FFrancesca Failonientrepreneur, pioneer, is the winner of the 2025 GammaDonna Award. For an all-female revolution. In Trentino, there is an abandoned hydroelectric power plant where, among silent turbines and walls that tell of decades of energy, something invisible but very powerful is being generated today: Bitcoin. It’s not a science fiction scene, but the operating model of Alps Blockchain, Trentino startup which transformed digital mining, the creation and management of Bitcoins using powerful computers, into a virtuous process of energy redevelopment. Where water once flowed, now flows computational power powered by renewable sources.
Francesca Failoni: Bitcoin becoming sustainable
Co-founder and CFO of Alps BlockchainFailoni won the Prize because his project does not promise abstract revolutions, but it creates them inside historic hydroelectric power plantswhere clean energy powers cryptographic calculations and generates virtual currency. An idea born in Trentino, grown in Italy, exported to Ecuador and Oman. The result? Over 20 active plants, 200 million euros raised.
The GammaDonna 2025 award to those who innovate without noise
Francesca Failoni convinced the jury with a model that combines technology and sustainability, but also with a coherent, ambitious and rooted entrepreneurial vision: «The people you build a business with are more important than the idea itself» he declared, underlining how coherence between values and strategy was decisive in dealing with a capital intensive sector, where raising funds is essential. The next stop? The stock market listing. Not as a goal, but as a challenge.
Francesca Failoni, leading the startup Alps Blockchain, is the winner of the 2025 GammaDonna Award
Not just Failoni: four visions, one ecosystem
The final of the GammaDonna Prize, the recognition that has valorised innovative female entrepreneurship since 2004was held in Turin, in Palazzo Madama. The main prize went to Failoni, but she was not the only one. Valeria Della Rosa won the Women Startup Award with Oli Helpan artificial intelligence-based app that supports parents and educators in managing children with ADHD. The system adapts to the clinical and behavioral profile of each user, already active in three countries.
Simona Maschi, founder of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Designan international center that trains innovators capable of designing sustainable and humane digital solutions, received the Giuliana Bertin Communication Award. It has just opened an office in Bergamo. Lucia Cuman, CEO of STL Design & Technologygot the Special Mention for Internationalization from DHL Express Italy. His Stilfibra line, seats in vegetable fibers and recycled plastictook the company from Marostica to the markets of Japan, Belgium, France and Germany. Part of the proceeds finance girls’ education in Nepal.
GammaDonna 2025, not showcase stories, but replicable models
These stories don’t talk about exceptions, but about models. Innovation is no longer a promise: it is a practice. And female entrepreneurship is not a category to be protected, but a resource to be recognized. Francesca Failoni did not win because she is a womanbut because he has built a business that works, that teaches, that expands. And which demonstrates how even blockchain, if inserted in the right context, can become an infrastructure of trust.
The GammaDonna Award, in fact, does not celebrate the potential, but the concrete. He doesn’t look for showcase stories, but replicable models. AND in a country where less than 15% of startups are founded by womenthese businesses show that female leadership is not a quota, but a direction.