Issue #15 | Wednesday, July 1, 2026
💸 Over $728M in disclosed startup funding went to 21 companies with one or more female founder this week. The largest raise was 🥇 Mirendil (Tara Rezaei), which secured a $200M Seed round to build self-accelerating AI systems for scientific and engineering discovery.
9 notable women-led fund announcements were made this week, representing more than $3.9B in venture capital, led by Spark Capital's (Natalie Vais, Yasmin Razavi) $3.3B pair of new flagship and growth funds.
🏆 Athletes on the Cap Table returns for week 2, tracking the capital moves of Alex Morgan, Allison Ellsworth, Serena Williams, Beth Ferreira, Demi Vollering, and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
This week, Christie is diving into the Signals Behind Jams + Alex Morgan.
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Amie
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Amie Sheridan | Editor, WINS LIST
📶 Capital Signal
The biggest stories around women and capital this week
📈 Founder Raises
Tier 1 — Mega Rounds ($100M+)
Mirendil (Tara Rezaei) raised $200M Seed to build self-accelerating AI systems for scientific and engineering discovery, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and NVIDIA.
Tier 2 — Growth Rounds ($25M–$99M)
Engram (Jessy Lin) raised $98M to build the learned memory layer for AI, led by General Catalyst.
Lycia Therapeutics (Aetna Wun Trombley) raised $75M Series D to develop therapies targeting extracellular disease-causing proteins, led by Balyasny Asset Management.
Nura Bio (Shilpa Sambashivan) raised $73.8M Series B to develop therapies for neurodegenerative diseases, led by The Column Group.
Oblenio Bio (Samantha Truex) raised $62M Series B to develop treatments for autoimmune diseases, led by Pfizer Ventures.
Patronus AI (Rebecca Qian) raised $50M Series B to build AI safety evaluation and simulation infrastructure, led by Greenfield Partners.
Coval (Brooke Hopkins) raised $28M Series A to build a voice AI evaluation platform, led by Norwest.
Hera (Jenny Lee) raised $27M Series A to provide virtual care coordination for older adults and their families, led by Bain Capital Ventures.
Tier 3 — Early Stage (<$25M)
Niural (Nami Baral) raised $21M Series A extension to build an AI-native global payroll and benefits platform, led by FOG Ventures and NewView Capital.
CroíValve (Lucy O'Keeffe) raised $20M Series B extension to develop minimally invasive heart valve technology.
JustAI (Neha Mittal) raised $17M Series A to build an AI-native marketing platform, led by Base10 Partners.
Trovy (Ashley Harris) raised $15M Series A to replace high-interest debt with home equity financing, led by Left Lane Capital.
TRIMTECH Therapeutics (Nicki Thompson) raised $14M Seed extension to develop treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, led by Johnson & Johnson Innovation.
ChemT (Jie Sun) raised $5M Seed to build an intelligence layer for biomanufacturing, led by Wavemaker Ventures and Seeds.
Valence AI (Chloe Duckworth, Shannon Brownlee) raised $5M Seed to build emotional intelligence infrastructure for voice AI, led by Differential Ventures.
Xella Health (Kelly Lacob, Adriana Dantas) raised $4.7M to build a precision healthcare platform for women.
Ovum (Dr. Ariella Heffernan-Marks) raised $4M Seed to build an AI-powered longitudinal women's health dataset, led by Admiralty Capital Group (Amanda Andriano).
Kalipso (Virginia Debernardi) raised $3.2M to help organizations operationalize regulatory change.
Moment Energy (Sumreen Rattan) raised C$3M to repurpose EV batteries into grid-scale energy storage, led by NorthX Climate Tech (Sarah Goodman).
Ralo (Helly Shah) raised $2.9M Seed to build an AI-native mortgage brokerage platform.
June Health (Lori Casselman, Dr. Romy Nitsch, Fazlin Bandali) raised $1.7M Pre-Seed to provide employer-sponsored women's healthcare navigation, led by Securian Canada and AgeTech Capital (Lyne Landry).
AIVA (Lucia Mari Sanguino, Paula Rodriguez) raised $1.5M to build an AI-powered hotel intelligence platform.
🏦 VC Signals
New women-led venture funds and investment vehicles
Spark Capital (Natalie Vais, Yasmin Razavi) announced $3.3B across two new funds to back early-stage and growth technology companies.
Seedcamp (Reshma Sohoni) raised $320M across two new funds to invest in Europe's next generation of Pre-Seed and Seed founders.
Bootstrap 4F (Stephanie Heller, Fatou Diagne) announced the first investments from its £130M fund of funds into high performing, female-led venture funds, Evertrue Capital and Seedcamp.
100x100 (Marie Cheong) launched a $100M fund to co-build climate technology startups across South and Southeast Asia.
Norrsken Launcher (Anna Fredrixon) raised €80M for its second fund investing in deeptech and impact startups.
EmergingTech Ventures (Meriem Zairi Tlemçani) launched EmTech II, a $60M early-stage technology fund focused on Francophone Africa.
MoE Capital (Naomi Xia) raised a $25M debut fund investing in early-stage startups.
Pachamama Ventures (Karen Sheffield) announced the final close of Fund I—undisclosed amount—focused on early-stage climate technology companies.
⚡High Signal Founder: Rebecca Qian | Patronus AI
Adjacent to her startup’s $50M Series B to build AI safety evaluation and simulation infrastructure, led by Greenfield Partners…
Thrilled to announce our $50M Series B led by Greenfield Partners (formerly TPG), with participation from Lightspeed, Notable Capital to accelerate agent simulation research and infrastructure. We are joined by leading AI researchers from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Recursive and more.
Three years ago, I left AI at Meta to start an eval research lab with Anand Kannappan. Today, we are realizing our dream of scalable AI oversight with a world class team of researchers, engineers and operators, partnering with frontier labs and AI companies to advance frontier AI capabilities.
The era of static benchmarks is over. Human labor marketplaces are not equipped for Data 2.0. Evals are now by default long horizon, agentic and grounded in the real world. To train and evaluate models more capable than ourselves, we need hyperrealistic simulation environments. The quality of your simulation is the quality of your model.
We are obsessed with understanding individual and collective intelligence. We are excited to usher in a new era of agentic evaluation. We are experiencing tremendous growth and hiring across all roles in San Francisco.
Our mission is to simulate all the world’s intelligence. We’re just getting started.
💬 Investor Speak: Marie Cheong | 100x100
Adjacent to launching a $100M fund to co-build climate technology startups across South and Southeast Asia…
We announced the launch of #FundII today targeting US $100m to build 50 new climate companies for #SoutheastAsia and #India.
This is the result of 12+ months of hard work, setting up 100x100, moving our team, getting our VCFM license all with the mission of scaling up a dedicated climate platform to abate #10% of global carbon emissions.
Climate is less fashionable than when we launched Fund I in 2021. The world looks different now - energy shortages, de-globalization, supply chain shocks, food security fears. Startups in #energy, #food, #newmaterials, #transportation and #industrialefficiency address these challeges, improve livelihoods and make our economies more resilient.
The world needs climate companies more than ever. The biggest emissions are the biggest opportunities. We partner with experienced #entreprenuers and build them from scratch.
🏆 Athletes on the Cap Table
Athlete-backed capital moves that caught our attention this week
Jams, a line of protein-packed, frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches founded by Conor Blakley and Josh Franko, raised a $60M Series C including athlete investor Alex Morgan and poppi founder, Allison Ellsworth.
TRACE (Ella Rubin, Katie Pflegler), a resale technology and recommerce startup, announced a $3M oversubscribed seed round led by Serena Ventures (Serena Williams, Beth Ferreira).
Tour de France winner Demi Vollering is the first women athlete LP investing in Hexis’—a performance nutrition platform built on carbohydrate periodisation science founded by Dr. David Dunne and Dr. Sam Impey. The startup raised $2.1 million (€1.85 million) in seed capital led by APEX Capital.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone has joined the Oklahoma City United Soccer Club as a minority owner.
🔍 Signals Behind the Deal: Jams + Alex Morgan
Alex Morgan's participation in Jams' $60M Series C reflects a broader shift in how founders are building cap tables. Rather than bringing athletes in after a financing round as paid endorsers, companies are increasingly inviting them to become equity owners from the outset.
For Jams, Morgan joins a growing group of strategic investors—including fellow athletes and creators—whose value extends well beyond capital. Together, they provide distribution, audience reach, credibility, retail relationships, and long-term brand advocacy that traditional financial investors alone cannot offer.
This approach signals an evolution in venture capital. Today's founders are designing cap tables around strategic capital—investors who contribute measurable advantages beyond the size of their check.
📶 What This Signals
🏅 Athlete investors are becoming long-term owners rather than short-term brand ambassadors.
📈 Cap tables are increasingly being built around distribution, credibility, and customer access—not just financial capital.
💡 The most valuable investors of the next decade may be those who can accelerate growth after the round closes, not simply help finance it.
🎬 Signing Off
This week reinforced three themes we'll continue watching closely:
👀 AI infrastructure is attracting some of the largest checks in the market.
👀 Women-led venture firms are deploying increasingly larger pools of capital across global technology ecosystems.
👀 Cap tables are evolving. Founders are bringing on investors who contribute more than capital—from strategic operators to athletes with distribution, credibility, and long-term ownership.
That's exactly what WINS LIST exists to track.
Thanks for reading.
See you next week.
— WINS LIST
