the Female Founders Award.
Three days of connections
HERS Monaco completes a week of events. A pre-networking evening on 21st October will be followed on 22nd October by the K2MATCH Investor Lounge, where curated pitching and matchmaking aim to turn introductions into investment.
The organisers have longer-term ambitions. They plan to build HERS Monaco into a year-round community, the HERS Monaco Circle, and in the medium term to launch HERS Monaco Capital, an investment initiative so that connections made in Monaco translate into funding for female-led companies.
Registration for HERS Monaco is open at hersmonaco.com, and for the K2MATCH Investor Lounge at registration.k2match.com.
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Photo source: K2Match