Closing the gender gap in technology continues to proceed at a glacial pace. Women make up fewer than 25% of UK tech employees, while the proportion of female founders and C-suite executives trails behind that figure. The innovators featured below are those shaping the SaaS space in 2026, delivering breakthrough software across healthcare, media, creator tools, AI, fintech and deep tech.
Globally, women hold around 28% of roles in the technology sector, according to McKinsey, and female-founded companies continue to receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital relative to their male-led counterparts.
Why Are There Still So Few Women In Senior SaaS Roles?
The venture capital numbers lay it out pretty clearly. Global venture trends show that startups with at least one female founder participated in about 20% of 2024 funding rounds, with female-only teams claiming a meager 2% of total invested dollars. Expanding deal counts, for the most part, from mixed founding teams, highlighting a persistent gap in funding for all-female ventures.
That said, the range of sectors where women are founding and leading companies has changed a great deal. Female founders are building dominant, high-growth platforms across AI, quantum computing, digital health, vertical SaaS and financial infrastructure.
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The Top Women In SaaS In 2026
The following snapshot profiles a select group of SaaS founders and tech leaders to watch in 2026. It highlights executive talent navigating market shifts, integrating AI capabilities and building modern software architecture for complex industries.
1. Kathleen Barrett, CEO, Backlight
Barrett leads Backlight, a global media technology company whose portfolio includes video workflow and media-management platforms. She previously led Vimeo’s enterprise business, scaling it from less than $1 million to more than $125 million in revenue – one of the more striking enterprise growth trajectories in recent SaaS history.
Her previous title was SVP of Enterprise at Vimeo. Backlight exists at the intersection of creative work and enterprise infrastructure, a combination that has historically been underserved by both media companies and traditional SaaS vendors.
2. Nathalie Garcia, Co-founder, Practice Better
Garcia co-founded Practice Better after experiencing the administrative burden of running a wellness practice. The platform provides practice-management tools for health and wellness professionals, including scheduling, telehealth, charting, billing, payments and client engagement.
It’s a good example of a founder building from direct knowledge of the problem. Wellness practice management is a fragmented category where most solutions have been adapted from general healthcare software, and Practice Better was built specifically for how practitioners in this space actually work.
3. Allison Yazdian, CEO, Uscreen
Yazdian leads Uscreen, which lets creators and media companies build subscription streaming services and branded video apps. The company says more than 13,000 creators use its platform, reaching over 15 million end users.
The creator-economy infrastructure space is competitive, and Uscreen’s focus on owned-audience streaming rather than platform-dependent distribution gives it a distinct position. As platform algorithms become less predictable, the case for building directly on owned infrastructure has become stronger.
4. Rachel Tipograph, Founder and CEO, MikMak
Tipograph founded MikMak to help brands connect digital marketing activity with retail and marketplace purchases. Its software tracks the consumer path to purchase across the digital shelf, addressing one of the more persistent problems in modern marketing: understanding which activity is actually driving sales rather than traffic.
Commerce intelligence is a growing category as brands try to consolidate fragmented data across social platforms, paid media and retail partners. MikMak’s positioning as an independent measurement layer rather than a channel-owned tool is a real differentiator.
5. Leigh Sevin, CEO and Co-founder, Endear
Sevin co-founded Endear, an AI-powered CRM built specifically for omnichannel retailers. The company says its platform has driven more than $800 million in revenue for brands including Reformation, Glossier and Todd Snyder since 2019.
Retail CRM is a crowded space, but Endear’s specificity around clienteling for fashion and lifestyle brands gives it a clear positioning in a segment where generic CRM tools have historically been a poor fit. The shift toward AI-assisted outreach has made the category more interesting than it was a few years ago.
6. Keri Gohman, CEO, PatientNow
Gohman is leading PatientNow’s transition from a traditional practice-management system toward an AI-enabled platform for medical aesthetics and wellness providers. Her previous roles include senior positions at Xero, Capital One, Intuit, GE and CARET.
That breadth of experience across fintech, accounting software and healthcare SaaS is unusual for a vertical healthcare company and gives PatientNow a different kind of institutional knowledge than most competitors in this space.
7. April Stiles, Co-founder and CEO, Perspecta
Stiles leads Perspecta, a provider-data management platform serving health plans, workers’ compensation organisations and provider groups. The company reports data accuracy above 95% and operates seven products for regulated healthcare environments.
Healthcare data accuracy is important for regulatory compliance, network adequacy and operational decision-making. Perspecta operates in a category where the cost of errors is high and where AI-driven data validation is beginning to create real differentiation between providers.
8. Lourdes Agapito, Co-founder, Synthesia; Professor of 3D Vision, UCL
Agapito is a computer-science professor at University College London whose research in computer vision helped inform Synthesia’s AI-video technology. Synthesia was valued at $4 billion in its most recent funding round and has become one of the clearest examples of academic research directly enabling a commercially significant AI product.
The connection between her academic work and a company of this scale is relatively unusual in the European AI space.
9. Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Founder and CEO, Nu Quantum
Palacios-Berraquero founded Nu Quantum, a quantum-networking company that closed a $60 million Series A round in December 2025, described by the company as the largest round for a firm focused exclusively on quantum networks. Quantum networking is a category where the infrastructure being built now will underpin secure communications for critical systems over the next decade.
It’s one of the more technically demanding areas of deep tech, and Nu Quantum is one of the few companies with real traction at the networking layer specifically rather than at the broader quantum computing hardware level.
10. Manjul Rathee, Co-founder and CEO, BFB Labs
Rathee co-founded BFB Labs, which develops digital mental-health support for children, including Lumi Nova, an NHS-backed therapeutic intervention.
The combination of NHS validation and a consumer-facing product gives BFB Labs a credibility foundation that most digital health startups take years to build. Children’s mental health is a category where evidence-backed digital tools are both urgently needed and historically undersupplied.
