The Startup Ladies are excited to announce the Top 9 women business owners who will be interviewed at our second annual #InvestInWomenFounders Summit taking place on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 from noon-6pm at the Delta Faucet Company HQ in Indianapolis.
This half day conference will gather our current investor members, along with a new group of investors in an effort to fund female founders and business owners growing scalable startups. We are expecting 150+ founders, qualified investors, and senior level corporate executives in attendance.
Event Purpose
INTRODUCE investors to nine new investor-ready women founders.
AMPLIFY the women founders featured last year.
TEACH individuals how to invest in women-owned companies.
MOVE $ into the hands of women founders so they can scale their startups.
CONNECT founders to potential investors, clients, and advisors.
Meet the 2023 Top 9!
Each of these women have chosen a scalable business model with viable markets that want, need, and are willing to pay for their respective products and services. With proper investment, each one of these startups is ready to start hiring people to grow their companies. Please meet The Startup Ladies Top 9 women business owners who will be interviewed by exited founders and senior executives at our second annual #InvestInWomenFounders Summit.
Diana Caldwell
CEO, Amplified Sciences
Diana Caldwell is Co-founder and CEO of Amplified Sciences, a clinical stage in-vitro diagnostics startup company dedicated to the early detection of debilitating disease with a lead assay in development for pancreatic cancer. The company leverages technology licensed from Purdue University and has developed a chemistry platform that scales to point of care. She is an accomplished and recognized life science entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in both large corporate and small entrepreneurial environments including a variety of leadership roles at Eli Lilly, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Purdue Foundry, and CEO and founder of Pearl Pathways which she sold in 2018.
Diana lends her talents to several organizations and not-for-profits including The ARC of Indiana Foundation, the Advisory Board for the Center for the Business of Life Sciences at Indiana University Kelley School of Business, and was one of the core team members responsible for founding the Indiana AXIS Mentoring program for life science entrepreneurs sponsored by the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute, 16Tech and BioCrossroads.
Amplified Sciences is developing in-vitro diagnostics with a clinical stage test that helps physicians more accurately detect risk for pancreatic cancer built on their ultra-sensitive optical reporter platform. There is a large unmet medical need to detect pancreatic cancer in high risk patients. PanCystPro is a clinical stage test that provides a highly accurate diagnostic solution which will allow clinicians to better identify patients at risk for developing pancreatic cancer as well as reduce unnecessary surgeries and associated complications.
Nicole Clark
CEO & Co-founder, striing
Nicole Clark began her career in 2012 at Kiwanis International, where she was tasked with creating and executing the social media strategy for all 7 of the youth-focused umbrella brands. Since then, Nicole has specialized in social media and building online communities, leading strategies for both B2B and B2C brands. For the past five years, she has also run the Instagram account for the Broad Ripple Farmers Market, which has helped positively transform the customer experience at the market. Social media shifted for Nicole when she became a step-mom to a 4-year-old little girl and suddenly had to make her social accounts private. Noticing how drastically different and limiting the private experience was, social media slowly became less intriguing to use personally. Nicole founded her company, striing, early on during the pandemic when she noticed the wide gap between what she posted and what she wanted to save. Together with her co-founder, Danielle Daugherty, Nicole has interviewed hundreds of potential users and validated the need to shift from a share-first mentality to having a place to save everything that is truly important.
striing is a consumer app that provides structure for how to document your life with timelines that are private, searchable, and shareable. striing addresses the problem that individuals lack an easy and organized way to document and revisit their life experiences. striing sells cloud-based storage that provides structure for how to document the details of your life.
Lesley Crane
CEO & Co-founder, Diversifind
Lesley Crane is a lawyer who has spent the bulk of her career in government service. After over 15 years in government, she made the leap into entrepreneurship and has not looked back. Lesley also teaches at IUPUI's O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She currently serves on the NAWBO and Sycamore School boards, and teaches Sunday school. She is married and has four wonderful, exhausting children.
DiversiFind is a B2B SaaS platform that helps diverse companies market themselves to entities that want to support their DEI initiatives by diversifying their spend. This easy, searchable application will become your go to resource for discovering and forming business connections and searching for opportunities to partner on projects in both private and public sectors.
Anna Dorris
CEO & Founder, Everewear
Anna Dorris is a recent Indiana University grad with a degree in Finance from the Kelley School of Business. During her time there, she was one of five Junior Representatives for the Undergraduate Student Government Senate, a member of the Kelley Indianapolis Women in Business Club, and Finance and Investment Club. Throughout high school and college, she had a small resale business that introduced her to how many used clothes were truly out there.
Everewear is AI powered shopping platform that helps people find the secondhand clothes they love in minutes instead of hours. Established resale businesses like Goodwill are operating at too large of a scale to implement the data science and machine learning needed to give accurate recommendations to their online customer base. Additionally, they have upwards of 200 million unique items they could post annually, and no customer is going to sift through that. We use an API to pull our resale partners' current online inventory, overlay it with over 60 data points and then post it to the Everewear website. A user fills out a style profile, where we collect over 60 data points on their style, size, and budget to give them their top 30 most relevant recommendations. It gets more accurate as they shop, using different machine learning touch points. All orders are fulfilled by our resale partners - we do not hold inventory.
Doloreste Jean Baptiste
CEO & Founder, Shestel
Doloreste Jean Baptiste is the CEO and Founder of Shestel. With more than ten years experience in finance and accounting, business management, data analysis and compliance, her passion for technical processes led her to create Shestel. A platform that allows users to delve deeper into their favorite media and engage in thought-provoking discussions.
Doloreste has a MBA from The University Of The People in Pasadena, CA (the first non-profit, tuition-free, American, accredited, online university dedicated to opening access to higher education globally) and a BS in Business Administration from the State University of Haiti (Inaghei) in Port-au-Prince. She currently resides in Albany, New York.
Shestel invites users to explore movies, TV shows, books, and music and open up meaningful dialogues with others about their experiences and interpretations of what they have watched, listened to, and read. The app connects friends and family. It also provides a safe space for those who tend to be more isolated, seeking an opportunity to build connection with new people through a shared love of entertainment.
Nicole Kearney
Head Wine Maker & Founder
Nicole Kearney is the Founder + Head Winemaker of Sip & Share Wines, a boutique winery passionate about connecting community with vegan wine for wine lovers overlooked and underrepresented by the wine industry. She is among the .01% of Black women winemakers and 1% of Black wineries in the United States. Nicole handcrafts her diversity of artisanal vegan wines which have been featured in Forbes Magazine and VegNews. Nicole's passion for community stems from her past work in community development and as a Professor, teaching adult learners. The benefit of me being a female founder who is also African American is being able to identify with my target customer's pain points of being ignored and marginalized by the wine industry. This is why I founded Sip & Share Wines, to create experiences for the African American women and men who often feel their presence and money is underrepresented and undervalued by the industry as a whole. As a female founder who understands, Sip & Share Wines caters to women and providing them a space to engage with and enhance their knowledge of wine that is fun and without judgment.
Sip & Share Wines makes and sells artisanal vegan wines. The lack of visibility of Black and Brown consumers and winemakers in the wine industry called to Nicole's pioneering spirit. Sip & Share Wines holds space and creates a culturally inviting community centering Black & Brown wine lovers, while inviting all to engage in a more inclusive and diverse wine industry. Sip & Share Wines collaborate with small businesses and nonprofit organizations to amplify their message and missions by providing their services to our customers, promoting their events/causes on our platforms, and popups and providing wine as a tool for fundraising.
Morgan Miller
CEO & Founder, Miller Co Medical Devices LLC
Morgan Miller entered the healthcare field as a patient care tech for IU Health Bloomington. There, she discovered her love for a fast pace, highly stressful, yet immensely rewarding career. Several years into the profession, she sustained a back injury on the job while repositioning a patient. Her injury was severe enough to require time off from work to to rehabilitate in physical therapy. It was during that time she began thinking of ways to automate the current manual system of turning patients. Morgan's vision was to eliminate the possibility of future injuries happening to herself and all of her coworkers in the future. That experience was inspiration for a new invention - a therapeutic mattress overlay which promotes blood flow from head to toe.
Miller Co Medical Devices will save patients from bed sores and pressure ulcers while reducing hospital acquired injuries, which cost healthcare establishments 26 billion dollars yearly. The products are designed for those who are bed bound or will be in bed for an extended period of time. These mattress overlays take the physical toll of manual turns off healthcare workers by providing automatic 30 turns at the push of a button. This not only ensures that patients are getting properly turned in a timely manner, it also gives healthcare workers back valuable time needed to provide higher quality care to their patients. Healthcare workers will now have time to develop quality relationships with their patients.
Bo Turner
Owner & Founder, TruckStop
Meet founder, foodie, food truck fan, Bo Turner. Bo was adopted from China when she was one year old. 📍Raised in Terre Haute, Indiana 🎓Alumna from Indiana State University, B.S. in Marketing 🌎 World traveler & thrives in cultural experiences 😋 Foodie and adventurous eater 💕 Big sis in Big Brothers Big Sisters of America for 8 years ☕️ Tea drinker ♻️ Trying to reduce my footprint by thrift shopping and bringing my reusable chopsticks everywhere ✨ Co-founder of BoCo Collective Marketing, a social media agency that will build your brand’s street cred.
The Truckstop is Indiana’s first park for food trucks located in Terre Haute, Indiana in the historic 12 Points District.. Each Truckstop location is a home for your favorite local food truck, where you can always find the new eats, and hang out. Our goal is to bring The Truckstop to every neighborhood that loves diverse, delicious, and damn good food!
Karen Wurster
CEO, Adipo Therapeutics
Karen Wurster, Chief Executive Officer at Adipo Therapeutics is an experienced pharmaceutical executive with over 30 years of experience developing, launching and commercializing pharmaceutical products for the global market including the launch of multiple block buster, first in class treatments for type 2 diabetes. At Adipo, Karen has leveraged her experience to recruit and lead a cross-functional team, raise over $2.8 million in seed funding, and drive the product development. Karen has a B.S. in Biochemistry from Indiana University, and an M.B.A. from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.
Karen passionately believes that everyone deserves a second chance and support programs that help people develop their skills, secure living wage employment, and find permanent safe housing. She does this through volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and Back on My Feet, and serving on the boards for PACE (Public Advocacy for Community re-Entry) and Constructing Our Future.
Adipo Therapeutics is developing a weekly treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes. Specifically, the treatment changes energy storing white fat into energy burning brown fat. 42% of the US population suffers from obesity, resulting in an 8 year reduction in life expectancy. This unique approach has the potential to increase the number of calories burned, leading to weight loss with no change in calories eaten.
Purchase Tickets to the Summit!
Tickets are currently on sale for $150/each through September 30 which includes lunch and a cocktail reception. Ticket prices increase on October 1. Tickets are limited. Purchase here.
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