The Chobham-based founder of a technology company has been shortlisted in the Female Entrepreneur of the Year category at the UK Small Business Awards.

Sophie Bruce, founder and CEO of family technology company MOLO, will represent Surrey at the national celebration of UK small business success at Birmingham in December.

The nomination recognises Sophie’s commitment to building a product that tackles one of modern family life's most overlooked challenges, the modern load, hence MOLO.

MOLO is an AI-powered app that takes the planning, remembering and organising off working parents, reading school emails, letters and messages and turning them into an organised family calendar automatically.

"I'm genuinely thrilled to be recognised as a finalist at the UK Small Business Awards," says Sophie, a former performance psychologist who is also the co-founder of Mums Building Companies (MBC), a network of more than 350 mum-founders across the UK.

"I started MOLO because I believe modern parenting has become an extreme sport, and that the load families carry today isn't a personal failing, it's a system that was never designed for the way we live now.

“To have that mission recognised, while we're still in the thick of building, means an enormous amount. It's for every exhausted parent who has ever felt they were the only one struggling to hold it all together.

“We have a research partnership with the University of Essex where we're looking into the specific demands on modern day parents, such as dual career households and digital demands from school or nursery and parental WhatsApp groups.”

MOLO recently closed a £250,000 fundraising round, bringing in investors as the company continues to build momentum. The capital will be used to further product development and grow the team.

Sophie adds: “MOLO is a mobile app , you can find us in the App Store and on Google Play. Think about everything that arrives in your life as a parent on any given week. A letter from school about a trip; a WhatsApp from the class rep about a birthday; an email from the nursery about a change to the schedule; a PDF with the term dates; a party invitation.

“You read all of that, try to remember it, mean to add it to your calendar, forget, remember at 10pm, add it to a note to yourself, and maybe eventually it makes it into the right place. Or not, and you find out at the school gate.

“MOLO reads all of that for you. It extracts the relevant information, date, time, action required, and puts it straight into your calendar with no manual input.

“The vision is a full family operating system, but right now, the thing it does brilliantly is take the most repetitive work of modern parenting and handle it automatically.

“And I really should add that our chief technology officer, Dan, is also a Woking resident so we’re very much a local start-up!”

MOLO is a paid-for app, at £10 per family, per month.

For more information about MOLO, visit wearemolo.com