Woman-founded deep tech: Aqta
Accessible, paid entry routes into AI governance and applied cryptography
Theme: Promoting women entrepreneurship in digital
Phase and Stage: LEADERSHIP – Senior career
Action: Introducing role models
Beneficiaries: Universities; Women only; Adults
Users: Education providers; Private companies; NGOs/Society
Aqta is a Dublin-based deep-tech company building cryptographic receipts for AI decisions, sold into regulated finance and healthcare. The best practice concerns how we hire: from day one we set out to make entry into a demanding technical field genuinely open and accessible, and to lead that field visibly as a woman founder, so the company widens the route in rather than guarding it.
THE CHALLENGE
Cryptography and AI governance draw from a narrow, self-reproducing talent pool. Roles are filled through closed networks, gated behind senior pedigrees, and concentrated in a few hubs, all of which screen out women and early-career talent. The challenge was to open real, paid entry points into this work without lowering the technical bar, from a small early-stage company with limited hiring capacity.
OUR SOLUTION
We published an open careers page on our own site with real paid roles: internships in engineering and cryptography research, research-collaborator and research-assistant positions, and product design. The application is deliberately low-barrier (which role, why it, and one thing you have built; no cover-letter theatre), remote-friendly across the EU and Switzerland, and privacy-by-design for applicants. Each opening is paired with a visible founder as a role model so candidates can see the work is reachable.
OUTCOME
A live, public hiring pipeline with six paid, remote-eligible roles across engineering, cryptography research and design, open to students and early-career applicants. It is backed by concrete, verifiable role-model signals: selection into TechFoundHer / WeBuild (Shared Island Enterprise Scheme), a Main Stage Top 10 at GenAI Zürich, and participation in the UN’s first Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Together these make a woman-led deep-tech company, and its entry routes, visible to people who would not otherwise see a way in.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Three things drove the result and transfer cleanly.
First, accessibility is a design choice, not a budget line: open postings, no cover-letter barriers, and remote or part-time options widen the pool at near-zero cost.
Second, for a small team, mentorship capacity beats vacancy volume, so honesty about how many people you can genuinely support matters.
Third, transparency compounds: an open spec, open roles and a public founder reinforce one another.
