Vaia Joins the Prosus Tech FoundHER Challenge

Prosus' Tech FoundHER Challenge is an initiative focused on addressing the persistent funding and visibility gap faced by women-led technology companies. Vaia served as the challenge's investment advisory partner, working with Encubay, for the April 2025 edition.

Women founders continue to build ambitious businesses across India's technology ecosystem, yet access to capital and investor networks remains uneven. The Tech FoundHER Challenge was created to bring greater visibility to high-potential women entrepreneurs and connect them with investors, mentors, and ecosystem partners.

The initiative brought together founders, investors, and industry organisations to identify companies building the next generation of technology businesses. Vaia's team reviewed close to 150 applications and led multiple rounds of screening and due diligence to help identify the final cohort of startups.

Working through roughly 150 companies and narrowing to a cohort means applying a consistent rubric at speed: reading the material each company submitted, testing claims, checking the market and the team, and being able to explain every cut. That is the same discipline Vaia applies in its investment practice, and the same problem its platform is built to accelerate.

The challenge also highlighted an important shift in the startup ecosystem. Supporting entrepreneurship is not only about providing capital: founders also need access to networks, expertise, institutional knowledge, and opportunities to engage with the people who can help companies move to the next stage.

Through initiatives such as Tech FoundHER, ecosystem partners can play an important role in making these networks more accessible and creating greater visibility for founders who might otherwise remain outside traditional funding circles. Vaia's involvement reflected its belief that the future of innovation will be stronger when more diverse perspectives are represented among the people building it.