FoundHER Summit: Build x Lead x Fund 2026

✨ The FoundHER Summit ✨

The FoundHER Summit is a high-energy, one-day event designed to support female founders elevate their business, no matter where they are on their journey - from first build to first raise.

We’re bringing together women founders, investors, tech partners, corporations, and ecosystem leaders for a day of practical insights, powerful conversations, and game-changing connections.

🌟 What to Expect

• Expert-led education on the latest tech, resilience and growth strategies

• Tangible take-aways

• Interactive sessions

• Two-room format with key sessions recorded for post-event access

• Networking drinks post event

  
  

💡 Why Attend?

• Build your confidence and connect with like minded founders and business owners

• Navigate the tech landscape and understand what makes sense for you

• Learn how to use social media to build a brand and reach your audience

• Protect your mental health and resilience

• Connect directly with partners looking to support founders at every stage

• Learn how to vibe code or set up Claude correctly

• Understand the different types of investment opportunities and how to get involved

• Build and strengthen your network and met some really awesome people!

• Headshot outdated? Get a new one at the event from our friends at Nacara Studio (additional cost $88 inc. GST. Bookings strictly required. Book here: https://luma.com/6p5mxm4l)

• Goodie bags generously gifted by Snackproud - powered by Feedwell 

Agenda

• A main stage and breakout room with dynamic sessions across capital strategy, tech and AI, personal branding, selling online and leadership

• Fireside chats, capability breakouts and pitching opportunities with those in the room

• Expert speakers to be announced- stay tuned!

• Bring your laptop!

This is THE room to be in to Build → Lead → Grow → Fund

This is THE female founder startup event you don't want to miss.

Full agenda to come.

Event Details

📅 Tuesday, 24 November 2026

⏰ 9:30 AM – 6:00 PM AEDT

📌 Western Sydney Startup Hub, North Parramatta NSW

👥 In Person | Limited spots

🎟️ In-Person: Early bird $99+GST (10% discount for our TRW Alumni - reach out the team at admin@techreadywomen.com to get the discount code)

🎟️ Livestream: $28+GST (If you're based in Melbourne, Adelaide, or Brisbane you can join the watch parties at the Tank Stream Labs* offices)

Note, early bird is available until Oct 31st then full pricing kicks in ($119 +GST)

*Tank Stream Labs - Melbourne: Level 5 & 6, 440 Collins Street, Melbourne, VIC 3000

*Tank Stream Labs - Adelaide: Level 1 & 2, 63 Pirie Street, Adelaide, SA 5000

*Tank Stream Labs - Brisbane: Levels 27 & 28, 215 Adelaide Street, Brisbane City QLD 4000

Don’t miss your chance to be part of this transformative event!
Tickets are limited, secure yours today and join us at the forefront of Australia’s inclusive innovation movement.

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About the Speakers

Your Hosts

Watch this space as we continue to add more and more amazing speakers! It is going to be great!

Nicola Mills is the Founder and Group Managing Director of Sunny Balcony Group and co-founder and Chair of CABER Group – together spanning professional services, recruitment, funding, AI, and engineering across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the USA, the Middle East and Brazil, with combined revenue approaching $32M. She is the architect of the Supported Start-Up model, enabling 8+ employees to become founders within the group. A founding member of the EY Asia Pacific Entrepreneurial Winning Women program, Nicola has been recognised as a Smart Company Eight Entrepreneurs to Watch, a finalist in The CEO Magazine Global Executive of the Year Awards, 2025 TITAN Business Award winner and a Silver Stevie Award winner.

Jessica Spendlove is a performance dietitian, keynote speaker, advisor, author and podcast host who helps leaders and high-performing teams sustain performance without burnout. With 15+ years’ experience across elite sport, defence and corporate environments, Jess has worked with Olympic medallists, world champions, professional sporting teams and Australia’s Special Forces. Today, she partners with leaders and high-growth organisations to build sustainable performance through practical, science-backed strategies for energy, recovery and resilience. Jess is the author of For the Long Run and host of Stay at the Top.

Bethan Timmins is an engineering practice leader, product strategist and advocate for women who build. As Adoption and Practice Lead for Westpac’s Engineering Practice, she works with more than 10,000 engineers on the thing that quietly decides whether a large organisation ships or stalls: standards that help rather than police, community that’s real, and craft that gets recognised. She was previously Chief Product Owner for Developer Enablement, shaping the platforms, tooling and AI coding capability those engineers build on, and she co-authored the You Build It You Run It playbook on giving product teams real ownership of what they ship. A systems thinker at heart, she also advises the product community at Organa, helping founders take an idea all the way to a customer, with a focus on women building extraordinary things on a fraction of the runway their peers are given.

Samantha McCallum is an innovation leader, CX strategist and startup advisor who helps businesses build growth strategies around their customers. She blends strategic foresight with proven methods, including Lean Startup, Human-Centred Design and Agile, to help organisations anticipate change and deliver what comes next. Her 20 years of experience span consultancies, digital agencies and client-side leadership, including Head of Experience Design at Latitude Financial, Head of Marketing at Fairfax Media and Strategy Director at R/GA. Across telco, finance, FMCG, media, retail and government, she has led teams and shaped products for brands such as Telstra, nbn, Macquarie Bank, Woolworths and McDonald’s. As Managing Director of her innovation consultancy Outfoxed, she now advises and mentors a portfolio of startups while working with enterprise and ASX-listed clients, and she brings a talent for aligning everyone from the Board to the delivery team around a shared vision.

Jade Porter brings more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry, working with enterprises, government, commercial organisations, and more recently digital natives and start-ups across Australia and New Zealand. At Dell, Jade led the High Performance Compute business through the emergence of machine learning and the evolution toward today's large language models, helping customers turn advanced compute into practical outcomes. Jade later joined CrowdStrike in its mission to Stop Breaches, bringing deep cybersecurity expertise to customers facing an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape. For the past four years at Cloudflare, Jade has overseen the growth of the Digital Native and Start-Up segment, where partners and customers are seeing a wide range of use cases for Cloudflare to Connect, Protect and Build in the AI era. This work draws on a career that spans infrastructure, security and the leading edge of AI, and reflects a consistent focus on helping organisations adopt new technology with confidence.

Gwynne Leftwich is a Customer Engineer at Cloudflare in Sydney. She works with enterprises and high-growth organisations to secure, modernise and scale their internet-facing infrastructure across networks, applications and APIs. Gwynne has more than a decade of experience in business development, strategy and technical solution delivery. She works closely with security, infrastructure and engineering leaders on technical discovery, solution design and hands-on proofs of concept. Her work now includes helping organisations adopt AI securely, from protecting APIs and data flows to designing architectures that can support AI workloads at scale.Gwynne's career began in banking and finance. She holds an MBA from the University of Sydney and a Master of Finance from Macquarie University. She is particularly interested in AI security, bot management and the governance challenges of generative AI. She focuses on practical solutions that help organisations move faster with confidence.  

Krithiga Gopalan is a cybersecurity leader, patent holder and community builder with more than 18 years of international experience at Oracle across Switzerland, Singapore and India. As Director of Enterprise Security and Data Management Lead for APAC, she leads a team of security and data experts helping organisations adopt Oracle Cloud and its database, security and identity capabilities. She co-authored Oracle’s white paper Approaching Zero Trust Security with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and founded Oracle’s global Security & Compliance Community of Practice, which now has more than 1,300 members. A cloud security evangelist and natural communicator, she has led workshops and delivered keynotes that mentor young people building careers in tech. Krithiga holds two security patents and dual MBAs with honours (top 5%) from UCLA and the National University of Singapore. She is also a singer and a devotee of Carnatic music.

Pijush Mukherjee is Head of Digital Natives at Oracle Cloud APAC, a hands-on architect and a builder of new markets, who helps founders and technology leaders turn platform choices into business outcomes. With more than 20 years where architecture, customers and revenue meet, [Name] advises startup and scale-up founders, CTOs and Heads of AI on agentic AI, AI data platforms and scale-ready architecture, with a sharp focus on cost, performance and security. That advice is grounded in more than a decade architecting enterprise platforms for Ford, Johnson & Johnson and Rolls-Royce. Their work there included an FDA-compliant supplier portal, multi-million-dollar licence savings and patient-specific knee implant manufacturing. [Name] has also built new practices across APAC from near-zero into multi-million-dollar businesses, and has led engineering and commercial teams across the USA, Europe, India, Singapore and ANZ. With a founder’s mindset, [Name] still builds their own products, including an AI-driven adaptive learning platform, a privacy-first travel platform and a hyperlocal marketplace.

Rebecca Grainger is a leadership coach, breath work facilitator and former venture-backed startup founder. She built and exited a company under the pressure of being a non-tech founder, raising VC during Covid, and running a team of 12 across continents - and she knows firsthand the cost when a founder's nervous system collapses under growth. She now works with founders and leaders across Australia on nervous system regulation and capacity expansion. She combines coaching with transformational breath work and energy management - processes grounded in neuroscience and leadership development - to help leaders scale with more clarity and staying power, without burning out.

Emily Swaffield is an entrepreneur, creator and coach with more than a decade of experience building businesses, brands and audiences online. After starting her career in investment banking and capital markets across Sydney, Hong Kong and London, Emily left corporate finance to pursue entrepreneurship. She went on to build and lead a global online sales organisation that generated more than $10 million in sales across six countries, while speaking on stages around the world, from London to Las Vegas, to audiences of up to 20,000 people. Most recently, Emily worked as a Content & Monetisation Coach for Creator College, one of the fastest-growing startups teaching content creation and personal branding, backed by Genflow, the global creator agency behind some of the world’s biggest personal brands. Today, Emily works with founders and creators on personal brand, content and monetisation strategy, helping them build audiences and turn attention into revenue.

Christie Whitehill is a founder, brand builder and passionate advocate for women in business and wellness. She co-founded INTU WELLNESS, one of Australia’s fastest-growing health and beauty supplement brands. In 2024, INTU became the first Australian wellness brand to launch in 80 MECCA stores nationwide. Christie also co-hosts the In Your Skin podcast, which explores the science and stories behind skin, health and feeling good in your body. In 2017, Christie founded Tech Ready Women, the award-winning platform helping women turn ideas into scalable tech businesses. It has attracted more than 5,000 applicants and supported 400+ alumni, and was acquired by Scalare Partners in 2024.

Mia Bowyer is a global AI corporate trainer, keynote speaker and CEO of Automate Social, an Australian AI company that automates 80% of social media agency admin. She has trained more than 5,500 people across Australia, Asia-Pacific, Dubai and the US. Her 'People-Led AI Operating System' gets teams to set up working skills, agents and automations on day one. A Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner and Global Claude Partner, Mia began her career in corporate marketing at WWF, Ogilvy PR, Mable and Plastics For Change. She believes a company's best AI advantage isn't more AI, it's people who know how to use it.

Thank you to our Sponsors and Event Partners

This event is possible thanks to them!

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is helping women founders ship faster and build securely from the start. Powering a huge share of the modern internet, Cloudflare gives founders the tools to launch, protect, and scale their products without a big technical team behind them. At FoundHER, they're showing founders how to build smarter with AI and security baked in from day one.

🙌 Ready to build faster and safer? Come meet the Cloudflare team at the Summit.

Oracle

Oracle is helping women founders build on infrastructure that scales. From cloud and data to enterprise AI, Oracle gives founders the foundation to grow from first product to global company and the confidence to build something defensible from day one. At FoundHER, they're bringing that expertise to founders thinking about what it really takes to scale.

🙌 Want to build on infrastructure made for growth? Come meet the Oracle team at the Summit.

Snowflake

Snowflake is helping women founders turn data into their competitive edge. With the AI Data Cloud, founders can bring their data together, build AI-powered products and make smarter decisions from day one, without the heavy infrastructure. At FoundHER, they're showing founders how to use data and AI to build faster, prove traction and scale with confidence.

🙌 Want to turn your data into your edge? Come meet the Snowflake team at the Summit.

Snackproud - powered by Feedwell 

Snackproud was born when UX designer Ash Whittaker set out with a mission to stop a floor of developers living on sugar and crashing by mid-afternoon. It grew into a full-time business with its own snack range, a warehouse near the Sydney CBD and pantry managers keeping offices stocked. When COVID emptied workplaces in 2020, it sent more than 10,000 snack boxes to people’s homes. Now Snackproud is part of Feedwell, the Sydney caterer that has been keeping offices fed with fresh and healthy meals, delivered on time, every time since 2017. Together they’re keeping offices across Australia and New Zealand fed, from the lunch order to the 3pm snack run.

🙌 Find us at -

snackproud.com.au / @snack_proud 

feedwell.com.au / @feedwellau

The Founders Union

Powered by an AI-enabled matching engine, The Founders Union (TFU) connects founders with the right education, community, services, perks, and investment - tailored to their growth stage and specific needs. The goal? To deliver the right-sized support at the right time.

🙌 If you’re a founder or potential partner and want to be part of this growing community, express your interest now via the TFU website.

Tank Stream Labs

Tank Stream Labs is Australia’s premier coworking and private office provider, supporting startups, scaleups, and SMEs with tailored and flexible workspace solutions.

With multiple locations across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and now Brisbane, Tank Stream Labs is dedicated to fostering collaboration, innovation, and growth within its thriving community. Visit their website.

About Tech Ready Women

Tech Ready Women (TRW) exists to champion women in technology and innovation, supporting every step of their journey as entrepreneurs and leaders. Through high-impact programs, mentorship, and community, TRW empowers women to build, scale, and fund the businesses that shape the future of innovation.

At the core of our mission is delivering practical, authentic, and transformational support that increases women’s confidence and accelerates their entrepreneurial success. Our programs span the full founder journey, from idea validation in the Female Founder Startup Program, to customer growth in our GTM sprint, to investor readiness and scaling globally and now, how to build your own AI operating system.

And if you aren't ready to take one of our programs, you can join our Female Founder Grow community where we support you in-between it all!

For more information visit: www.techreadywomen.academy



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