Homes, Hormones, Hardware
Clair launches a hormone-tracking wearable, Kindred raises $125M for home swapping, and an a16z guest essay argues AI will not kill software.
TL;DR: Midi Health raised $100M at a $1B+ valuation. Kindred raised $125M. Overland AI raised $120M. Clair Health launched from stealth with a16z Speedrun to build a real-time hormone tracking wearable. Plus new startup roles, YC’s Spring 2026 request for startups, the death of software, and the economics of a Super Bowl ad.
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Joanna Strober, Co-Founder & CEO of Midi Health, a women’s telehealth company delivering AI-enabled, insurance-covered care across every life stage, raised $100M in Series D funding at a valuation exceeding $1B led by Goodwater Capital.
Stephanie Bonk, Co-Founder & President of Overland AI, a defense technology company building autonomous ground systems for national security and the U.S. Armed Forces, raised $100M in funding led by 8VC, alongside $20M of venture debt.
Justine Palefsky and Tasneem Amina, Co-Founders of Kindred, a home-swapping travel platform offering a lower-cost alternative to hotels and short-term rentals, raised $125M in new funding, including a $40M Series B co-led by NEA and Dylan Field (Figma CEO) and an $85M Series C led by Index Ventures.
Clara Bernardes, Co-Founder & CSO of Biorce, a Barcelona-based life sciences startup using AI to accelerate and standardize clinical trial design, raised $52M in Series A funding led by DST Global Partners.
Adun Akanni, Co-Founder & COO of Alaffia Health, a healthcare technology company using agentic AI and clinical expertise to modernize health plan claims operations, raised $55M in Series B funding led by Transformation Capital.
Sara Hooker, Co-Founder of Adaption Labs, an AI research startup focused on building smaller, more efficient models that can adapt continuously to tasks without costly retraining, raised $50M in seed funding led by Emergence Capital Partners.
Susanna Pho, Co-Founder & COO of Forerunner, a software platform helping local governments manage infrastructure and community risk, raised $39M in total funding, including a $26M Series B led by Wellington Management and a Series A led by Union Square Ventures.
Galina Russell, Co-Founder & CEO of Mitra EV, a commercial fleet electrification company offering no-upfront-cost EV leasing and shared charging for fleet operators, raised $27M in financing, including equity led by Ultra Capital.
Pauline Roteta, Founder & CEO of Pasito, an AI-native workspace automating insurance and benefits operations from quote to claim, raised $21M in Series A funding led by Insight Partners.
Veronica Ma and Kelly Zhou, Co-Founders of Arbor, an AI-powered research platform turning frontline employee and customer conversations into operational intelligence, raised $6.3M in combined seed and pre-seed funding led by 645 Ventures.
Remy Tucker, Founder of On the House, a Brisbane-based startup providing free, organic period products in public bathrooms through an advertising-funded model, raised $1.1M in seed funding led by Purpose Ventures.
Female Founder Spotlight: Jenny Duan (Clair Health)
This week, we spoke with Jenny Duan, CEO and co-founder of Clair Health. The company officially came out of stealth this week with pre-seed funding from a16z speedrun and Reach Capital.
Jenny graduated early from Stanford after creating a custom concentration at the intersection of AI and the social internet. She previously worked at Daydream (fashion tech) in NYC and led Stanford’s creator collective before turning her focus to one of the most underfunded and misunderstood areas in healthcare: women’s hormones.
Clair is building the world’s first non-invasive continuous hormone tracker, a wearable designed to give women real-time insight into estrogen, progesterone, LH, and FSH without blood draws, pee sticks, or guesswork.
The problem space is massive. Today’s solutions are outdated (temperature tracking, expensive lab tests) and exclusionary (period apps don’t work for roughly 30% of women with irregular cycles). Meanwhile, nearly 70% of wearable health data is trained on men, leaving women to navigate their health with incomplete or inaccurate tools.
The Clair team has already tested its prototype with 40+ women across 127 menstrual cycles, achieving 94% cycle classification accuracy using optical sensors. Every layer of the stack has been built entirely in-house.
Next up is a Stanford-run clinical study launching at the end of May, enrolling 150 women over three months. The study will provide scientific validation ahead of Clair’s planned end-of-year launch. While the company is pursuing FDA approval as a medical device, Clair will initially launch as a consumer wellness product to get into women’s hands faster.
💄 Astou from e.l.f. Beauty is hiring a Summer Intern in Influencer Partnerships to work hands-on on influencer marketing (NYC).
💙 Mackenzie from Marble Health is hiring across GTM roles (BDR, Account Executive, School Success Manager) to help scale school partnerships and tackle the youth mental health crisis.
✨ Odette from Licensed to Glow is hiring a Creator & Social Media Marketing Manager to manage a creator network and drive scalable virality for an all-access beauty booking platform.
🎉 Shreya from Partiful is hiring Campus Growth Managers (Spring 2026) to launch and grow the social events app on college campuses.
🎥 Annie from Dream Ventures is hiring a content + video intern to help launch a new platform in the angel investing space focused on connecting more women to capital.
📞 Daryna from Quo (formerly OpenPhone) is hiring an Account Executive to help scale a modern business phone platform.
⚙️ Angela from Fearn is hiring a Member of Technical Staff (Infra) and an AI Research Intern to help build the future of intellectual property.
🎓 Madeline from Outsmart is hiring a Business Operations Associate to work directly with leadership and help scale a venture-backed startup reimagining higher education for the AI era.
🧩 Mints Media (founded by the ex-CMO of Cluely) is hiring an Operations Intern to systemize processes, write SOPs, and help scale a fast-growing content studio.
🎙️ Willow is hiring a Founding Full-Stack Engineer and a Founding Growth & Content Lead to help replace keyboards with voice-first AI.
🛠️ Probook is hiring founding roles across recruiting, sales, marketing, people ops, and deployment to build AI-powered dispatching software for home service businesses.
🧠 Traverse (YC W26) is hiring Software Engineer Interns to build reinforcement learning environments for long-horizon AI agents.
🥄 Giant Spoon is hiring Summer Interns across creative, accounts, media, and production to work on brand campaigns at an independent advertising agency (NYC & LA).
🏓 CityPickle is hiring across growth marketing, events, hospitality, and on-court roles to staff its new Times Square flagship pickleball venue.
📈 Ergo (YC W25) is hiring a Growth Lead to build and own funnel, content, and GTM experiments for an AI revenue automation platform for modern sales teams.
⚡ a16z Speedrun Alpha is accepting applications for a new fellowship placing top technical students and recent grads into full-time engineering roles at a16z portfolio companies, with a 2-month in-person SF fellowship. Applications close March 6.
🍐 Pear VC is accepting applications for Pear Prime, a highly selective program matching top technical new grads with early-stage founders for founding-engineer roles focused on real ownership from day one. Applications close 2/15.
💁♀️ Teli Labs matches and introduces young talent to founders at top early-stage startups & SMBs. Join here! Check out our job board with 10k live startup roles.
Death of Software? Nah. a16z released a newsletter drawing direct parallels to earlier tech shifts where PCs did not eliminate mainframes, e-commerce did not kill physical retail, and streaming did not end media creation. In each case, legacy systems persisted, new platforms layered on top, complexity increased, and the total amount of software, businesses, and work expanded far beyond early predictions. AI, he argues, follows the same pattern.
The economics of a Super Bowl ad. Ro’s CEO breaks down why they’re spending $16-29M (media + production + talent) on their first Super Bowl ad with Serena Williams. The math: $233k (minimum) per second for airtime, but 100M+ people actually watch the ads. The bet structure is asymmetric: worst case loses ~1-2% marketing efficiency, best case compresses years of brand building into one night.
Kirsten Green curated a list of 50 consumer AI startups to join now, arguing consumer AI is at an inflection point and highlighting companies building new discovery, personalization, health navigation, financial planning, career coaching, personal productivity, social, and robotics products.
YC released its Spring 2026 Requests for Startups, highlighting opportunities in AI-native product management, AI-native hedge funds and agencies, stablecoin-based financial services, AI for government and fraud detection, modernized U.S. industrial systems, AI guidance for physical work, large spatial reasoning models, and new infrastructure to make training and deploying LLMs dramatically easier.
Fort (YC W26) launched to build a wearable that automatically tracks strength training by detecting exercises, reps, sets, form, and fatigue, designed for longevity beyond sleep and heart rate metrics.
Women across The Nucleus Network are crushing it, including Hot Girl Pickles in consumer food, Goodword in AI-powered networking, The Female Quotient in large-scale women’s community and brand experiences, and French Squirrel in better-for-you chocolate dates.
What’s working in AI for GTM? 40 GTM workflows where AI is driving real gains, including AI-built competitor comparison pages generating thousands of SEO landing pages, AI-powered outbound producing personalized emails at scale for under $10, and AI copilots synthesizing Gong calls and CRM data for sales prep.
📈 Partner with Her Hustle & Teli Labs if you are an early-stage startup interested in hiring top talent.
🗞️ Explore our other newsletters: Teli Digest, a roundup of startup hiring, funding, and ecosystem insights, and Dorm Report, spotlighting standout young founders.
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter, Hustlers!
Love,
Daniela & Adrian