Tech leader creates statewide women-empowering platform

Not many people can say they maintain two C-suite roles at the same time. As if being the chief marketing officer at software firm Revstar wasn’t enough to fill her days, Raechel Canipe is also founder and CEO of Women in Tech and Entrepreneurship — a cohort that started as a happy hour in Tampa in 2022 and has since grown into 3,000 members in six chapters statewide. 

“We’re incredibly motivated and interested,” Canipe says of women in the technology field. Her own experiences with harassment, in addition to those of women she met in her career, inspired her decision to launch Women in Tech.

“In realizing that I wasn't alone in the experience, I came to the understanding that we needed to do something, but there needed to be a stronger community. In particular, in the tech and tech entrepreneurship space.” Canipe relays.

Canipe was born in North Carolina and grew up in Central Florida with her single mother and a close knit extended family that cared for her while mom went back to school — twice — and worked multiple jobs. Canipe cites her mom as her first example of ‘grit, tenacity, and resilience’, traits that would serve her well as she obtained her degree in psychology and sociology from the University of South Florida and entered the workforce. 

Jobs at Dex Imaging, Quiet Professionals Inc, Project Afghan Relief Fund and Synapse Florida positioned her for her current role at RevStar, a software development company focused on cloud-native technology.

“I jokingly and lovingly call myself a chaos monster,” she laughs when asked about how she handles change and being a changemaker. “So my thing that I've been working on [regarding] change management has been slowing down enough to bring more people along for the ride, to give them a chance to share the really incredible insights that they also have, that might shift my thinking or approach, and to give them enough information and time to process that information to trust in the change that I'm leading.”

Canipe spent a lot of time conceptualizing and doing preliminary research by asking around the female tech community about what everyone would want in a group crafted to support them. The launch got off to a shaky start — the first happy hour was rained out — but pointed questions of ‘when are we going to start this?’ became a signal of things to come. 

“One of the biggest challenges that we have had from the very beginning is the ability to scale to meet the demand. Demand for our resources and community has far outpaced the financial resources that (we) have to support that,” Canipe says, “Thank God we have an incredible team of volunteer managers who have stepped up to help ensure that these things are still possible. And I have an incredibly flexible arrangement with my employer that allows me to give a significant amount of time to this organization while still having the income to financially support me and organization out of my day wages.”

Canipe has bootstrapped the entire endeavor with help from volunteers and sponsors. She is singularly focused on keeping the interests of the members first, ensuring as few barriers to entry as possible. “We are not interested in passing along the cost to members because those costs are one of the key barriers that are preventing diversity in the first place,” she says. 

A Slack workspace serves as the primary communication platform for the group. Women from Tampa, St.Pete, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville and, most recently, a USF chapter, are able to post jobs, grants and event happenings for free. Any in-person event hosted by WTE is free of cost as well. 

The connections forged in these spaces continue to inspire Canipe. “My belief is that as the organization continues to mature, as those relationships among our members have time to grow and evolve and new opportunities begin to arise for them, that the impact will just be exponential. I'm most excited about what the impact will be in the long run.”

Women in WTE have found new jobs through group postings amid a slew of layoffs in the tech sector; a few banded together to create a tech summer camp for K-12 students in Fort Lauderdale; and an angel investor began posting educational content to help founders hone in on their pitches for their best chance at getting funding. "I am really proud of the way the community has rallied together to create change," she says. 

Sharing her vision for the future, Canipe says: “I believe that this means that within the next five to 10 years, we'll be able to serve women all throughout the Southeast with the very long term goal of being able to serve women all over the world."

Another WTE chapter is forming in Melbourne, where Canipe's mother currently lives. Other chapters are in the works as well. 

“What really excites me is that we're just getting started,” Canipe says, “And we're already seeing the transformative power of the community that we're building and the joy that it brings to our members and the impact that it has on them.”