A mentor in every pocket

Women have a harder time in the world of work than men in many ways – for example, they are interrupted more often and their ideas are given less weight. With her app Ada Growth, Kosima Kovar wants to show women how they can change that.

Austrian companies are rarely led by women. Although women are represented on twice as many Austrian boards as in 2018, 70% of all boards are still made up exclusively of men, as the Boston Consulting Group reports in a new study. If the growth of women does not pick up speed, women and men will only be represented equally in 30 years. According to a report by the consulting agency McKinsey, it is not true that women simply do not want to be in management. Young women in particular show ambition: 90% of those under 30 want a promotion and three quarters want to be in management.

So if a lack of ambition isn’t the problem, then what is? “Because the management level is so dominated by men, courses and seminars for further training are also tailored to men. Women are often told that if you want to move up, you have to act more like a man. And that’s exactly what we don’t want,” explains Kosima Kovar about the “male bias” in the world of work. Kovar is the founder and CEO of Ada Power Woman GmbH, a Viennese start-up that wants to strengthen women in the labor market.

Kovar’s start-up provides Ada Growth, an app that “aims to put a mentor in every woman’s pocket.” Short learning videos explain to users how they can increase their visibility in the company using their tone of voice, posture, rhetoric and other tips. What you have learned is then tested in short quiz elements. Users can also tell the app whether they actually implement the skills they have learned in their everyday work. This feedback enables an AI to tailor recommendations for further learning videos to the user.

The AI ​​behind it is one thing that sets it apart from other comparable systems: All AIs are trained with data – and because the world of work is primarily geared towards men, it is also the data that AIs are usually fed with. In Ada, however, the AI ​​should have a “female bias” instead of the “male bias” that plagues other AIs. Kovar explains: “We do not train our AI with data from the Internet, but with content from our experts.” This should help women learn to use their strengths instead of copying men.

Kovar actually has her career not started in the micro-learning area. In 2017 she completed her bachelor’s degree in communications economics and added a master’s degree in organic business & marketing. While still studying for her master’s degree, the Viennese founded her first company, Sgreening, a marketing agency with a focus on sustainability. Through her work at Sgreening, Kovar noticed that women in companies often cannot realize their potential. “In my opinion, there are three pillars that a successful company needs: It must be economically successful, act ecologically and bring a social benefit,” says Kovar; and further: “Most companies are doing well economically. Many people don’t act ecologically yet, but that is slowly changing. But the third pillar is often overlooked – and especially the issue of gender equality.”

She brought Matthew Ziebarth on board as CTO, and together they founded Ada Power Woman in March 2021; A few months later, Ada Growth was launched. It was clear to the two of them that they could only achieve their mission – to promote the visibility and success of women in business – by making their business big enough.

Your target group is therefore not the users directly, but their employers. And unlike workshops or seminars, an app can reach thousands of people at the same time. “While many companies offer mentoring for women, this cannot be offered to every employee in large organizations and does not have the impact on the company that we want to achieve. What is needed is penetration. A mentor for everyone,” explains Kovar.

15 companies use Ada Growth and pay one euro per working day per user. According to Kovar, customers, which include EY Austria, Verbund, Erste Group and Voestalpine, have experienced that qualified women leave the company instead of being promoted internally. “Many companies have difficulty retaining their employees,” says the 28-year-old founder. “With Ada Growth, we support companies in developing their employees individually. Offers for further training are a form of appreciation – and studies show that employees stay in a company longer if they are valued.”

After an initial pre-seed financing round At the beginning of 2022, Kovar and her team were able to close another round of €1 million this summer – and are already in discussions for the next round. At the beginning of 2024, another low seven-figure amount should flow into the start-up, says Kovar.

How should the fresh capital be used? “We want to open up new markets and put a stronger focus on our AI,” says Kovar. While the short learning videos are still produced by humans today, AI will be used for this in the future. “In the future, our users will communicate with an avatar that conveys the content of our experts and looks like a real person,” explains Kovar. This means that new content can not only be produced more quickly, but also translated more easily. Once the content is there, explains Kovar, only one click separates it from a translation.

One challenge, however, is that the work culture is a little different in every country, admits Kovar. “That’s why we’re currently asking ourselves where our international journey will take us. Because the cultural differences are much greater between European countries than overseas,” she says. So far, Ada Growth is only available in German and in the DACH region.

Although she has already founded two companies at her young age, it doesn’t seem as if Kovar will spend the rest of her life with Ada. “I have thousands of ideas – that’s exactly the problem,” she says when asked whether the next company is already being planned. “Now the focus is definitely on Ada Growth. But I’ll never run out of ideas.”

Kosima Kovar studied communications economics and marketing. In 2018, she founded Sgreening, a “social and green” marketing agency. Two years later she started Ada Power Woman GmbH together with Matthew Ziebarth.