Taboos, Turkeys, Treatments
This past week marked Women’s Entrepreneurship Day!! Massive wins across femtech, AI, and care. Function’s $298M, Perelel’s $27M, and Archetype’s sensor-to-agent. Plus fresh roles for Hustlers!
This is Teli Labs’s weekly newsletter: Her Hustle, a place to learn all about the new and the next in female entrepreneurship. We highlight the women who are building startups—from those launching from dorm rooms to experienced professionals turning their bold visions into reality.
Welcome to the new readers who have joined us since the last issue!
If you haven’t yet, join our community of readers by subscribing below.
To read the full newsletter, please access it through our Substack site here.
Pranitha Patil, Co-Founder & CBO of Function Health, a personalized health platform turning lab results and biometric data into AI-driven insights, raised $298M in Series B funding led by Redpoint Ventures at a $2.5B valuation.
Michelle Carnahan, Co-Founder & CEO of Arbiter, a healthcare AI platform that automates administrative workflows, raised $52M in seed funding at a $400M valuation co-led by TriRidge Investments and MFO Ventures.
Yael Shemer, Co-Founder & CCO of TULU, a platform offering in-building smart units for on-demand access to shared household products, extended its Series A to $37M co-led by GreenSoil PropTech Ventures, Bosch Ventures, and New Era Capital Partners.
Jaime Lien, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Archetype AI, which converts sensor data into real-time AI agents for physical-world tasks, raised $35M in Series A funding led by IAG Capital Partners and Hitachi Ventures.
Victoria Thain Gioia, Alex Taylor, and Dr. Banafsheh Bayati, Co-Founders of Perelel, a women’s health company offering clinically backed, stage-specific prenatal and hormonal supplements, raised $27M led by Prelude Growth Partners.
Jenny Button, Founder & CEO of Emm, a London-based developer of smart menstrual cups with embedded sensors to deliver reproductive health insights, raised $9M in seed funding led by Lunar Ventures.
Maggie Chung, Co-Founder & Medical Lead of Voio, an AI lab building models to interpret medical images with higher accuracy, raised $8.6M in seed funding led by Laude Ventures and The House Fund.
Jessica Gaulton, Founder & CEO of FamilyWell Health, an integrated women’s mental health platform supporting patients from pregnancy through menopause, raised $8M in Series A funding led by New Markets Venture Partners.
Laura Tortosa Sancho, Co-Founder & CPO of Lative, an AI-powered sales planning platform, raised $7.5M in funding co-led by Act Venture Capital and Senovo VC.
Samira Daswani, Founder & CEO of Manta Cares, a platform that helps cancer patients navigate treatment decisions through personalized guidance tools, raised $5.4M in seed funding led by Pear VC and Sozo Ventures.
Sahitya Sridhar, Co-Founder of Synthio Labs, a clinical-grade voice AI platform for life-sciences customer engagement, raised $5M in seed funding led by Elevation Capital.
Charlene Wang, Co-Founder & CEO of Ember, an AI platform that reduces healthcare claim denials by automating coding and documentation, raised $4.3M in seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Shivi Sharma, Co-Founder & President of Kaaj, an AI platform that automates credit-risk analysis for small-business loans, raised $3.8M in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures.
Cameron Hardesty, Founder & CEO of Poppy, a tech-enabled wedding floral platform modernizing sourcing and design, raised $2.7M in Series A funding led by Michigan Capital Network.
November 19th marked Women’s Entrepreneurship Day!!!! The Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Organization celebrated by ringing the Closing Bell at Nasdaq, shining a global spotlight on the power, impact, and unstoppable energy of women founders everywhere!
LinkedIn flagged a post for using the word “vagina,” highlighting how women’s health content is still getting censored in 2025.
Normal, the female-founded sexual wellness startup, is turning to equity crowdfunding after VC “vice clauses” blocked traditional funding, rallying its 40k-member community to fuel its next stage of growth.
Thanksgiving Day, the day after “Blackout Wednesday” (notorious for reunions and hookups), drives a surge in emergency contraception sales. Winx Health is responding with its “Thankful for Contraception” campaign, offering major discounts and reminding consumers that EC is legal in all 50 states, with Winx now stocked in 6,000+ Walgreens for easier, stigma-free access.
a16z’s newsletter broke down the “bitter lesson” in AI: brute-force compute wins. Small teams with huge GPU budgets can now turn capital directly into capability, which is why AI startups are growing faster and raising more than any past software cycle.
Hannah Zhang reflected on choosing marketing over more “prestigious” MBA paths, noting that her friends in strategy know frameworks and her friends in banking know models, but she’s learning how to make people care about something that didn’t exist yesterday, which she sees as the real skill of building from zero.
🎤 swsh is hiring a full-time Account Executive (Sales + Ops) in NYC to help live events turn fan photos and videos into real marketing results and CRM data.
💬 OGTool is hiring a Customer Success / Account Manager to support clients using its platform that finds targeted Reddit posts and generates on-brand replies to drive startup growth.
📸 Hosts of Influence, founded by Gigi Robinson, is hiring a Winter/Spring Brand & Creative Ops Intern to support her creator-education platform.
🎥 Robyn is hiring a Social Media Strategist and Content Creator Intern to help lead video creation and grow its presence across IG and TikTok for its emotionally intelligent AI partner product.
📊 CapsLock is hiring its first full-time generalist in LA across strategy, operations, marketing, and AI for its placement agent helping funds outsource their fundraising.
💳 Fizz is hiring a Software Engineering Intern (Summer 2026) to work on its AI money advisor, payments stack, and web/mobile products.
🧩 Contrario is hiring Growth Interns, SWE Interns, Founding Ops, and Founding Engineers in-person in SF for its AI-powered recruiting platform.
📚 AfterQuery is hiring 11 Growth Strategists for Spring 2026 for its research lab investigating the boundaries of AI capabilities and curating high-quality human-generated data.
🌱 Eleni Zervos shared 5 social impact funding opportunities, including the Yale World Fellowship for global social impact leaders, MIT Climate & Energy Prize funding for student-led climate startups, and more!
🗂️ Change Raven is hiring a remote Ops Manager (20-30 hrs/week, Fall 2026) to support its career coaching practice led by Alana Lerch.
💁♀️ Teli Labs matches and introduces young talent to founders at top early-stage startups & SMBs. Apply to join our talent community!
🚀 Share this newsletter with a friend and start growing your network.
💁♀️ Connect with me on LinkedIn for daily insights on women in entrepreneurship.
📈 Partner with Teli if you are a early-stage startup interested in hiring top talent.
🌟 Promote yourself to our subscribers by sponsoring this newsletter.
I hope you enjoyed this newsletter, Hustlers!
Feel free to share your feedback on this newsletter with me by filling out this form!
Love,
Daniela, Adrian, & The Teli Team
The femtch funding rounds this week are huge. Perelel's $27M for prenatal supplements and Function's $298M show how much capital is finally flowing into womens health. The LinkedIn story about censring the word vagina is wild tho.