European Women Innovators Prize 2026: Pioneering Solutions to Complex Challenges
In the ever-evolving landscape of innovation, a few remarkable women are rising to the occasion to tackle some of the world’s most daunting challenges. The European Women Innovators Prize 2026 celebrates these extraordinary women who are leading startups that aim to change the world, one bold idea at a time.
The awards ceremony, jointly organized by the European Innovation Council (EIC), the Executive Agency for SMEs (EISMEA), and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), is now in its 12th year. It recognizes women who are successfully transforming groundbreaking research into commercial and scalable businesses across Europe.
Sifted caught up with this year’s winners, unveiled last month at the EIC Summit in Brussels, to explore their motivations, the journey from lab to market, and the critical role of European public funding in their success.
The Women Innovators Prize
The Women Innovators Prize is open to all female founders and co-founders from EU Member States and associated countries. This year’s winner, Katerina Spranger, is the founder and CEO of Oxford Heartbeat. Her company has developed AI software that assists clinicians in performing less invasive surgeries for neurovascular and cardiovascular diseases.
Oxford Heartbeat’s platform empowers clinicians to better predict and select the appropriate size stent—a device crucial for maintaining open passageways in blood vessels—particularly for brain surgeries. “When I was a child, I had to have high-risk eye surgery […] a fraction of a millimeter was literally the difference between keeping my sight or going blind for the rest of my life,” Spranger recalls. “When a patient is on the table undergoing a neurovascular procedure, a fraction of a millimeter dictates the rest of their life.”
Spranger’s passion for precision in surgery was ignited during her PhD at Oxford, where she witnessed a brain operation and was taken aback by the manual, imprecise methods used. “I was absolutely in shock at the state of technology that surgeons were forced to use,” she says. Her background in robotics at Sony highlighted the potential for advanced tracking technology, inspiring her to establish Oxford Heartbeat.
Since its inception in 2015, Oxford Heartbeat has supported over 1,000 surgeries across 14 European countries. However, Spranger notes the challenges of securing funding as a female founder in deep tech. “A venture capitalist looked me straight in the eye and told me to my face that I would have to work much harder than a man to get funding. This still happens today,” she says. The company received €2.5 million in EIC accelerator grants this year, which Spranger emphasizes are vital for female-led startups.
The Emerging Innovators Award
The Rising Innovators Award, aimed at promising young female innovators under 35, was won by Marta Oliveira, co-founder and COO of ATMOS Space Cargo. This German company builds reusable space capsules for cargo return from low Earth orbit.
Founded in 2021, ATMOS marked its first flight in 2025, launching the Phoenix 1 capsule aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Oliveira predicts a surge in demand for ATMOS’s services with the decommissioning of the International Space Station (ISS) by 2030. “Every company doing experiments in life sciences or space manufacturing will need return platforms once the ISS is retired,” she states.
Oliveira, with her co-founders from aerospace and military backgrounds, acknowledges the steep learning curve in commercial ventures. “There were a lot of unknowns in starting a commercial venture. Everything from building the team to finding a launch site was an obstacle,” she says. European public support, such as the EIC accelerator’s €13.1 million investment, has been instrumental in ATMOS’s growth.
“This support directly covers our next two flights,” Oliveira notes, emphasizing the importance of initiatives like the European Women Innovators Prize in increasing visibility for female deep tech entrepreneurs. “Seeing other female founders succeed makes the next generation realize that success is possible.”
The EIT Women Leadership Award
The EIT Women Leadership Award honors outstanding EIT community members who inspire others. The 2026 recipient, Ella Cullen, is the co-founder and CMO of Minespider, a blockchain startup that enables manufacturers to trace materials and identify problematic supply chains.
Cullen explains, “Specifically, we’re looking at the ‘3TGs’: tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, often linked to slave labor, child labor, or environmental devastation in regions like the Amazon.” Minespider’s early success came from collaborating with Volkswagen to map lead supply chains linked to labor issues in the DRC.
According to Cullen, large companies are “desperate” for technology to understand opaque supply chains involving multiple supplier tiers. A European grant of €2.8 million was pivotal for Minespider’s development, as was an EIT RawMaterials investment of €500,000. “We don’t reach this scale without European public funding,” she asserts.
Winning the award is a significant milestone for Cullen, who hopes it will encourage more women to innovate in underserved sectors. “Europe has an impressive pool of female talent, but a microscopic percentage of venture capital goes to them. We desperately need more women to create products aimed primarily at women,” she emphasizes.
For more details on the winners and their groundbreaking work, visit Here.
“`
