Female Foundry Week 153: Growth Unchartered. Crowdsourcing. Cold Feet for Biotech. Samphire Neuroscience Lands $5M.
Welcome to The Week 153, 2024 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - the Future of Venture is Here.
In the news
British Samphire Neuroscience (Visionaries Cohort I), co-founded by Emilė Radytė, lands a $5M round led by Inventure 🎉 - see more details below.
Also: British Treefera, co-founded by Caroline Grey, lands a $30M round led by Notion Capital; German Atmen, founded by Flore de Durfort and Erika Degoute, bags a €5M round led by Project A; Portuguese Litehaus, co-founded by Simi Launay, raises a €1.46M round co-led by Cornerstone VC and Explorer Fund; British Valla, co-founded by Danae Shell, fetches a £2M round led by Thrive Capital; Also Portuguese PFx Biotech, co-founded by Diana Oliveira, picks up a €2.5M round led by Buenavista Equity Partners; Norwegian NoMy, co-founded by Ingrid Dynna, raises a €1.25M round led by Nippon Beet Sugar Manufacturing; British ThreatSpike, co-founded by Kate Blake, lands a $14M round led by Expedition Growth Capital; British Skyral, co-founded by Naomi Hulme, bags a $20M round led by NOIA Capital; German Banxware, co-founded by Miriam Wohlfarth, bags a €10M round led by Unicredit; Swedish Twirl, co-founded by Rebecka Storm, gets acquired by US-based Modal.
Helsinki-based Nordic Foodtech VC, co-founded by Louise Rørbæk Heiberg announces the first close of its €80M fund to back foodtech and agritech startups across the Nordics and Baltics.
Spotlight
Growth Unchartered.
Making a bet on AI startups right now is like strapping into a rocket with a slightly experimental engine - it can be a little nerve-wracking - think: Builder.ai’s recent messy downfall from $1.5B valuation, the rise and fall of Inflection’s emotionally intelligent chatbot (founded by Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman - yep, the same Reid Hoffman) that raised eye-watering $1.3B. On one side, giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are expanding their reach swallowing up functionalities and markets that startups might once have hoped to dominate. On the other, startups are breaking all the old rules of growth, reaching multimillion-dollar revenue milestones and billion-dollar valuations within a year of launch.
Stripe data shows that currently top AI startups reach $1M in ARR in just 11.5 months — nearly four months faster than SaaS companies did just five years ago — and hit $5M in about 24 months, compared to 37 months for traditional SaaS firms. Let’s take as an example Cursor, founded in 2023, that reportedly scaled to $100M ARR within its first year. Anysphere, launched in 2022, is now nearing $500M ARR and valued close to $10B.
That kind of acceleration would still be hard to imagine three, four years ago. Yet beneath that impressive surface of revenue and valuation, many of these companies are still building the basics—like leadership, safety protocols, and scalable teams and the gap between the apparent maturity and actual operational depth seems to be widening. That’s where things are shifting for growth investors.
Here is a paradox: the faster a company grows, the harder it is to assess whether it’s built to last. For growth investors, that makes things challenging. Of course, you can look at retention, you can look at quality of revenue—but still, betting on a company with impressive numbers might seem like a good idea—until you remember it might be outpaced next month by someone coding in a garage today. The market’s changing so quickly that what looks like a safe bet can suddenly feel outdated before the ink dries on the term sheet.
To give you more context, venture growth funds deployed over $45B in 2024 alone, a 35% increase year-over-year, but deal terms are getting stricter, with more intense due diligence focused on operational soundness.
The recent report highlighted that nearly 60% of high-growth AI startups struggle with operational scalability. Today’s AI startups still rely on people (and people, compared to AI, don’t scale fast). As a consequence, growth investing is also changing. With big winner-takes-all growth rounds, the size of the risk doesn’t seem that smaller from that of first checks—it’s just different.
Fundraising
Crowdsourcing.
A founder asked me this week what kinds of AI startups I’ve been seeing recently. I speak with 15–35 founding teams each week, and while trends shift quickly, here are some of the most common (not necessarily the hottest) areas where I see founders building right now:
AI-powered recruitment solutions | AI bots for customer service | AI-enabled forecasting for e-commerce | LLM-based tools for code completion | AI-driven investment and robo-advisors | Vertical-specific AI content creation tools | AI agents for productivity and personal assistance | AI companions for mental wellbeing | AI-enabled drug discovery platforms | Enterprise search using RAG | AI-powered corporate training solutions.
If you're a founder building in any of these areas, be aware: competition is intense, and differentiation is critical. These areas might be crowded (if I’m a good proxy), and standing out requires a sharply defined value proposition, clear unfair advantages, and a unique go-to-market approach.
Analysis
Cold Feet for Biotech.
Things are not looking great for biotech. VC investment in biotech has plummeted to its lowest levels in over a decade, with fundraising down 92% from its 2018 peak, recently released data shows. Despite a broader recovery in VC fundraising, and heightened appetite for deeptech startups, biotech now accounts for just 3% of capital raised in 2024.
What’s driving the trend? Biotech’s long development timelines, regulatory hurdles, and high failure risk deter investors, as more and more VCs focus on AI. The decline is also likely due to rising capital costs, fewer IPOs or acquisitions post-COVID. Who still invests? In the US major VCs like NEA and Andreessen Horowitz remain active, in Europe, Northzone and Bessemer Ventures are still active in the space - see the full list here.
Community
Samphire Neuroscience Lands $5M!
Congratulations to the fantastic team behind Samphire Neuroscience, Emilė Radytė, PhD and Alex Cook (Cohort I Visionaries in partnership with Google Cloud) for closing a $5M Seed round led by Inventure!!
This is a great milestone to revolutionise women’s health through neurotechnology.
When I met Emilė one and half years ago, I had no doubt she had all it takes: the vision, the passion and the unique knowledge needed to truly succeed. It's been fantastic to see the team go from strength to strength with their pioneering device Nettle. Take a note of them and follow. Congratulations, Emilė and Alex!
Hiring
This week hiring:
Relay ➯ Operations and Strategy Manager | Ochy ➯ Product & Marketing Designer | Agurotech ➯ Sales Specialist | Tryp ➯ Country Manager (French-Speaking).
Events
This week
Tuesday, June 10, London ➯ London Climate Meetup | Wednesday, June 4, Paris ➯ Superconnectors Paris | Thursday, June 12, Amsterdam ➯ Founders Tech Talk - Infrastructure Mistakes | Friday, June 13, Amsterdam ➯ Amsterdam Innovation Day.
Meet me
It’s London Tech Week next week and I’m looking forward to meeting some of you, come and say hello:
👉 Monday, 9th 4:10PM-5:45PM - Founders Stage: 'Where Vision Meets Opportunity: What it means to build disruptive ventures right now?'
👉 Tuesday, 10th 12:40PM-1:10PM - EQL Stage: 'Building Resilient Businesses That Can Thrive in Uncertain Times'. and 3:30PM-4:30PM - EQL Lounge: 'VC Investors Power Hour' (email me if you would still like to get a ticket).
Happy Sunday. Have a great week ahead!
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.
Suggestions? Drop me an email.
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