Apple announced Monday the launch of its first initiative to boost support for women entrepreneurs through Entrepreneur Camp, a technology lab that focused on app development.
The free two-week camp, which is to take place in January 2019, is now open for applications from app-driven businesses, which must be female-founded, co-founded or led and have at least one woman on the development team, Apple said.
Once accepted, Apple will give each company the opportunity to send three attendees to its headquarters at Cupertino, California for the 14-day immersive program, where they will be offered one-on-one code-level instruction from Apple engineers, as well as sessions on design, technology and App Store marketing.
Each company will also receive two tickets to the following year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference that is held annually to showcase Apple's new software and technologies for software developers.
With these efforts, Apple is looking to better support female entrepreneurs as women-owned businesses are growing more than two times faster than the US national average.
Women-led tech startups delivered a 35 percent higher return on investment than those by men, though women entrepreneurs received only 1.9 billion U.S. dollars in funding in 2017, compared to 83.1 billion dollars for men, Apple said.
