We Are SO Back 💁♀️
$1.7B+ raised by women-led companies, 70+ startup roles, & LinkedIn’s biggest conversations
Hello, hello! We’re back, and we’re sorry for going ghost. We heard from so many of you that you missed us, and we truly missed you too.
Our unexpected sabbatical came while I was finishing my Fulbright program, completing my master’s, and trying to figure out what was next. I’m sorry I left this community hanging, but we’re returning with a much clearer focus on how we can support this incredible group of women!
We’ll continue spotlighting female founders who are raising, hiring, and building, along with the posts and conversations trending on LinkedIn. But we’re also adding a new focus: helping more women put themselves, and their ideas, out there online.
I’m incredibly bullish on the power of social media and personal branding to create opportunities. I’ve seen it transform my own life, and I want to help more women experience those benefits too! Each edition will now include practical advice to help you start posting, strengthen your voice, and grow your presence on LinkedIn.
We’re officially back to publishing weekly, and we’re so excited to be back!
Welcome to our new readers, and if you have not yet subscribed, join the community below!
To read the full newsletter, please access it through our Substack site here.
Lin Qiao, Co-Founder & CEO of Fireworks AI, an AI infrastructure platform turning general-purpose models into specialized, faster, cheaper systems trained on enterprise data, raised $1.5B in Series D funding led by Index Ventures, Atreides Management, and TCV, valuing the company at $17.5B.
Christina Qi, Co-Founder & CEO of Databento, an institutional-grade market data platform built to rival Bloomberg and LSEG, raised $97M in Series B funding led by NEA.
Henley Vazquez, Co-Founder & CEO of Fora, an AI-powered platform giving independent travel advisors the tech and training to run their own businesses, raised $60M in Series D funding led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, pushing the company to unicorn status.
Dr. S. Chandralekha, Founder of Iswarya Fertility Center, South India’s largest fertility-care network with more than 70 centers, raised $37M in growth funding led by OrbiMed Asia.
Lily Clifford, Founder & CEO of Rime, a voice AI company building enterprise-ready speech-to-speech models for high-volume customer calls, raised $24M in Series A funding led by M13.
Anya Freeman, Founder & CEO of Kind Designs, a climate-resilience company 3D-printing living seawalls that protect coastlines while restoring marine ecosystems, raised $10M in an oversubscribed Pre-Series A round backed by Mark Cuban, NY Angels, TaMiami, Adrian Fenty, and Kyle Kuzma, valuing the company at $70M.
Eliza Wu (Co-Founder & CEO) and Jake Xia (Co-Founder), of corner, a social app for curating and sharing real-world nightlife, bar, and restaurant recommendations, raised $6.9M in funding, per an SEC filing listing thirteen investors.
Pam Stetkiewicz, CEO of Lyora Therapeutics, a biotech reviving stalled gene-therapy programs from Editas and Biogen to treat inherited retinal diseases, raised $2.5M in pre-seed funding from undisclosed investors.
Emmy Thamakaison stepped down as CEO of Foundess after two years of building it into something that reached 30,000+ people and 15+ countries. She’s passing the torch to Audrey Chan and Pear Chotbunwong, the two people who’ll carry that impact forward into Foundess’s next chapter.
Aya Jaff on Meta’s Smart Glasses campaign with Kylie Jenner: strategically it tracks, but women, the Kardashians especially, have long been disproportionate targets of surveillance culture. Now Meta is packaging that same surveillance as cool.
Bloomberg News reports that Phia, the shopping app co-founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, is claiming credit for online sales it didn’t actually drive.
Jennifer Xu on ŌURA’s new integration with Oova: for the first time, your sleep tracker can start telling you why your sleep tanked, not just that it did. Instead of two disconnected charts, sleep hours here, hormone levels there, the pairing links them together. It’s a real step toward wearables explaining your body instead of just monitoring it.
Avni Barman hit 100K LinkedIn followers after posting daily, without missing a single day, for two straight years. Her point: what looks like an overnight moment is usually two years of unglamorous consistency, a reminder that the long game is still the only reliable path to real traction.
Casap (Shanthi Shanmugam, CEO) – hiring across Customer Experience, Engineering, Product & Engineering, G&A, and Revenue (San Francisco & New York City, hybrid; some remote) for the AI-native disputes and fraud-prevention platform helping banks and fintechs fight chargebacks, whose 2026 Female Founders 500 CEO just 10x’ed revenue in a year.
Nectar Social (Misbah & Farah Uraizee, co-founders) – hiring across Business, Engineering, Operations, and Product (Palo Alto, CA; NYC remote; Lahore, Pakistan remote) at the sister-founded startup turning brands’ DMs and social comments into a real-time, agentic revenue channel, fresh off a $10.6M seed led by GV.
Arketa (Rachel Lea Fishman, CEO) – hiring across Engineering, Marketing, Operations, People, Sales, and Support (New York City; Mexico City; remote across the US, UK, Canada & Australia) building the all-in-one software backbone for boutique fitness and wellness studios, freshly funded with a $15M Series A.
Databento (Christina Qi) – hiring across Systems Engineering, Exchange Relations, C++/Rust Software Engineering, UX Writing, Product Marketing, Executive Support, Quantitative Sales, and Technical Support (Remote across the U.S.; Boston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Portland & Salt Lake City) for the market data infrastructure platform making institutional-grade financial data accessible to every quant and developer.
Venus Aerospace (Sarah “Sassie” Duggleby) – hiring across Test Operations, Manufacturing Engineering, Instrumentation, Contracts, Propulsion Engineering, Structures Engineering, Accounting, Linux Systems Engineering, Avionics, CNC Programming, Information Security, and Technical Operations (Houston & Remote U.S.) at the startup building a reusable hypersonic engine to make Mach 9 flight real.
Alta (Stav Levi Neumark) – hiring across AI Engineering, Full-Stack Engineering, R&D Leadership, Customer Success, Go-to-Market Strategy, GTM Engineering, Sales Engineering, Account Executive, and Head of Customer Success (Remote U.S. & Tel Aviv) building an AI system that runs go-to-market actions instead of just recommending them.
CurifyLabs (Charlotta Topelius) – hiring across Robotics and Automation Production Engineering, Inside Sales, Regional Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success (Helsinki & Remote U.S.) for the startup building robotic micro-pharmacies that let pharmacists compound personalized medicine on demand.
Alchemab Therapeutics Ltd (Dr. Jane Osbourn OBE & Rachael Bashford-Rogers) – hiring a Principal Deep Learning Researcher working across antibody discovery, representation learning, biological sequence modeling, and generative AI (Cambridge, U.K.) at the biotech mining the immune systems of resilient patients to find new antibody drugs.
Skello (Quitterie Mathelin-Moreaux & Emmanuelle F.) – hiring across Talent Acquisition, AI Engineering, Legal, Growth, Sales, Product Management, Product Design, Marketing, Customer Care, Data Analytics, Operations, and Business Development (Paris, Lille, Barcelona & Remote) for the workforce-scheduling platform helping shift-based businesses manage their teams.
Fuchs & Eule (Lina Adrian) – hiring across Team Leadership, Software Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Energy Consulting, and Energy-Efficiency Advisory (Berlin) at the firm helping businesses cut energy costs and navigate the shift to renewables.
alqem (Hanh Nguyen) – hiring across Materials Science, Magnet Science, and Computational Materials Science / DFT Research (Munich) for the startup using AI to design next-generation magnets and materials.
naaia.ai (Nathalie Beslay & Olivia Rime) – hiring across Enterprise Sales and Systems, Cloud, and IT Security Administration (Paris) at the AI governance and compliance startup helping enterprises deploy AI responsibly.
Aylight (Bahareh Marzban) – hiring across Microwave Engineering, Integrated Photonics, Semiconductor Processing, Characterization Engineering, and Operations Coordination (Zurich) at the startup building next-gen photonic chips.
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I hope you enjoyed this newsletter, Hustlers!
Love,
Daniela