Women Entrepreneurs Fund Winner – Orchid Horizon
- May 9
- 3 min read
Tailored Trading and Proactive Saving: Orchid Horizon’s Twin Finance Solutions
For many female business founders, building a business means juggling paid work, startup demands, and family responsibilities – often all at once – which, without a financial buffer, can make committing to a new venture feel insurmountable. The Women Entrepreneurs Fund, founded by Joy Shivas in 2022, is working to upend the gender imbalance in the startup sphere by providing female founders with precious time, support, and financial stability through $10,000 grants for living expenses.
Our final winner for this grant round is a little unusual: not one, but two innovations developed by not one, but three pioneering women. Their collective, Orchid Horizon, is dedicated to building practical digital tools for everyday users under the tagline “Cultivating What Matters.”
What began as a personal project to create digital solutions to problems in their own lives has blossomed into two viable products: Orchid Edge, a performance and risk management platform for futures prop traders, and My Budget Mate, a feature-rich budgeting and household management app.
Zaskia Katzke, Lee-Anne Hefer, and Debby Hoffman are the leading brains behind these products, each serving a different audience but built on the same core philosophy: behaviour-aware systems that work in the real world. They say both apps grew from real, felt market gaps, personal experience and diverse expertise, which helps ensure their business and products remain practical, financially coherent, and grounded in how people actually behave.
Orchid Edge was built to address a lack of journaling tools that reflect the realities of proprietary trading – particularly the technical demands of managing multiple funded accounts with strict rules. Designed for a growing group of futures prop traders, the platform makes it easier to track trades across different accounts, integrates with tools they already use, and provides personalised feedback based on their own trading habits. It also acknowledges the emotional and psychological side of trading, which is often overlooked in existing, male-skewed systems.
My Budget Mate is built on the philosophy of being in control and planning ahead. While most budgeting tools track what you’ve already spent, My Budget Mate flips the script, allocating money to where it is needed before a single dollar leaves your bank account. That mental shift – from reactive to proactive – is what helps break the paycheque-to-paycheque cycle that so many New Zealand households are stuck in. The app’s purpose-built framework introduces users to the “envelope method,” helps them build their first $1,000 buffer and domino their debts, before moving on to grow a three-month safety net and invest in their future.
The founding team has each invested a significant amount of personal time and money over the past year, building two production-ready platforms from the ground up while raising seven kids between them. Receiving the grant was reportedly “a game changer.”
Lee-Anne says that “when we won the award, I think the first thing that stood out to me was that someone saw our ideas and thought they were worth investing in.” Debby adds: “I don’t have to go back to work for a wee while, which just takes that financial burden away for now and allows me to stay focused on this.”
We can’t wait to see what this terrific trio comes up with next, and we’re proud to play an early part in the Orchid Horizon journey.
Congratulations, Zaskia, Lee-Anne, and Debby!
