The Bold Woman Award comes with a surprisingly long history. Veuve Clicquot launched the prize in France in 1972; it has been presented in Germany since 1984. Its historical touchstone is Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin, better known as Madame Clicquot.
When her husband died in 1805, she took over the Champagne house. For a woman in the early 19th century, that was hardly the expected course of events. She did it anyway — and she did far more than simply keep the business running. Production, distribution, technique: Clicquot intervened, reworked processes, and pushed the company forward. She is also credited with the development of the riddling table, one of those deceptively matter-of-fact inventions whose name gives little sense of the effect it had on Champagne production.
That history still shapes the award today. The Bold Woman Award honors entrepreneurs who have spent years building and defining their businesses. The Bold Future Award turns its attention to a younger generation of founders — women whose companies may still be relatively early-stage, but whose work already sits squarely inside some of today’s most consequential conversations.
Six women to watch
What connects these six biographies is not a shared founder archetype so much as a shared point of friction. Each is working on something that has long been expensive, inefficient, invisible, wasteful, or simply taken for granted. Lunar vehicles sit alongside financial education; skin models alongside logistics; construction robotics alongside medical plastics. The strength of this year’s field lies in that range.
2026 Bold Woman Award
Three entrepreneurs are nominated for the 2026 Bold Woman Award.
Irene Selvanathan founded Berlin-based NEUROSPACE in 2020. The company develops lunar rovers and autonomous robots for space exploration. Selvanathan herself came out of the aerospace and satellite sector, where she worked for more than a decade before launching the company. Through its “TACHELES” mission, NEUROSPACE is also involved in the broader context of NASA’s Artemis II mission. A proprietary CubeSat is intended to test the company’s technology under real spaceflight conditions.
Carmen Rommel, co-founder and COO of BIOVOX, is tackling a problem that medicine long treated as an unavoidable byproduct: plastic. The Darmstadt-based medtech company develops bio-based materials for medical products and is working on alternatives to conventional plastics. Raw materials such as sugarcane and corn sound, at first, more like the language of agriculture than medical technology. That shift is precisely what makes the idea interesting.
Karolina Decker, meanwhile, works in a field that sounds less technical but is no less structural. With FINMARIE, founded in 2018, she built a company focused on financial education, advisory services, and investing for women. The gender investment gap is not just a talking point here; it is part of the business proposition. Decker is also a co-founder of SchulGold and the author of Finanzen sind weiblich. With the Bold Future Award, the focusmoves further toward younger technology companies.
2026 Bold Future Award
With the Bold Future Award, the focus moves further toward younger technology companies.
Dr. Lena-Marie Pätzmann is co-founder and CEO of SITEGEIST ROBOTICS. Spun out of robotics research at the Technical University of Munich in 2025, the company develops autonomous, AI-powered machines for construction sites. They are designed to take on work such as concrete demolition, sandblasting, and drilling — jobs that are physically demanding, sometimes dangerous, and increasingly difficult to staff. Here, the construction site becomes a testing ground for automation.
Katharina Kreutzer, co-founder and CEO of MUVN, starts with a far more everyday image: a car, a destination, room in the trunk. The Hamburg-based startup connects already-planned trips with delivery requests. The idea is to make better use of mobility that already exists rather than create a new trip for every shipment. According to published figures, MUVN has reached roughly 85,000 app downloads and handles around 400 transports per month.
Amelie Reigl, founder and CEO of TIGERSHARK SCIENCE. Her biotech company develops in-vitro skin models as an alternative to animal testing for the cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries. What stands out is not only the research itself, but the way she brings it into public view. Under the name “Die Wissenschaftlerin,” Reigl reaches more than 400,000 people on social media. Research, entrepreneurship, and science communication sit unusually close together in her work.
Behind the Bold
The German edition of the award is backed by Moët Hennessy Germany. The initiative is supported and managed by LA MAISON Victor • Schilly & Friends, which has been involved with the format for several years and works across both communications and execution.
This year’s winners will be selected by an eight-member jury: Isabel Grupp-Kofler, Thurid Kahl, Saruul Krause-Jentsch, Fränzi Kühne, Janina Kugel, Delia Lachance, Sebastian Pollok, and Miriam Wohlfarth, winner of the 2025 Bold Woman Award.
The final decision will be announced on October 12, 2026, at the James-Simon-Galerie in Berlin.
Full Circle
For AVIAIR, this year’s award comes with an additional layer.
In AVIAIR 012, we had already written about Madame Clicquot as part of a broader story on Champagne. Now her name returns in a very different context — not as a historical figure in the story of a wine house, but as a reference point for women building companies out of entirely different materials: data, robotics, financial models, bioplastics, cell cultures.
More than two centuries separate Madame Clicquot from this year’s six nominees. It would be too neat to draw a straight line between them. History rarely behaves that way. More interesting is the persistence of a certain entrepreneurial instinct: the moment when someone stops accepting an existing condition as a given. A production method. An industry convention. A habit. A gap in the system.
For Madame Clicquot, it was Champagne. Today, it may be lunar rovers, construction robots, medical plastics, financial education, logistics platforms, or lab-grown skin models.
Not the same story. Maybe the same restlessness.
One to watch: Bold Woman Award by Veuve Clicquot, October 12, 2026, James-Simon-Galerie, Berlin.