Issue #14 | Wednesday, June 24, 2026
💸 In this issue, we are tracking roughly $950M in disclosed startup funding to 34 companies with one or more female founders. The largest raise this week was 🥇 Element Biosciences (Molly He) — $175M Series E to advance DNA sequencing technology.
6 new women-led venture funds were announced this week, totaling over $430M in disclosed capital. The largest fund announcement was Gigascale (Victoria Beasley), which raised a $250M climate fund to invest in climate technology companies.
New to WINS LIST — 🏆 Athletes on the Cap Table — where we’ll track the increasing role of elite athletes as investors, owners, fund managers, and influence-driven capital allocators. This section is curated by Christie Lenox. This week, she’s diving into the Signals Behind the Champ + Rhoback deal.
💡 Key takeaways from Issue #14…
On-trend startup positioning: Infrastructure over AI.
Women are fueling enterprise tech innovation, globally.
Athletes are vying for ownership over endorsement.
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 of WINS LIST.
Amie
Amie Sheridan | Editor, WINS LIST
📶 Capital Signal
The biggest stories around women and capital this week
📈 Founder Raises
Tier 1 — Mega Rounds ($100M+)
Element Biosciences (Molly He) raised $175M Series E to advance DNA sequencing technology, led by Samsung Electronics.
Twinco Capital (Sandra Nolasco, Carmen Marin) secured €165M financing package including a €15M Series B and €150M securitization facility to expand purchase order finance infrastructure, led by FMO and Banco Santander.
Tier 2 — Growth Rounds ($25M–$99M)
Theker (Carla Gómez Cano) raised $85M Series A to develop autonomous generalist robots for industrial environments, led by CRV.
Stepful (Tressia Hobeika) raised $55M Series C to train and place healthcare workers, led by Oak HC/FT (Annie Lemont, Patricia Kemp).
Innovafeed (Aude Guo) raised €51M (~$59M) to expand insect-based ingredients for animal feed, pet food, and agriculture, led by Creadev.
Poetic (Markie Wagner) raised $50M Series A at a $500M valuation to automate enterprise workflows, led by Kleiner Perkins.
Andera (Tinah Hong) raised $37M Series A to automate audit and compliance testing, led by Lightspeed.
Dapple (Tricia Martínez-Saab) raised $30M Seed to build private AI cloud infrastructure for enterprise and government, led by The Raptor Group.
Mammogen (Elizabeth Cormier-May) raised up to $30M Series A to develop RNA-powered breast cancer diagnostics, led by a major U.S. public retirement system.
Evotrex (Stella Qin) raised $30M Series A to manufacture hybrid RV trailers, led by GSR United Capital.
Tier 3 — Early Stage (<$25M)
Jedify (Adi Elimelech) raised $24M Series A to build enterprise context graph infrastructure, led by Norwest.
Eclipse (Imen Marrak) raised €20M Series A to advance battery storage solutions across Europe, led by BNP Paribas and Noria.
Podium Automation (Jamie Niu Serota) raised $18M Series A to build industrial control systems for manufacturers, led by Construct Capital (Dayna Grayson, Rachel Holt).
Rem3dy Health (Melissa Snover) raised £14M (€16M) to scale personalized nutritional supplements.
01Health (Dr. Sonia Szamocki) raised $15M Series A to expand specialist healthcare access through local clinics, led by Gresham House Ventures.
Clair Health (Jenny Duan) raised $11.6M Seed to develop an AI-powered wearable for hormone monitoring, led by Khosla Ventures.
Billables AI (Nancy Jeng) raised $10.2M Series A to automate operational intelligence for law firms, led by Avenue Growth Partners.
Frontier Health (Rachel Finegold) raised £9.7M (~$13M) to build AI agents for NHS administrative staff, led by Atomico.
Waniwani (Luiza Gusmao) raised $8M Seed to build AI-powered distribution for financial services, led by Seedcamp (Reshma Sohoni).
Green-Got (Maud Caillaux) raised €8M crowdfunding round to expand its sustainable neobank.
Uncovr (Ines Iraki) raised $7M Seed to automate surgical reporting and billing workflows, led by Index Ventures.
Lexful (Pinar Ormeci) raised $7M Seed to build AI-native IT documentation software, led by Top Down Ventures.
Rejuvenate Bio (Ann Belien) raised $6M to develop gene therapies for age-related diseases, led by VCapital.
Fearn (Angela Gao) raised $5.5M Seed to automate patent drafting and compliance workflows, led by Kindred Ventures.
Soffi (Cris Dobbins) raised $4.6M Pre-Seed to build collaborative product development software, led by Innovation Endeavors.
Swsh (Alexandra Debow, Weilyn Chong) raised $4M Seed to power fan engagement experiences, led by Game Changers Ventures.
CardNexus (Julie Le Soymier) raised €3.5M Pre-Seed to build a marketplace for trading card game enthusiasts, led by Piton Capital.
Volteum (Zsofia Toth) raised €2.5M to expand EV and mixed-fleet management software, led by Movens Capital.
June Health (Lori Casselman, Romy Nitsch) raised $2.4M Pre-Seed to provide women’s health benefits through a virtual clinic.
Campground (Sruti Bharat) raised $2.2M to build operations software for social impact programs.
Sirius Game (Laura Cesaro) raised €1.3M to develop game-based learning programs, led by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.
Granarium Technologies (Paula Viinamaki) raised €1M+ Pre-Seed to industrialize renewable supercapacitors, co-led by BSV Ventures (Sandra Golbreich) and Beamline (Jana Budkovskaja).
Impli (Anna Luisa Schaffgotsch) received a £1.4M grant to develop continuous molecular monitoring technology for hormonal health.
🏦 VC Signals
New women-led venture funds and investment vehicles
Gigascale (Victoria Beasley) raised $250M climate fund to invest in climate technologies.
Aum Ventures (Nisha Shah) launched an $80M Fund II focused on early-stage deeptech startups.
THENA Capital (Tatum Getty, Pamela Walker-Geddes, Esther Reynal de St Michel Richardot) launched a £45M debut fund focused on healthcare and medtech startups.
Animal Capital (Dylann Sands) closed a $33M Fund III focused on early-stage consumer technology companies.
Startmate (Phoebe Pincus) secured $8M from the Minderoo Foundation to back women founders.
Angel Invest (Nazanin Daneshvar) launched its third angel fund targeting investments in 250 startups. (Fund size undisclosed.)
💬 Investor Speak: Victoria Beasley | Gigascale Capital
Women in venture capital sharing insights into their latest funds and investments
Adjacent to the launch of her firm’s $250M first institutional fund…
Today we're announcing Gigascale Capital's $250M first institutional fund.
I've spent over 15 years as an operator and investor working across the physical economy — starting in solar, scaling manufacturing through trade wars and commodity price spikes, then as an investor watching a generation of climate companies succeed and fail.
Now feels different from anything I've seen before.
Lots of learnings, but the pattern is clear: the science matters, but it's rarely the thing that separates the companies that scale. What matters is the economics. The market entry. The ability to move from working prototype to deployed infrastructure.
More than any time in my career, the fundamentals are moving. Cost curves. Customer demand. Energy, grid infrastructure, materials, manufacturing, and supply chains being rebuilt. The companies breaking through aren't winning because they're better for the planet in theory — they're winning because they're better in practice: cheaper, faster, more reliable, safer, easier to deploy.
When better systems win at scale, people and the planet are better for it.
🏆 Athletes on the Cap Table
Athlete-backed capital moves that caught our attention this week
TIVA brought tennis star Elina Svitolina onto its cap table as part of a $600K Pre-Seed round to scale its performance cosmetics brand.
Champ—a joint venture between L Catterton & Patricof Co—launched a $500M consumer brand investment fund with a roster of elite women athlete investors.
Juggernaut Capital Partners + Gareth Bale launched Juggernaut Diversified Sport with plans to raise a $500M+ investment fund targeting opportunities across global sports, including women's sports.
Rhoback (Kristina Loftus) raised $50M to expand its performance apparel brand through new retail locations, collegiate partnerships, and influencer-driven growth.
Phia (Phoebe Gates) raised a $35M Series A for its AI-powered shopping platform and added Olympic skier Eileen Gu to its cap table as an investor.
🔍 Signals Behind the Deal: Champ + Rhoback
Athlete investing continues to evolve beyond endorsements and sponsorships and favor ownership.
Champ is a new $500M consumer brand investment fund built around a simple premise: athletes become equity holders, not paid promoters. To date, more than 250 athletes have collectively committed over $50M of their own capital to the fund.
Women on the Cap Table: WNBA players Azzi Fudd, Cameron Brink, and Sophie Cunningham, and former LSU Gymnast Olivia Dunne.
The mechanics of the fund matter: an athlete who owns 0.2% of a brand that exits at $500 million makes $1 million, regardless of whether they ever post about it on Instagram. An athlete who signed a $200,000 endorsement deal for the same brand makes exactly $200,000, no matter how big the exit gets.
The fund’s first investment in Rhoback (Kristina Loftus) signals a broader shift toward athlete ownership and highlights growing investor interest in founder-led consumer brands where authentic athlete involvement may drive long-term value creation.
In her words…
Ten years ago – the day after I graduated from University of Virginia Darden School of Business – Bunker (our Rhodesian Ridgeback) and I loaded inventory into the back of a camper, hitched it to our car, and drove up and down the East Coast selling polos, q-zips, and hats to people willing to take a chance on us.
Matthew and Kevin would fly out to wherever I was on weekends after spending the week at their "real" jobs. We brought a small label printer with us and fulfilled online orders from the road, hoping we had packed the right inventory somewhere in the camper. We clocked more than 40,000 miles on the road, and when we weren’t crashing on a friend’s couch, we slept in the camper.
Today, I’m excited to share Rhoback’s partnership with Patricof Co (P/Co), L Catterton, and The Champ Fund – a milestone that reflects over a decade of blood, sweat, and tears.
This partnership will help accelerate the next phase of Rhoback's growth while allowing us to stay focused on what has always mattered most: building great products, serving our customers, and inspiring people who crave activity.
A huge THANK YOU to our amazing team, our loyal community, and to those who believed in us when everyone else (and our parents) thought we were crazy.
Here’s to the next amazing chapter in the Rhoback’s story.
🎬 Signing Off
This week, capital flowed toward companies building foundational systems—from genomics and robotics to climate infrastructure and enterprise AI.
Beyond traditional venture, athlete ownership continues to gain momentum as elite athletes increasingly move from endorsement deals to equity positions, investment funds, and cap tables.
The common thread: ownership.
Whether founder, investor, or athlete, those creating long-term value are looking beyond visibility alone and toward participation in the upside.
Follow along with us as we track the signals shaping women founders, investors, and the future of capital markets.
Thanks for reading.
See you next week.
— WINS LIST
