We are very proud to announce that our CEO Josefien Groot, had been nominated as one of the twenty-one most talented and inspiring women entrepreneurs in Europe. On the 23rd of September, we received the great news that Josefien won the Rising Innovator title that recognizes excellent female entrepreneurs under the age of 35 which comes with a 50,000 Euro award.
The EU Prize for Women Innovators 2020 highlights and celebrates the outstanding achievements of female entrepreneurs running innovative companies and was funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program for research and innovation.
Josefien started the company with CO-Founder Ruben based on a dream to make a change in the way we think about coatings and to improve the world with material science. Ruben and Josefien combined their passion of technology and sustainability with the vision to eventually make every surface functional.
Qlayers company was founded in August 2017 and has managed to increase their sizes since then. This young and passionate start-up is situated in Delft, the Netherlands, and envisions to automate coating processes worldwide, by delivering functional surfaces.
Qlayers put years of development into the latest 10Q robot which uses a state of art technology that transforms the traditional method of coating application on large-scale industrial surfaces such as storage tanks.
This new technology changes the current inefficient and unsafe painting process into a fully automated, faster, safer and more reliable process, with almost zero emission.
Women are outnumbered by men in leadership positions in the corporate sector in the EU. This means that female creativity and entrepreneurial potential are a hugely under-exploited source of jobs and economic growth.
The European Commission is working with EU countries to overcome the barriers to women entrepreneurship and encourage more women to start their own companies.
