Female Foundry Week 100: Who rules the world? When to be perfect. Down to zero. Celebrating 100.
Welcome to The Week 100, 2024 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - where investors and female founders meet.
This is the 100th (can you believe it?) edition of the Female Foundry Newsletter. When I started writing the newsletter just over two years ago, I could not have imagined getting to this point. During the past 99 editions, the newsletter has been opened over 345,322 times. Today, the newsletter is read by over 5,000 founders, VC investors, angel investors, and tech ecosystem players on a weekly basis.
Thank you for bringing meaning to my purpose.
For those who are perhaps curious:
This was the very first cover of the Female Foundry newsletter released on February 12th in 2022 that featured Özlem Türeci, the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer behind BioNTech - still the highest-ranked IPO by female founder in Europe AND (!) behind Ganymed Pharmaceuticals (that was acquired for $1.25bn).
In the news
Barcelona-based Domma, co-founded by Mireia Roca and Cristina Martinez Jiménez, snaps a €950k Seed round for its menopausal transition products; London-based femtech Unfabled, co-founded by Hannah Samano picks up a €1.5m Seed round led by for its wellness platform; Stockholm-based MANTLE, founded by Stina Lönnkvist and Josefin Landgard secures a €2.8m Seed round for its skincare products; Berlin-based DUDE CHEM, co-founded by Sonja Jost, lands a €6.5m Series A round green chemical manufacturing company; Paris-based The Essence App, co-founded by Elina Vale secures a €500k Pre-Seed round to for its menstrual health monitoring solution; Irish Examfly, co-founded by Deirdre Lyons raises a €1.5m Seed round to expand to the UK; UK-based DE&I startup MeVitae, co-founded by Riham Satti secures a €1.7m Seed round; Barcelona-based habitacion.com, co-founded by Anna Labarias Bedmar, raises a €400k Pre-Seed round for its real-estate startup; Copenhagen-based Aegir Insights, co-founded by Rikke Winther Nørgaard, picks up an €8.5m Series A round for its off-shore energy intelligence solution; Copenhagen-based LAIKA, co-founded by Charlene Putney, raises a €164k Pre-Seed SAFE round from Rockstart for its AI-powered writing tool.
Spotlight
Who rules the world?
AI will eat the world - have you tried newly-released Sora yet? As much as I think everyone agrees by now that we are just scratching the surface when it comes to what the AI future will look like, modern artificial intelligence simply will not be possible without the processing power delivered by highly specialised chips.
The chipmaker Nvidia overtook Alphabet and Amazon this week to become the world’s fourth most valuable company in the wake of the AI boom, after Microsoft, $3.04t, Apple, $2.84t, and Saudi Aramco. How did it happen?
Nividia is behind the staple H100 chip that currently powers the majority of LLMs in use today - including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the vast majority of AI projects from Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon and is about to release an even more superior AI chip, the H200, having recently committed a staggering $30bn into a chip development unit.
It is clear that the battle over who will fuel AI growth is just warming up. While the market will likely be less concentrated than it currently is, the question remains: Who will fund its future?
Europe falls far behind the US and China, with ASML and Arm, whose shares are currently up by 110% (!) after its recent IPO, holding the biggest share of the European market. The global funding market for AI chip makers, however, still remains surprisingly lukewarm, despite many investors calling it the 'biggest bang for the buck'.
In 2022, $2bn was invested in nearly 80 US-based deals, that number however, fell to only $1.2bn in 64 deals last year — that’s despite nine-figure rounds by AI chip startups like Boston-based Lightmatter and Santa Clara-based Celestial AI. So far this year, there have been just two deals recorded - a low number, even when taking into account the overall venture capital investment slowdown.
Some argue that as Nvidia grows stronger in the semi-conductors area, it becomes very hard for startups to build competing chips. That’s perhaps too early to conclude. Big tech companies are seeking to reduce their dependence on Nvidia - Amazon recently invested $4bn in 2 year-old Anthropic - a deal sealed by making Anthropic use Amazon-designed AI chips; Meta has plans to develop its custom chip; OpenAI’s Sam Altman said just a week ago he was seeking trillions (yep, trillions) to fund chips for AI.
I think that’s very good news. The AI chips market is estimated to reach $140bn by 2027 and while most typical venture capital firms will most likely be left out of funding it - the race of who will rule the world tomorrow, that will also result in many lucrative startup M&As, remains open.
Fundraising
When to be perfect.
I spoke with a founder this week who is developing a data capture solution for medical clinics - with limited funding and a small team I thought she developed a fairly sophisticated solution. Yes, parts of the delivery mechanism are still manual, yes - she uses low-code solutions for most of her infrastructure, but I think she did a great job on maximising the resources she had to get her solution off the ground.
It’s a known tale: startups are meant to be scrappy. The trade-offs you make to stay lean can help you get closer to product-market fit with limited resources - it’s valuable to be scrappy when you’re experimenting - you might use a low-code or no-code tool to build a simple MVP and gain traction with your early-adopters, or, as you experiment with different audiences, you might be the face of your company’s social media channel, instead of burning money on ads. After all, according to the Pareto Principle, 80% of the end goals can be achieved with 20% of the effort. But to truly maximise on your opportunities, as an early-stage founder you also need to know when to be perfect and this really comes down to your honest assessment of what the stakes of your opportunities are (this is key!) and then agreeing what is good enough to achieve them.
Start by putting every business opportunity presented to you, whether it is growth, hiring, funding-related - it doesn’t really matter - in a “low”, “mid”, “high” bucket category. Don’t rush it - this is the key step. Now - forget about the “low” stake opportunities - the cost of time needed to pursue them makes them not worth the effort. Keep “mid” opportunities on low-burn as your Plan C. Now - spend some time on figuring out what “perfect” looks like for “high-stake” opportunities. Remember, what I mean by “perfect” is: “good enough to get the result you want”. Keep yourself time-accountable - never spend a minute more than it is necessary and as importantly - stay creative: “Perfect” can be still licensed, borrowed, bolted-on, co-developed, recycled..
Analysis
Down to zero.
According to our Female Foundry report, released two weeks ago, VC firms in Europe raised €17.1bn in 2023. Although the figure represents a significant 38% drop from 2022, the amount raised is still the third highest for venture capital funds in Europe in the last five years. Almost two months into 2024, the exit market, key to LP distributions, does not seem to be heading in the direction most LPs (and VCs, for that matter) would want. Recent data indicates that in 2023, distributions to LPs as a percentage of mature funds’ net asset values fell to the lowest point in nearly 14 years. - Here are some of the European companies touted to IPO in 2024. So while 2024 is expected be a record year for secondaries hitting north of $130bn, for now the majority of VC funds are still looking at zero exits.
Community
State of Gender Diversity in European Venture report Launch Event.
Thank you for many of you who have joined the live-stream version of the State of Gender Diversity in European Venture report launch. Here are a few snaps from the in-person event in London. Thank you to our sponsors: Ashurst, Google, Accenture, London Stock Exchange, HSBC Innovation Banking and our fantastic partners for making it happen! I loved the energy in the room.
Celebrating 100 weeks of the Female Foundry Newsletter.
To mark the 100th newsletter, I would like to send a surprise gift to three Female Foundry Newsletter subscribers. Wherever you are, I want to say thank you. I will announce the winners of the surprise gifts here next week.
Hiring
This week hiring:
Skyqraft ➯ Global Account Director | Teale ➯ Finance Manager | Thymia ➯ Quality Assurance Manager.
See more jobs on the Female Foundry Job Board.
Enjoy your Sunday and see you next week!
Agata
Written by Agata Leliwa Nowicka, an investor, a startup adviser, a two-time entrepreneur, and a founder of Female Foundry based in London.
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