Female Foundry Week 130: Concentrated. How you should see your go-to-market market. Startups are aging. Female Innovation Index 2025 Survey is live!
Welcome to The Week 130, 2024 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - the Future of Venture is Here.
In the news
It’s been a huge fundraising week for female founders in Europe! Germany Passionfroot, founded by Jennifer Phan, lands a $3.8m Seed round led by Supernode Global, to revolutionise creator marketing with AI; Finnish startup LOUHE.ai, co-founded by Eira Hurskainen, raises a €3m Series A round led by Lifeline Ventures to innovate solutions for cyber-physical security needs; London-based WYA, co-founded by Tamzin Lent, secures a €3m Pre-seed round led by STAR Capital Partnership to enhance nightlife safety; Zurich-based Sallea, co-founded by Anna Bünter, Nicole Kleger and Simona Fehlmann, picks up a €2.38m Pre-Seed round led by Founderful to enable sustainable, cruelty-free whole cut meat and fish production; Reykjavik-based Moombix, co-founded by Margret Juliana Sigurdardottir and Svanhvit Fridriksdottir, fetches a €2.27m Seed round led by Iceland’s Frumtak Ventures to scale its online music learning platform; London-based Circuland, co-founded by Anastasia Stella, picks up a €750k Seed round led by Apeiron Ventures to reduce construction waste with material reuse; Helsinki-based biotech Avenue Biosciences, co-founded by Katja Rosti raises a $2.5m Seed round led by Voima Ventures for its AI-enhanced protein engineering solutions; Gent-based biotech AmphiStar, founded by Sophie Roelants, Karolien Maes, and Sofie De Maeseneire secures €2m from SPRIND to commercialise biosurfactants; German greentech startup autarkize, co-founded by Sophie Peter, raises a €2.3m Seed round led by High-Tech Gründerfonds; Munich-based materials R&D platform ExoMatter, co-founded by Barbara (Prähofer) Bachus, raises a €1.7m Pre-seed round led by Vanagon.vc; Helsinki-based startup Cambri, co-founded by Outi Somervuori and Heli Holttinen, raises a €8m Series A round led by Octopus Ventures to scale its AI-powered insights platform; Lithuanian unicorn Vinted, co-founded by Milda Mitkutė secures €340m secondary investment at €5B valuation led by global alternative asset manager TPG.
Spotlight
Concentrated.
Sometime between watching the giant chopsticks catch the booster of his SpaceX's Starship on Sunday two weeks ago and campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, on Tuesday this week Elon Musk celebrated Tesla’s biggest single-day stock gain in over ten years, that added close to $150bn in market value.
The news comes as S&P Global is hitting new records in stock concentration in 60 years, with Magnificent Seven—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—and other three top mega-cap stocks representing almost 32% of the S&P Global.
What’s causing this trend?
Global central banks have been shifting from zero-interest-rate policies to a “higher-for-longer” strategy to tackle inflation. Now, with higher interest rates and a slower growth outlook, investors are flocking to mega-cap companies that offer greater liquidity, steady growth, and strong pricing power.
For context, in 2023, the S&P 500’s performance has been largely driven by these mega-caps, with the Magnificent Seven boasting a 101% return (!) compared to just 2.5% from the equal-weight index. The excitement around generative AI has also been playing a role, driving valuations up for the big players.
Why does it matter?
Putting too many eggs in one basket is hardly ever a good idea. To outperform benchmarks like the S&P 500, asset managers often avoid investing in heavyweight stocks they consider overvalued. Even those who want to invest in these big players face regulatory hurdles; asset managers must be “diversified” and can't allocate more than 25% of their assets to any single stock that exceeds 5% of the fund’s net value. Today, BlackRock’s newly launched Long-Term U.S. Equity ETF, for example, has 52% of its assets in holdings exceeding 5% of its portfolio as of last week.
Portfolio concentration in mega-caps creates a closed-cycle: poor performance leads to more money flowing into passive ETFs, which in turn pushes up prices for the largest companies ..attracting even more investment and more concentration of power among the mega companies.
Community
Female Innovation Index 2025 Survey is live!
If you are a female founder, a VC, an angel, or an LP investor, have your say on the current innovation ecosystem in Europe.
Last year, 1,168 (!) of you answered our survey, making it the largest survey (👀) on female innovation in Europe! Let’s repeat that success and deliver the definitive picture of female entrepreneurship in Europe with data!
This year, we are doubling down on female innovation. We live in some of the most exciting times for business creation. Which ideas get funded?
Share your thoughts and get a chance to win a ticket to Slush, a dinner with Carta, and other prizes!
*The survey takes only 3 minutes, but your voice will speak volumes when we publish the report in February.
*Please share the link to the survey with any fellow female founders and investors you know!
*The first prize drop on the 7th of November.
Fundraising
How you should see your go-to-market market.
We are two weeks away from announcing and welcoming Visionaries Cohort II (stay tuned for the announcement), and with the launch of the Female Innovation Index 2025 Survey, things are super busy. I still managed to squeeze in a couple of founder catch-ups this week, including one with a founder who has developed a very interesting technology and is now looking for an application while defining her route to market.
It’s not a title error. I regularly meet founders who somehow separate their go-to-market market (users) and their product-market-fit market (users). I know it starts to sound a bit complicated. Let me explain.
As you test your route to market, you want to engage with early adopters—the enthusiasts of your product—who are willing to forgive you for all the glitches, test your MVPs, provide you with feedback, and, as a consequence, shape your product roadmap.
Now, let’s stop here. You also want to make sure that those early enthusiasts are your go-to-market customers and have a high probability of being your product-market-fit validators. As an early-stage founder, everything you do, should be getting you closer to proving your product-market-fit. Can you see it? In a go-to-market strategy, you should always be assessing the enthusiast → go-to-market → product-market-fit axis. Your go-to-market market should be your product-market-market (and the growth market).
I repeatedly meet founders who don’t think that way and end up wasting a whole lot of time engaging with enthusiasts (and implementing their feedback!) who will never ultimately be their product-market-fit customers!
Analysis
Startups are aging.
An average VC fund expects a typical 10-year fund return lifespan, but it looks like that model might be getting outdated with the growing popularity of SAFEs and convertible notes. The newly published data analysing U.S.-based companies shows longer times between priced rounds across all stages. For example, U.S. companies that secured their Seed stage funding are 0.3 years ‘older,’ Series A companies are 0.8 years ‘older,’ and Series B companies are also 0.8 years ‘older’ than their counterparts that raised funding in 2019. When you think about it, if this trend continues, a typical company reaching an exit stage at, let’s say at the Series E round, will be 4 years ‘older’ than companies that exited at a similar stage five years ago.
Hiring
This week hiring:
PHINXT (Visionaries Cohort I) ➯ Head of Sales | Pipeline Organics ➯ Electro Mechanical Engineer | Cozero ➯ Account Executive | Spyke Games ➯ Data Analyst | Prewave ➯ Product Manager.
Founder & Investor Meetups
Monday, October 28, Paris ➯ EMBRASSER LA FRENCH TECH | Wednesday, October 30, Barcelona ➯ Founders Running Club | Thursday, October 31, London ➯ Spooky Science Party, Berlin ➯ Deeptech Night.
Have a good Sunday. See you next weekend!
Agata
Written by Agata Leliwa Nowicka, an investor, a startup adviser, a two-time entrepreneur, and a founder of Female Foundry based in London.
Suggestions? Drop me an email.
♡
Thank you Alice for the research!
Check femalefoundry.co for more fundraising tools and investor content. View other Female Foundry articles.