Issue #11 | Wednesday, June 3, 2026
💸 Approximately $393.5M USD was raised by 14 companies with one or more female founder this week. This excludes Anthropic’s $65B raise.
The largest raise this week was Focused Energy (Dr. Anika Stein) with a €240M Series A to develop laser-driven fusion technology for sustainable energy production.
From the VC angle, four new women-led funds were announced this week as women investors increasingly allocate capital toward foundational industries and technical sectors.
I’m reading the signs around co-founder Hanah-Marie Darley’s announcement of Geordie’s $30M Series A on LinkedIn.
💡 Key takeaways from Issue #11…
Four of the 18 women on this week’s funding list hold advanced degrees—two MDs and two PhDs. That’s 22%.
Women-owned and led investment firms backed four of the 15 women-founded companies with funding news this week. That’s 27%.
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 about women and capital this week
📈 Founder Raises
Airwallex (Lucy Yueting Liu) raised new funding at a $12B valuation to scale its global payments and financial platform for businesses led by Addition.
Anthropic (Daniela Amodei) secured $65B in funding at a $900B pre-money valuation to advance enterprise AI and coding-focused foundation models with participation from Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital Partners.
Eddy Grid (Emma Wolthuizen) raised €7.5M to build AI-driven energy management software that optimizes electricity usage and reduces costs from Graduate Ventures and Volve Capital.
Focused Energy (Dr. Anika Stein) raised €240M Series A to develop laser-driven fusion technology for sustainable energy production from RWE, SPRIND, European Innovation Council Fund, and Prime Movers Lab.
Geordie AI (Hanah-Marie Darley) raised $30M Series A to help enterprises securely adopt agentic AI led by Balderton Capital.
Kubera Health (Dr. Roja Garimella) raised $6.5M to build a contract-to-payment system of record for healthcare organizations led by Upfront Ventures.
Mykor (Olivia Page and Valentina Dipietro) raised $5.4M to develop low-carbon construction materials from industrial and agricultural waste led by Clean Growth Fund (Beverly Gower-Jones).
Nuclidium (Leila Jaafar) raised $33M Series B extension to develop radiopharmaceutical therapies and diagnostics for cancer from Kurma Growth Opportunities Fund and Angelini Ventures.
Oli (Dr. Sarah McDonald and Tara Croft) raised $6.5M Series A3 to develop a wireless wearable device that monitors maternal and fetal signals during labor from Scale Investors (Samar Mcheileh, Roo Harris, Chelsea Newell), Clare Ventures (Anna Stuck), and The University of Sydney.
P2 Science (Oihana Elizalde) raised $23M to transform sustainable feedstocks into high-performance ingredients led by Sofinnova Partners.
Patina (Laura Sisson) raised $2M to create novel fragrance molecules using molecular design, machine learning, and scent research from Betaworks and True Ventures.
Peripear (Nina van Schaick) raised £800K Pre-Seed to develop a medical device designed to reduce perineal tearing during childbirth with support from Innovate UK.
Replit (Haya Odeh) received an undisclosed investment from Visa to expand its agentic software creation platform.
Sleep or Die™ (Lauren Sudeyko) raised $1M to scale its sleep-focused consumer wellness brand from True Beauty Ventures (Cristina Nuñez).
Zonova (Dr. Georgia Fleet and Carla Southworth) raised £2.1M Seed to develop next-generation infection-resistant medical devices led by THENA Capital (Pamela Walker-Geddes, Ester Reynal de St Michel Richardot, Tatum Getty).
🏦 VC Signals
byFounders (Sara Rywe), a community-powered early-stage VC backing the next generation of globally ambitious and impact-aware founders, announced the close of their fund III, oversubscribed at €130M+.
Factory Capital (Anna Samuelsson) committed approximately $18M to establish women’s midlife health as an institutional investment category through the launch of the Institute Advancing Women’s Health (InAWH).
Skybound Venture Capital (Thaleia Misailidou) launched a $38M fund to invest in early-stage deeptech startups.
TMV (Marina Hadjipateras and Soraya Darabi) launched a $200M fund to back U.S. maritime and supply-chain startups.
💬 Investor Speak: Thaleia Misailidou
Adjacent to the launch of her $38M VC fund set to invest in early-stage deeptech founders…
“Today, after years of sitting on opposite sides of the table as founder and investor, George Varvarelis and I are building Skybound Venture Capital together.
Long before Skybound existed, I knew I wanted George beside me building it. Not because he had a successful exit, but because he understands what it takes to build hard technology from zero. Founder empathy earned the hard way.
Calling ourselves founder-led matters to me. I wanted Skybound to feel more like a startup than an investment manager - fast-moving, hands-on, ambitious by default.
Tarık Dutkuner joined us incredibly early, and together we’re building an international team from Athens around the same ambition.
We’re here to back more underdogs on a mission.
Founders change the world. We bring the conviction.”
👀 If I’m Reading the Signs…
Narrative intelligence around venture funding communication
Founder Signal Assessment: Geordie
London, UK-based cybersecurity and governance platform purpose-built for enterprise AI agents, Geordie, announced a $30M Series A, exclusively covered in Fortune.
Co-founder Hanah-Marie Darley shared her words about the investment on LinkedIn.
“Fortune exclusively covered our $30m Series A today, led by Balderton, and the need for a purpose-built platform to understand, secure, and govern enterprise agent operations as adoption scales.
Enterprises are no longer asking whether agents will matter. They’re asking how to govern them as they move into production.
For our customers, this becomes practical very quickly: security teams need a way to support agent adoption without losing visibility, control, or confidence.
As Jon Mattey, CISO at Forge Holiday Group, put it: “Geordie makes me successful in my role by helping me practice what I preach in making the business go faster safely. It enables us to be a first mover and to adopt agentic AI in a way that is safe for the business.”
Thank you to our customers, partners, investors, and team for helping us build the infrastructure enterprises need for the agentic era!”
📶 Signal Strength
✅ In her opening line, Hanah-Marie does an effective job of quickly sharing the investment amount, type, and VC firm leading the round.
✅ She addresses the problem Geordie is solving and the need for this solution in the market.
✅ She includes a customer testimonial that signals traction.
📉 Signal Gaps
⭕ Darley does not include any additional numbers to amplify the narrative around Geordie’s fundability.
👀 What I'd Add
To strengthen her founder signal, Hanah-Marie can add more proof in numbers to her post. I would suggest including things like:
total number of users across X enterprises
persona of target customer
market size, global or regional
revenue growth data
Bottom Line: This is a feel good announcement containing the facts around the deal. Prospective investors, partners, and customers are more likely to take notice if more compelling performance data is included.
🎬 Signing Off
That’s a wrap on issue #11.
WINS LIST tracks the signals shaping women founders and investors.
In today’s ecosystem, visibility matters.
👀 We are seeing founders and VCs leveraging their own channels to amplify their traction.
👀 We are seeing startup storytelling begin six to twelve months before a raise.
👀 We are seeing funding announcements lead to press tours.
👀 We are seeing women founders showcasing credibility, momentum, and demand.
Follow along with us as we unbox investor perspectives and frame out the fundability metrics they evaluate when considering not only where their investments should go, but also which founders to meet.
We do not represent nor are we compensated by any of the businesses we cover.
Thank you for being a valued subscriber.
See you next week.
— WINS LIST
