Female Foundry Week 152: Hard Love. No Excuse for Growth. Down Rounds are Down. Female Foundry x London Tech Week.
Welcome to The Week 152, 2024 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - the Future of Venture is Here.
In the news
Finnish RNatives, co-founded by Tiia Turunen picks up a €1.4M round led by Nordic Science Investments; Also Finnish Volare Solutions, co-founded by Jarna Hyvönen lands a €7.8M round led by ; Belgian Auditstage, co-founded Natalia Khamraeva fetches a €750K round led by Smartfin; Swedish Alba Health, co-founded by Eleonora Cavani, raises a $2.5M led by Unconventional Ventures; UK-based ZOEX Power, co-founded by Ash Penley, picks up a $700K round led by Equity Gap; Finnish CurifyLabs, co-founded by Charlotta Topelius, raises a $2M round from Springvest; French kyron.bio, co-founded by Emilia McLaughlin, lands a €5.5M round led by HCVC; Swedish Hormona, founded by Karolina Löfqvist and Jasmine Tagesson, bags a €7.8M round led by Voima Ventures; British Ankar AI, founded by Tamar Gomez and Wiem Gharbi, raises a £3M round led by Index Ventures; Swiss GlycoEra, founded by Manuela Mally and Veronica Gambillara Fonck, bags a $130M round led by Novo Holdings.
Spotlight
Hard Love.
It’s been only a week since OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s (yes, the same Jony behind the original iPhone you might be holding in your hands right now) startup for a staggering $6.5B—its biggest acquisition yet and I thought it would be a good time to dive a bit deeper into why even though some people (including me) believe that AI hardware, not just better models, will define the future of AI, the space is hard to back.
Even though $6.5B is clearly mouth-watering, and some of the investments seeing the highest returns are those where AI meets the real world, operating in logistics, supply chain, and manufacturing, when it comes to success, Jony’s Io’s acquisition, which was only founded in 2024, is still an exception.
Investing in hardware remains risky. The progress is slow and requires serious capital. Deep tech doesn’t churn out overnight demos like most AI startups do (more on this see below) and that’s a hard pitch for most VCs, which is why governments and a few giants like NVIDIA and Tesla are stepping up to build fully integrated systems.
Speaking about investment, in 2024 less than 10% of AI investment actually went to infrastructure. On the M&A front, last year, there were fewer mergers and acquisitions in the AI hardware sector than in 2023 and when M&A transactions actually happen the valuations do not seem to be picking up. - Just a couple months ago, another promising startup, Humane, that offered a screenless wearable pin with AI voice search, was sold to HP at a huge discount—for around $116M, less than half of all the VC dollars it raised—after its device failed to gain traction.
Why do I remain excited about hardware + AI? Whether that’s factories, hospitals, or vehicles—to be fully implemented, AI needs more than just code. It needs hardware. Sure, development is expensive and time-consuming, but the payoff in long-term and competitive edge of some of the hardware startups is huge. Here are some of the most exciting hardware startups in robotics, funded by Y Combinator and those innovating in Europe.
Are you a founder of a hardware startup? Here is the list of investors loving hardware!
Fundraising
No Excuse for Growth.
Yet another busy week! It was fantastic to spend three days in Dublin at the Dublin Tech Summit, exchanging ideas during speaking panels, networking drinks, and side events - and meeting some of you! - Next week, I’m taking it slow.
If you are a regular reader, you know that I love hearing directly from founders about how they are building and one idea that stood out this week: there has never been a better time to impress your B2B clients. - I spoke with a founder who’s building an integration platform for AI agents. Compared to six months ago, her team can now build and ship new features overnight, addressing client requests within days instead of weeks - No more weeks of combing through support tickets or spreadsheets full of survey responses. Naturally, clients are impressed, which then leads to shorter sales cycles and more conversions.
Is this your experience too? How are you currently building? What do your feedback loops currently look like, and how have you integrated them into your tech stack and workflows? If you feel lost (I really hope you don’t!), here is how you can get started.
Start with collecting feedback in the wild. Think support chats, call transcripts, emails, social DMs—anywhere customers are talking. Tools like Viable, Dovetail, or Akkio can pull from your support stack (like Zendesk, Intercom, or Slack) and use AI to summarise, tag, and group feedback into themes automatically. A quick prompt like ‘Summarise the top 5 user complaints from this week’s tickets’ can give you a mini roadmap.
Next, automate tagging and routing. Tools like Zapier, Make, or Parabola allow you to connect your feedback sources with tools like Linear, ClickUp, or Notion. - Feedback gets tagged (automatically with AI) and sent directly into the backlog or roadmap with context included—sometimes even with an AI-written issue summary.
Want to hear it from the source? Call summaries are a goldmine (you must be already using one like Tether or Fireflies (my personal favourite is Fathom) to record and transcribe calls, then extract key themes, objections, or requests. You can review 10 calls in under 10mins and walk away knowing what sticks, what’s broken, and what’s converting.
Then there’s rapid prototyping. Replit Ghostwriter, Codeium, or even just GitHub Copilot let your devs spin up MVP features fast—sometimes same-day.
Lastly, here is one underrated tactic: build an internal chatbot trained on your feedback, knowledge base, and roadmap using LlamaIndex, LangChain, or Glean. Great for onboarding new team members or letting your query, ‘Has anyone reported this before?’ instead of digging through Slack threads.
And keep everyone in the loop. I see some founder teams using GPT-4 or ChatGPT Team to generate weekly customer insight digests shared in Slack or Notion. It’s a dead simple way to make sure you are all on the same page. - I hope this is helpful!
Think about it — with such a fast pace of deployment, corporate client expectations will only be rising. Listening closely to your customers has never been easier to translate into your product. If you’re not doing this already, you might be losing your foothold!
Analysis
Down Rounds are Down.
After a tough stretch, it looks like startup valuations in Europe are showing signs of recovery, according to newly released data. Only 12.2% of deals in Q1 2025 were down rounds, down from 17.1% last year - the recovery is especially noticeable at the growth and late stages, which have seen valuation jumps of over 30% and 14% respectively. Pre-seed deals however, remain the only stage were down rounds remain the most prevalent.
Community
Female Foundry x London Tech Week
Female Foundry is partnering with the London Tech Week and EQL:HER teams for an exclusive invite-only gathering curated for women in venture and angel investing.
*Each spot includes a FREE London Tech Week ticket—simply follow the registration steps. Only a few tickets remain, so don’t miss your chance to join this exclusive networking Power Hour at London Tech Week!
To register, start by completing the registration below. Looking forward to seeing you on the 10th of June!
Hiring
This week hiring:
ZYMVOL ➯ Human Resources Manager | HelloBetter ➯ Inside Sales Manager | flowww ➯ Community Manager | Relay Technology ➯ Operations and Strategy Associate.
Events
This week
Tuesday, June 3, London ➯ Anatomy of a Founder | Wednesday, June 4, London ➯ CONEXEN London, Amsterdam ➯ ClimateHack Amsterdam | Thursday, June 5, London ➯ AI Salon: Trustworthy AI Futures, Berlin ➯ Many Faces of AI, Paris ➯ Paris AI Club: June.
It’s been a good week. Enjoy your Sunday!
Agata
Written by Agata Leliwa Nowicka, the Managing Partner of the Visionaries AI Incubator, a startup adviser, a two-time entrepreneur, and a founder of Female Foundry based in London.
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Check femalefoundry.co for more fundraising tools and investor content. View other Female Foundry articles.