Amber Akhtar awarded prestigious grant to advance TextMine’s LLM capabilities in other languages, including Mandarin

INNOVATE UK REVEALS THE TRAILBLAZING WOMEN INNOVATORS TO WATCH IN 2025

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Amber Akhtar awarded prestigious grant to advance TextMine’s LLM capabilities in other languages, including Mandarin.

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The Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards is celebrating 50 women leading the charge in groundbreaking industries - from revolutionary peat-free farming solutions, to continuous green electricity, to an AI-powered platform that streamlines allergy management in schools.

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This year’s winners, from Edinburgh to Southampton and Cardiff to Belfast, are tackling critical social, environmental and economic challenges, creating a robust pipeline of women-led businesses for future investment. Each will receive a £75,000 grant, personalised business coaching, and access to networking, role modelling and training opportunities.

Amber Akhtar, co-founder of TextMine from London, was one of the 50 trailblazing winners. Amber has launched a project that adapts TextMine’s large language model (LLM) powered document data extraction technology to mandarin, the most-spoken business language after English. For companies with global activities, many documents are written in other languages, and cannot easily be processed by human users or by LLM-based technologies such as TextMine (which typically focus on English). This means (i) their business critical decisions are being driven by only a fraction -- and an unrepresentative sample -- of the valuable information they own, and (ii) risks in key documents might be missed. As such, global companies are at risk of millions of avoidable losses or missed business potential.

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Research highlights significant hurdles for women entrepreneurs, including access to funding, and a lack of networks and visible role models. The Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards address these issues, enabling women innovators to scale their businesses, whilst making a powerful impact on our economy and society.

Since launching in 2016, the Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards have invested over £11 million in 200 women innovators and has built a vibrant community of over 10,500 women business leaders.

The awards continue to champion high-potential women business leaders from diverse backgrounds: 36% of the winners are from ethnic minority groups (excluding white minorities); 22% have long term conditions, illnesses or disabilities; and 50% have caring or parental responsibilities.

The award winners, who represent a broad range of high growth industries - from health tech and agriculture to renewable energy and education – also span every nation and region of the UK.

The Awards drew 1,452 applications from women business leaders, 52% up on last year. This record-breaking engagement highlights the high demand for innovation support and potential to drive economic growth from women leading businesses in the UK. In total, £3.75 million in government funding is being awarded, with each recipient receiving 50% more than previous years.

Recent data across all Innovate UK competitions shows that 1 in 3 successful grant applications are now led by women, a significant jump from 1 in 7 when Women in Innovation was first launched.

Emily Nott, Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Innovate UK, said:

“Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Awards spotlight the UK’s most groundbreaking women entrepreneurs. This year’s winners have shown incredible leadership and creativity. We’re thrilled to support them in scaling their businesses and inspiring the next wave of women innovators. Their success stories will undoubtedly pave the way for more women to enter and thrive in the world of innovation.”

Dr Stella Peace, Interim Executive Chair of Innovate UK, said:

“The Women in Innovation programme is a powerful catalyst for change, not just for the brilliant women entrepreneurs it supports, but for the entire UK innovation landscape. By breaking down barriers and amplifying diverse voices, Innovate UK are fostering a more inclusive and dynamic ecosystem that drives progress across all sectors. This programme is about more than funding – it's about creating role models, building networks, and inspiring the next generation of women innovators to dream big and transform our world.’

Minister for AI, Feryal Clark, said:

“From low-cost cancer treatments that could save lives through earlier diagnoses, to AI supporting our police to secure victims justice, this year’s Women in Innovation Awards winners are driving forward an exciting range of projects that could improve so many aspects of our lives. It truly shows the value of Government investing in creative, women-led projects in every corner of the UK – supporting economic growth to deliver our Plan for Change.”

Previous Women in Innovation Award winners have gone on to achieve remarkable success, including securing multi-million pound investments, expanding their operations, winning prestigious industry and royal awards, entering international markets, and forging high-profile partnerships with organisations such as Google, Disney and the NHS.

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Explore all 50 of the remarkable award winners and discover how you could benefit from the programme by searching ‘Innovate UK Women in Innovation’ or visiting: bit.ly/IUKWomenInnovate

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For Further details contact:

Amber Akhtar - Amber@textmine.com

Notes to editors

About TextMine

TextMine is the leading AI powered enterprise document data extraction solution for procurement, finance, compliance and legal teams. TextMine’s self-hosted and proprietary models automate the extraction of key terms from critical documents such as contracts, policies, certificates, POs and SOWs delivering real-time data that saves time, reduces errors and enhances operational efficiency. TextMine can streamline a number of use cases including but not limited to vendor onboarding, internal audits, ERP data entry, payment term analysis, purchase order and invoice reconciliation.

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About Innovate UK

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is the UK’s innovation agency. It works to create a better future by inspiring, involving and investing in businesses developing life-changing innovations. Its mission is to help companies to grow through their development and commercialisation of new products, processes and services, supported by an outstanding innovation ecosystem that is agile, inclusive and easy to navigate.

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About Innovate UK Women in Innovation

The Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards launched in 2016, to increase the number of women engaging with Innovate UK and investing in innovation to grow their own businesses.

Research conducted with women innovators revealed that access to funding and finance remains the most significant barrier to success, alongside challenges such as the lack of visible role models and difficulty accessing key networks. Over the past eight years, the Awards have worked to break down these barriers. They have championed women entrepreneurs, driven business growth, and created opportunities for more women and girls to be inspired into innovation.

They have had an incredible impact and kickstarted positive change across the innovation system. Through the Awards, Innovate UK has invested over £11 million in 200 pioneering women innovators and the programme has driven a >100% increase in the number of successful women-led applications across all Innovate UK funding competitions.

This pipeline of high-potential, women-led businesses will be ready to engage with the upcoming Invest in Women Taskforce. This industry-led, government-backed initiative is establishing a £250 million funding pool - one of the world’s largest investment resources for female-led and mixed-gender enterprises.

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