Bloomberg and NY Tech Meetup Spotlight Female-Led Startups at ‘Winter 2016 Women’s Demo Night’

Originally posted on bloomberg.com

Bloomberg Chief Technology Officer Shawn Edwards kicked off NY Tech Meetup’s (NYTM) “Winter 2016 Women’s Demo Night” – our second collaboration with NYTM, the world’s largest Meetup group with over 48,000 members.

The Bloomberg Women in Technology (BWIT) group was the main sponsor for the event. BWIT is a community within Bloomberg that helps to empower women in technical roles to take on leadership roles, make the company more accessible for women who want to enter the tech field, and inspire girls and young women to pursue STEM-related fields of study and degrees. Shawn is a leading champion of their efforts.

By partnering with NYTM on this event, BWIT saw an opportunity to help advance those efforts and their mission. As a result, an impressive group of women presented to a sold-out audience, sharing the highlights of their organizations and demoing their technologies.

The presenters and links to their websites follow. The photos and descriptions are from Xconomy Editor Joao-Pierre S. Ruth.

“This is one of many events we participate in to foster diversity in technology,” said Ziejie Li, an engineer in the Trading and Analytics team and a BWIT Committee member.

Jessica Lawrence, executive director of NYTM, said the organization created a women-specific event because they were not receiving many applications from women-led companies to demo at their regular monthly meetups, so they thought creating an event just for women would help encourage more to step forward and be the catalyst to demo at the larger, monthly event.  She was happy to report that this month they had over 90 female-founded companies apply to demo – and two of the companies, Shareblee and Mental Canvas, went on to the NYTM mainstage in February. “We hope more and more women demo at our monthly meetups,” she said.