💰 Approximately $451M in disclosed startup funding went to 13 companies with one or more verified female founder this week.

The largest raise was 🥇 Gimlet Labs' $300M round at a $3B valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

One women-led fund was announced by Auxxo — the €33.3M Female Catalyst Fund II.

🏆 Athletes on the Cap Table highlights the capital moves of Leylah Fernandez, Russell Westbrook, Omri Casspi, Harrison Barnes, and Kevin Durant.

The signals in this digest come from a variety of credible sources. If you have a tip, opp, data point, or story you would like to include, please send it to [email protected].

Thank you for being a valued subscriber.

Expand your influence. Build your wealth. Celebrate your success.

Amie

Learn more about my work….

A snapshot of this week's capital activity across founder raises and new funds

Founder raises by round type:

New funds by fund number:

Funding rounds raised by companies with one or more women founders

Thinking Machines Lab (Mira Murati) is reportedly in talks to raise $1B at a $40B valuation — a steep comedown from the $50B talks that collapsed after January's leadership departures — to keep building its frontier AI research and tooling, in a round said to be led by Accel.

Gimlet Labs (Michelle Nguyen, Natalie Serrino) raised $300M at a $3B valuation to grow its platform that routes AI inference workloads across GPUs, CPUs, and specialized accelerators, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Arm Holdings and M12 also participating.

Odyssey Energy Solutions (Emily McAteer) raised $74M ($27M equity plus $47M debt) to expand procurement and working-capital financing for solar installers and EPCs building distributed solar and storage projects in emerging markets, led by Broadscale Group, FMO, and Al Mada Ventures.

iPremom (Dr. Tamara Garrido) raised €15M Seed to scale its blood-test platform that predicts severe first-trimester pregnancy complications before they happen, led by Amadeus Capital Partners with Asabys Partners and APEX Ventures also participating.

Elm AI (Aparajita Thakker, Eesha Khanna) raised $3.84M (bringing total funding to $6.2M) to grow its AI agent platform that automates vendor compliance, responsible sourcing, and supplier operations for supply chain teams, backed by five investors per an SEC filing.

Sarelly (Anna Sarelly, Rémi Martini) has raised $3 million in a new funding round, the Mexican beauty and lifestyle brand announced Wednesday. The funding will be used to support Sarelly’s US expansion goals.

Souk (Sofia Hamilton Sambrano) raised $1.6M Pre-Seed to build Coco, an AI agent that revives dormant B2B partnership and referral deals, led by Sure Valley Ventures with Antler and Fuel Ventures also participating.

Backbone (Siska Lannoo) raised €4M Pre-Seed to build an AI platform that pulls scattered supplier certificates, lab results, and internal records into one place so food producers can catch quality problems earlier, led by Pitchdrive.

ProvanAI (Joy Jiang) raised $1.2M Pre-Seed to commercialize an AI model that predicts ovarian cancer risk from routine mammogram imaging, backed by BioGenerator and the Missouri Technology Corporation.

askpolly (Erin Kelly) raised $3M Seed to grow its platform that analyzes social-media conversations to produce statistically representative market research, led by Differential Ventures with The 98 and Forum Ventures also participating.

MOA Foodtech (Susana Sánchez) raised $3.8M (bringing total funding to $14.3M) to scale its fermentation platform that turns agrifood waste into egg substitutes and yeast ingredients for food and pet food manufacturers, co-led by the European Innovation Council Fund, Swanlaab Innvierte Agri Food Tech, and CDTI-Innvierte.

Ollie (Christine Shannon) raised $7.5M Seed to grow its privacy-first family AI assistant that helps manage calendars, meals, groceries, to-dos, and bills through group chats, led by Khosla Ventures with AI House also participating; Shannon co-founded the company as CMO alongside CEO Bill Lennon.

Aranya (Aryamika Bhatia Ondaatje) raised $11M total ($9M Seed led by First Round Capital, plus an earlier $2M Pre-Seed led by Asylum Ventures) to convert bare-metal servers into custom, production-ready GPU clusters for AI inference and training in under 48 hours.

InLeap Photonics (Katharina Haas) raised €20M Seed to scale its laser beam-steering systems that improve industrial laser manufacturing and help neutralize drones near critical infrastructure, led by UVC Partners.

Auxxo (Bettine Schmitz, Dr. Gesa Miczaika) closed €33.3M Female Catalyst Fund II (final close, up 75% from its €26M first close) to back pan-European pre-seed and seed startups with at least one female founder holding 20%+ of the cap table, alongside launching a co-founder matchmaking platform aimed at closing the "co-founder gap" for women.

Athlete-backed capital moves that caught our attention this week

This section is contributed by Christie Lenox.

Kevin Durant made $60M on his $250k investment in Hugging Face that Nvidia just acquired for $12.9B.

Capacity, an AI platform that automates customer-support tasks, raised $54 million in Series E funding. Kathy Ireland led the round.

Vie Artlétique, created by a private group of tennis players, coaches, agents, and investors, launched at the US Open. Tennis player Leylah Fernandez is part of the player collective and holds an equity stake in the company. 

Project B, the international “F1 for Basketball” League, added Russell Westbrook as co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer.  Westbrook is taking an equity stake, board seat and CSO role.  

Swish Ventures, founded by Former NBA player Omri Casspi, raised its $250M third fund, pushing AUM to roughly $800M.  Backed by Sequoia, the firm now has eight unicorns across 20 portfolio companies including Cognition, Upwind, Eon and Applied Compute

San Antonio Spurs forward and NBA champion Harrison Barnes invested $25 million of his own money through his family office, Barnes & Co., to purchase Community State Bank in Paton, Iowa. 

Every week, we track the capital flowing to and from women founders and investors.

In Athletes on the Cap Table, we track and unpack the capital moves of elite athletes.

Love what we’re doing? Consider supporting us for $3/mo.

Interested in partnering with us? Learn more here.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

— WINS LIST