Last month we celebrated five exceptional women leading the way in travel tech. As a fast-growing industry, it’s a highly innovative space for talented tech pioneers transforming the way we experience the world around us.
Having just launched with an investment of £1.3 million, travel app Bimble is a new female-founded innovation reinforcing the value of female entrepreneurs in tech. Co-founded by Francesca Howland and Tomi Novak, the app gives travel lovers a platform to collect, remember, and share all the places they love, to create personalised travel lists and inspire a community of travel lovers.
CEO Francesca Howland secured £1.3 million in angel funding as part of the Google Digital Accelerator Programme, an invite-only partnership designed to boost the growth of brands with great potential. Out of this investment, a third of it has come from female angels with a specific interest in backing female-founded businesses.
For women in technology around the globe, stories like this are evidence that female tech talent is not the only key to the growth of sub-sectors in tech such as travel tech, but that it’s valued by investors. Having both come from a strong background in AI and digital, Bimble’s founder demonstrates the opportunities women with a technology background can have access to as a result of their passion for their work.
As a start-up, Bimble is seeing fast growth. After 12 months of work developing the place list technology powering the app, they have secured an early partnership with travel tech giant EasyJet, as well as a growing community of 60,000.
Perhaps one of the most inspiring points of this story is how the innovation seems to have been born out of a desire to use technology to build a community of likeminded people, and connect them in a similar way to other visually driven tech apps such as Instagram and Pinterest.
CEO, co-founder, and female entrepreneur Francesca Howland has said, “We created Bimble after realising there are thousands of place recommendations shared every day, but no simple way to collect these and pass them on. As we looked more closely at the opportunity, we simply couldn’t believe that no one was doing this already”. Howland is driving forward the notion of community media that seems to have the potential to grow into as big of a phenomenon as the traditional social media that’s become so integral to modern life and work.
Francesca Howland is a woman in tech serving up inspiration and ambition to aspiring female tech entrepreneurs. She has utilised technology to build a product that essentially serves as a giant digital guidebook which places great value on remembering places you’ve been, sharing them with others and enriching the way masses of people experience the world. The story behind Bimble drives home how important it is to spark an interest in tech in girls from a young age, and demonstrate to them through more and more visible roles models that the future of tech needs to be a gender-balanced one.