The term “tech bro” conjures quick, vivid images. Mark Zuckerberg sitting in Joe Rogan’s podcast studio, talking about grappling coworkers; Elon Musk wearing sunglasses and brandishing a chainsaw; Jeff Bezos appearing (suddenly, and alarmingly) with washboard abs. There’s always a reaction to the tech bro, whether it’s an eye roll or a vague sense of unease.
Milette Gillow and Sedinam Simpson know all about the tech bros baggage. Still they said screw it, let’s call our all-female accelerator that anyway.
Why this name? “I get asked: ‘why aren’t you called The Tech Gals or The Tech Queens?’ That misses the point of laying claim to something that’s seen as a negative,” says Gillow, a UK-based former VC and maths lecturer. “We want to flip the narrative on its head because if you don’t laugh at this, you’ll cry.”
Boys Club, a crypto group for women, was an inspiration. “I thought surely someone’s done The Tech Bros but it seems no one wanted to go near it. Now we get reactions like, ‘I saw the name and it made me angry. I clicked on it and I loved it.’”
The problem
Gillow started The Tech Bros in 2024, first as a series of meetups and hackathons for exclusively female founders. Over the past year, there have been gatherings on topics such as robotics and cryptography and workshops around how to take your pitch to the “minimum viable product” stage. A recurring session is the “Bad Ideas Build”, where women gather to hash out ideas: some good, some inevitably bad.
Next month, things will go up a level when The Tech Bros hosts 20 wannabe “technical founders” — the focus on STEM graduates is deliberate — from all over the world in a “hacker house” in the Norwegian mountains. Ultimately, the dream is to turn The Tech Bros into an equivalent to the San Francisco-based Y Combinator incubator, Gillow says.
Simpson, who is from South Africa and moved to the UK to study machine learning at Cambridge University, discovered the group online and signed on as cofounder after a coffee with Gillow confirmed the pair had a lot of the same ideas.
“We want to back the underfunded and undervalued. We’re not after anyone’s slice of the pie, we’re growing the pie,” Simpson says.
There is, to continue the pastry analogy, a whole heap of pie that’s being ignored. A regularly cited figure is that all-female teams only receive 2% of VC funding, while European startups with at least one female founder raised just 12% of venture capital raised in 2024, according to the 2025 Female Innovation Index.
The figures change slightly but the overall trend is unmistakeable: VC money disproportionately goes to all-male teams. Why? “I could talk about this for a day,” says Gillow (we have an hour).
“Investing in women is still seen as riskier than investing in men and we just find that absurd,” she says. “The higher I went in different fields, in maths, in classical music [Gillow is also an opera singer], it was always men at the top. There was always some explanation for why it was like this and I’m annoyed with myself for accepting these explanations in the past,” she says.
“As a female-led company, you will have to impress men all the time. An entirely male company, on the other hand: you can go your entire existence without having to impress a single woman.”
If there are more female investors, the argument goes, funding for women-led teams will improve. “More women are joining VCs but they’re mostly still in the bottom ranks, they don’t get to make decisions on where the money goes,” Gillow says. But then there are biases to watch out for here, too. Gillow cites one study from 2023 which says women-led firms with first round funding raised exclusively from female VC partners were 2x less likely to raise a follow-on round than those whose first round included male partners.
The Tech Bros hope can’t solve everything but at least it ca help make all-female teams much more common. “Converting women from ‘I’m not sure I can do this’ to a strong ‘yes, I can do this’ is going to make the biggest difference,” Gillow says.
In a recent LinkedIn post, she riffs on a line from Anton Ego, the food critic in the film Ratatouille: “Not everyone can build a startup; but a good founder can come from anywhere.”
Talent spotting
The Tech Bros keeps a lively LinkedIn page, which has fun ribbing various tech types. This post, for example, introduces us to Chad, whose hobbies include: ignoring feedback, gaslighting his cofounder and calling himself a futurist. The kicker: “That’s why we built The Tech Bros: Zero Chads. Just elite women building real companies.”
Over 200 applications were submitted for the first Tech Bros cohort and among them are women who’ve worked for big tech names like Google, Discord, Tesla and Microsoft. “There are gaming pitches, medtech and spacetech too,” says Gillow. “Someone wanted to build a drone to clean windows.”
The 20 woman shortlist will develop their ideas for several weeks in a cabin (22 beds and an obligatory sauna) located a few hours outside Oslo. There will be some of the same hurried founder coupling-up common at other incubators but the programme is light.
The Tech Bros are keeping afloat with sponsorship from companies and individuals (partners listed on the website include Google Cloud, a company run by some famous tech bros, Innovate UK, the government’s moonshot agency Aria and chipmaking supremo Nvidia). “I really think people are going to be fighting to give us sponsorship spots next year,” says Gillow.
In a year where it feels like tech bro culture is taking deeper root, particularly in AI companies — whether it’s the awkward job posts that feature men in their bath robes or Zuckerberg’s call for more “masculine energy” — Gillow and Simpson are confident they can carve out a new space for women.
And like with Y Combinator, The Tech Bros may eventually take a stake in companies: but not yet. “We’re not taking equity now because first we need to show the talent is out there,” Gillow says.
“We don’t want to risk chasing away a single woman for a 2% stake.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/meet-the-women-behind-the-tech-bros-were-laying-claim-to-the-term/
