Welcome to this month’s spotlight. We’re excited to bring you the latest edition of our European Women in VC x Evertrace Spotlight. In this space, we are dedicated to amplifying the vision of women driving Europe’s next wave of innovation. Each month, we will use this space to highlight outstanding startups across Europe led or co-led by inspiring women. These founders and leaders are driving innovation across sectors. This is not about numbers or gaps. It’s about celebrating the women building, leading, and scaling ventures that will shape our future! 🚀

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The next wave of venture growth it’s being written in labs, greenhouses, clinical trials, and stealth-mode garages. Who is at the helm of many of these frontier ventures? Female founders who are blending scientific depth with commercial firepower.

Together with Evertrace, we bring founders who are redesigning entire markets: From energy transition, to early disease detection. 🏃🏽‍♀️

📍Ghent, Belgium

Enoki is building the defence system for AI applications: B2B security software that protects models and data across the full development and deployment lifecycle, from build to runtime.

As organisations move machine learning into increasingly critical workflows, the need for AI governance, vulnerability detection, and threat mitigation is moving from optional to essential. Enoki helps engineering teams identify weaknesses, enforce security policies, and maintain continuous protection without disrupting the pipelines they already rely on.

Audrey Stampaert is a serial entrepreneur and commercial leader with a background across law, management, and venture building. Before co-founding Enoki, she served as Country Lead and International Expansion at Moneybird and as a Venture Partner at StarApps.

Her deepest founder experience came at Mbrella, a B2B SaaS company she co-founded and scaled as CRO for nearly five years. Earlier in her career, she worked as a Management Consultant at BrightWolves and as a Marketing Consultant at The House of Marketing. She holds a Master of Global Management from Antwerp Management School and a Master of Laws from Ghent University, where she also completed her bachelor’s degree in law.

Enoki sits at the intersection of two urgent enterprise priorities: AI adoption and cybersecurity. Audrey’s combination of legal training, commercial leadership, and prior B2B SaaS founder experience gives her a strong foundation to build a category-defining product in AI runtime security.

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📍Barcelona, Spain

Cala AI is building the trusted data layer for AI agents: infrastructure that turns fragmented, messy information into structured, verified, source-traceable knowledge that agents can query reliably.

As AI agents move from demos into real business workflows, the quality of their data layer is becoming a bottleneck. Search results, scraped pages, stale facts, and unstructured sources can quickly lead to hallucinations, brittle pipelines, and unreliable automation. Cala AI helps developers and enterprises ground agentic systems in typed, auditable data, making it easier to build products that reason over facts rather than noise.

Elisenda Bou-Balust is a Barcelona-based AI entrepreneur, engineer, and repeat founder. Before co-founding Cala AI, she co-founded Vilynx, an AI company focused on video understanding and semantic search that was acquired by Apple. Following the acquisition, she joined Apple, where she led applied AI and information retrieval initiatives across large-scale machine learning systems.

Her background spans telecommunications engineering, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, machine learning, and large-scale data systems. She has also been recognized for her work in AI and innovation, including the Princess of Girona CreaEmpresa Award 2022. At Cala AI, she brings together deep technical expertise, founder experience, and first-hand knowledge of building AI products at global scale.

Cala AI sits at the core of one of the biggest infrastructure questions in AI: how agents access trustworthy, current, and explainable data. Its €7M pre-seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Kfund, Kibo Ventures, and Masia, reflects growing investor conviction that the next generation of AI companies will need more than models — they will need verified knowledge infrastructure.

Elisenda’s track record across Vilynx, Apple, and applied AI research gives Cala AI a rare founder-market fit in a category that could become foundational to the agent economy.

📍 Copenhagen, Denmark

Stride is a B2B MarTech platform that continuously benchmarks customer CRM data against a validated, real-time view of the market. It surfaces what is missing, inaccurate, or outdated in ways that directly affect routing, segmentation, pricing, and pipeline quality.

At its core, Stride’s Footprint layer maintains a living dataset of companies, identities, and operating signals with confidence scoring and market benchmarks. Its AI agents then scan CRM records against that ground truth and route trusted data and recommended fixes directly into the tools sales and operations teams already use.

The result is a platform designed to close the gap between the data organisations believe they have and the market reality they need to act on.

Angela Timofte is a senior engineering executive who built her career at Trustpilot, where she progressed over a decade from Software Developer and Tech Lead through Director of Engineering, VP of Engineering, and ultimately VP of Global Engineering and Applied AI.

She began her career as a Software Developer intern at Continental and later worked part-time as a developer at Microsoft while completing her studies. She holds a Master of Science in Software Development and Technology from the IT University of Copenhagen and a Bachelor’s in Automatics and Computers from Politehnica University of Timisoara.

After leaving Trustpilot in late 2025, Angela founded ATim Advisory and co-founded Stride in May 2026, bringing a decade of hands-on data platform and applied AI leadership to the CRM intelligence market.

Stride tackles one of the most persistent and expensive problems in enterprise sales: CRM data decay and blind spots. Angela’s decade at Trustpilot scaling data and applied AI systems gives her the technical credibility and operator instincts to build a much-needed infrastructure layer for GTM teams.

📍 London, United Kingdom

Shared Slate is an EdTech platform built around a simple but powerful belief: distance should never get in the way of a bedtime story.

Its app, Ralai, combines a secure eReader with built-in video and AI to create shared reading experiences that connect families wherever they are in the world. Whether it is a parent working away from home, a grandparent on another continent, or a classroom looking for a smarter literacy tool, the platform is designed to be warm, safe, and genuinely engaging for children.

Shared Slate brings the science of early shared reading into a format that is more accessible, interactive, and scalable.

Merceda Fusia is a technical architect and solutions leader with more than a decade of experience in subscription and billing infrastructure. She spent seven years at Zuora, progressing from Technical Consultant to Lead Technical Consultant and Senior Technical Architect, before moving to Paddle as Solution Architect Manager and then Head of Solutions.

Since 2022, she has worked independently as a Chief Technical Architect in subscription consulting. She holds a Bachelor of Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-founded Shared Slate in April 2026, bringing deep platform architecture experience to a new kind of family literacy product.

Shared Slate targets the intersection of family technology, AI, and early childhood literacy, a category where the emotional pain point is real and parents demonstrably spend. Merceda’s platform architecture experience at Zuora and Paddle gives her the technical credibility to build a scalable and monetisable product where many competitors remain underpowered.

📍 Helsinki, Finland

WorkGuardAI is bringing AI-powered computer vision to construction sites, monitoring objects, people, machines, and safety conditions around the clock. Its platform delivers actionable insights that help construction businesses improve decisions, reduce waste, and lower their CO2 footprint.

Designed for real-world site conditions, the product focuses on easy implementation, optimised resource utilisation, and a user-friendly interface, making advanced AI monitoring more accessible without the usual complexity of industrial computer vision deployments.

Maiju Karhu is a geospatial scientist and software developer whose career spans academic research and infrastructure technology. She spent more than two years as a Remote Sensing Researcher at the National Land Survey of Finland, working on geospatial data analysis, before joining Infrakit as an Associate Software Developer in 2025.

She holds a Master’s degree and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Helsinki, supplemented by programming studies at Taitotalo. She co-founded WorkGuardAI in March 2026, applying her background in spatial data, remote sensing, and software development to real-time AI safety monitoring for construction and infrastructure sites.

WorkGuardAI is entering construction technology, one of Europe’s largest and least digitised sectors, with a product that addresses safety, regulation, insurance costs, and workforce efficiency at once. Maiju’s rare combination of geospatial research and infrastructure software experience gives the company a strong technical base for demanding outdoor environments.

📍 Munich, Germany

TakeControl is an AI-powered film post-production tool that parses screenplays and automatically organises raw footage into story beats for professional editors, removing one of the most time-consuming and error-prone steps in the post-production workflow.

Built for the professional film and video industry, the platform helps editorial teams move from raw material to a structured cut faster and with greater consistency, while preserving the creative control experienced editors need.

Martina Gstöttmayr is a serial entrepreneur and product leader with more than twenty years of experience across design, product management, and venture building. She began her career as a concept and creative designer at agencies including Saint Elmo’s, Interone, and DDB Berlin, before moving into product roles at Deutsche Telekom and Doodle AG.

She co-founded and led UpLyvt as CPO until its acquisition in 2023 and later served as Head of Product at Penzilla GmbH. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Multimedia from EU Business School and a Bachelor in Multimedia from Mediadesign Hochschule.

She co-founded TakeControl in late 2025, combining deep product craft with a longstanding passion for film and the creative industries.

TakeControl applies AI to a specific, high-value pain point in professional post-production, where studios and editorial teams spend significant labour on work that is largely mechanical. Martina’s track record building, scaling, and exiting a product company, combined with two decades of design and product leadership, positions her to build software that professional editors can trust.

📍 🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom

Arcive.ai tackles what it calls the Context Tax: the thousands of hours lost every year to search fatigue, missing context, and the constant hunt for answers across emails, messages, and documents.

The platform automates the Company Brain through instant expert discovery, proactive gap automation that identifies missing documentation before it blocks work, and permanent context retention so institutional knowledge does not leave when people do.

Arcive.ai is designed for growing B2B teams that need collective intelligence to scale with them.

Sozan Karlsson is a software engineer with experience across defence, big tech, and academia. She built her engineering career at the UK Ministry of Defence before joining Amazon Web Services, where she worked for nearly two years on cloud infrastructure.

Alongside her AWS role, she mentored computer science students at King’s College London. Earlier in her career, she worked as a Software Developer at a law firm. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Westminster and completed additional programming training at Code First Girls.

She founded Arcive.ai in March 2026, applying her AWS cloud engineering experience to the problem of knowledge loss and context fragmentation at growing companies.

Arcive.ai targets a problem that compounds as organisations scale: knowledge trapped in people’s heads or scattered across fragmented systems. Sozan’s AWS engineering background gives her the credibility to build a reliable, enterprise-grade infrastructure product in a knowledge management market where existing tools are often either too lightweight or too complex.

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👉 If you’d like to nominate a founder for the spotlight, reach out!

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