Female Foundry Week 155: No Limits for Talent. On Distribution. Insider-led Deals Are on the Rise. Automated Architecture Lands £5.1M.
Welcome to The Week 155, 2024 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - the Future of Venture is Here.
In the news
Belgian PointCaré, co-founded by Veronique Pattyn, raises €1.5M from a group of private investors; French Nabla, co-founded by Delphine Groll, bags a $70M round led by HV Capital; Also French Sifflet, co-founded by Salma Bakouk, raises an $18M round from existing investors EQT Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners; Swedish Studio555, co-founded by Stina Larsson lands a $4.6M round co-led by HOF Capital and Failup Ventures; Estonian Tadaweb, co-founded by Genna Elvin bags a €17.3M round co-led by Arsenal Growth and Forgepoint Capital; Dutch umob, co-founded by Bibi Jorissen, secures a €3.5M round led by General Catalyst; Danish Droplet IV, co-founded by Mette Dahl fetches a $2M round from multiple investors; Spanish Steryon, co-founded by Maria Taberna fetches a $1.1M round co-led by 4Founders Capital and Abac Nest Ventures; French Fungu’it, co-founded by Jeanne Baudevin, raises a €4M round led by Asterion Ventures.
Belgian early-stage investor biotope, led by Annick Verween, raises €5M to fund up to 30 startups.
Spotlight
No limits for talent.
Welcome summer. Just last week I wrote about Meta poaching Scale AI’s 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, to kick-start its Superintelligence Lab amid fierce competition from OpenAI and Google, and this week it was revealed that the war for AI talent might be even bigger than anyone expected—well, at least now we can put a dollar value on the current hunt for the best AI executives.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman accused Meta this week of offering $100M signing bonuses to poach his employees. Yes, you read that right. $100M just to show up on your first day at work.
Competition to recruit artificial intelligence workers has definitely reached an all-time high. Meta’s aggressive recruitment tactics are part of a bigger plan—reportedly, Meta plans to hire about 50 people for the team even this year (that’s a $5B recruitment bill—still a fraction of its $65B AI budget for 2025) and Zuck will personally recruit most of the members, marking a return to the original playbook that powered Meta’s early success: move fast, take bold bets, and focus on long-term impact over short-term profits. Zuckerberg has already cut back layers of middle management to create a “flatter is faster” structure, sharpening focus on core priorities, and bringing back Meta’s engineering-first culture. Reportedly he now even runs a WhatsApp group called “Recruiting Party” where he and top execs personally scout talent.
Another fresh example: Mira Murati. Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines announced a $2B fundraising ‘Pre-Seed’ rise on Tuesday, valuing the six-month-old, secretive AI startup at $10B—one of the largest initial funding rounds in Silicon Valley’s history.
Whether Zuckerberg’s deep pockets will turn the tide on Meta's LLM development —or Mira Murati’s stealth ambitions will come to fruition—remains to be seen in the coming months. One thing is clear: the reality of the AI talent landscape is becoming increasingly polarised. On one side, big corporates are quietly laying off thousands of workers in the name of automation and efficiency; on the other, the multibillion-dollar race to poach top human talent continues…
Fundraising
On distribution.
Today, I want to speak about distribution. I meet too many founders who spend too much time on building and almost no time on figuring out how anyone in the universe will actually discover what they’ve built. They assume that if their product is good enough, the market will just show up. But that’s not how it works. If you focus all your energy only on your product, once you launch, the unexpected will happen: nothing. Nada. Niente. Nic.
And so, what is distribution? Distribution is how you reach your audience, how you communicate with them, and how you ultimately drive sales. Distribution is what takes you from technology to solution—from solution to scale and is therefore the core of any business!
Broadly speaking, there are two types of distribution: direct and indirect.
Direct distribution means you own the relationship with the customer. That might be running targeted outbound outreach to specific enterprise buyers, building a developer community through forums or Discord, launching invite-only beta programs to build buzz, or distributing via API keys to early adopters who convert to paying customers. It can also include content marketing through technical blogs, publishing white papers, or hosting live demos and webinars. Anything where you control the conversation and gather user data.
Now, indirect distribution means you reach customers through intermediaries. That could mean listing your product in major cloud marketplaces (think: big tech), partnering with systems integrators who embed your AI model into their solutions, selling through technology resellers, or launching integrations with larger SaaS platforms that open you up to their user base. It might also include distribution via Apple Store or third-party plugin ecosystems where discovery is built-in but customer data is limited.
Which one is better? There’s no right answer here. Direct channels take time and effort but give you ownership and flexibility. Indirect channels unlock scale quickly but make you dependent on partners who can change terms or even compete against you by building similar features themselves (think: Amazon 👀). - One thing is guaranteed, however: your distribution strategy will change as you acquire more customers, release new products etc.
Where should you start? If you are early, you might benefit from focusing on direct channels first—because owning the customer relationship gives invaluable feedback on your product and control. Once you’ve validated product-market fit and built a scalable sales process, layering in indirect channels will definitely accelerate growth and broaden your reach. Ultimately, you will end up with a mix—direct for high value accounts and indirect for high velocity low-value accounts. When you are starting, the key is to choose your distribution strategy intentionally, understand the tradeoffs, and focus on building the channels that deliver the most leverage.
Remember: in the AI era, successful founders don’t just build products people love—they are also masters of building systems to efficiently put those products in front of the right audience at the right time, turning distribution into their biggest competitive asset.
Analysis
Insider-led deals are on the rise.
It looks like a growing number of VC investors is choosing to double down on its own portfolio companies rather than make new bets. The newly-released data shows that as much as 10% of all US VC deals in Q1 2025 were led by an existing investor, up from 9% in 2024.
Here is an example: Ramp, a fintech startup that provides corporate credit cards and expense management tools, announced its $200M Series E at a $16B valuation this week - the round was led for the fifth time (!) by Founders Fund, its original Seed investor.
At the same time, first-time financing activity remains low - in Q1 in the US, $3.8B was invested across 892 first-time deals, down over 10% - both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. How does this make sense in the age of AI?
Community
Automated Architecture Lands £5.1M!
Congratulations to the team behind Automated Architecture, Mollie Claypool and Gilles Retsin (Cohort I Visionaries in partnership with Google Cloud) for closing a £5.1M round led by Planet A!
This is a great milestone to revolutionise how housing is built by combining AI and robotics technologies.
It's been fantastic to see the team go from strength to strength - Congratulations, Mollie and Gilles!
Hiring
This week hiring:
doinstruct ➯ Teamlead Customer Success | WeeFin ➯ Senior ESG Sales Manager | Abound ➯ Executive Assistant to the Founders | Ochy ➯ Product & Marketing Designer.
Events
This week
Monday, June 23, London ➯ Carbon Removal Summit | Tuesday, June 24, London ➯ London Fintech Breakfast, Berlin ➯ AgentCon 2025 - Berlin, Zurich ➯ Future-proof Product Thinking | Wednesday, June 25, Berlin ➯ Digital Health Cocktail Hour, Paris ➯ Demo Day | CCI Paris, London ➯ Founders Circle: Founders Truth.
Have a good Sunday everybody! See you next weekend.
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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