Female Foundry Week 156: Nine Two Six. On Long Runways. Ultra Unicorns are Back. Women in Sports with IRIS Ventures.
Welcome to The Week 156, 2025 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - the Future of Venture is Here.
In the news
Spanish Ocean Ecostructures, co-founded by Mireia de Mas Romeu and Anna Lloveras Armengol, picks up a €3M round led by Seven Seas Capital to restore marine ecosystems; Belgian Axiles Bionics, co-founded by Claire Cherelle, lands a €6M round led by PE Group to advance next-gen smart bionic mobility solutions; British OutSee, co-founded by Chang Lu, fetches a €1.2M round led by Ahren Innovation Capital to expand therapeutic pipeline using predictive genomics; French EverDye, co-founded by Amira Erokh, lands a €15M round led by Crédit Mutuel Innovation and daphni, to make textile dyeing more sustainable; Also French Priothera SAS co-founded by Simone Seiter, secures €1.7M in government funding for its cell therapy; Swiss Adiposs, co-founded by Nathalie Stransky von Heilkron picks up a CHF4M round; Dutch FieldFactors, co-founded by Karina Peña raises a €1.6M round led by Connect the Drops; Also Dutch Groove Quantum, co-founded by Anne-Marije Zwerver bags a €10M round from European Innovation Council; Dutch AIKON Health, co-founded by Sofia Hidalgo, picks up €1.2M round from Thematic Tech Transfer Medtech program to transform heart failure care; Finnish CloEE, co-founded by Julia Sabitova, picks up a €520K round from angel investors to accelerate AI-driven process manufacturing; Danish Cellugy, co-founded by Isabel Álvarez-Martos and Deby Fapyane, lands a €8.1M round co-led by ICIG Ventures and Unconventional Ventures to eradicate microplastics in personal care products; Irish Lios, co-founded by Rhona Togher, fetches €6.25M from the European Innovation Council Accelerator; British HIVED, co-founded by Murvah Iqbal, bags a $42m round led by NordicNinja to take its logistics network nationwide; Estonian Tibo Energy, co-founded by Linda Zandt-Sloot bags a €6M round led by KOMPAS VC; French Cosma, co-founded by Laura Huguenin raises a €2.5M round led by WIND and Ternel; German EDURINO, founded by Irene Klemm and Franziska Meyer bags a €17M round led by Ravensburger Next Ventures; French Solarock, co-founded by Laure Crémieux lands a €7M round co-led by Pale Blue Dot, Noa and Ring Capital.
Swedish Norrsken Foundation, co-founded by Agate Freimane, commits €300M to back the future of ‘AI for good’ in climate, health, food, education and society; Italian ZNEXT, led by Elena Lavezzi, launches a €60M build-and-acquire initiative dedicated to unlocking human potential.
Spotlight
Nine Two Six.
On Tuesday this week, OpenAI announced a mandatory one-week vacation for all its staff to help them ‘recover’ from apparently months of back-to-back 80-hour workweeks. The unprecedented move comes amid internal reports of burnout and waning morale at OpenAI—but many also see it as Sam Altman’s play to keep Zuckerberg from poaching his top AI talent (see more Week 155).
As the quest to create the first solo $1B valuation company continues, 996 working model that actually originated in China and refers to working 12 hours a day (9AM-9PM), six days a week got adopted by startups in the West—think Amazon, Apple or Meta, all born from hustle culture. The recent survey found that only 10% of founders currently talk to VCs about their stress and with AI increasing competition and making speed more imperative (see more on this below), there is even greater expectation from founders to progress faster.
In 2016, Slack famously hired its first VP of sales after raising $540M in total funding and hitting a $3.8B valuation. In 2012, Facebook acquired two-year-old Instagram with 13-employees for a then-shocking $1B in cash and stock. Two years later Zuckerberg also bought Whatsapp for $16B when the company had only 55 employees.
That was all well before AI tools were so accessible—before Cursor, Lovable and Jasper. The hustle culture in Silicon Valley is real, and it’s been that way for a long time.
But in the age of AI, do today’s entrepreneurs really need to trade sleep, social lives and perhaps even their sanity to succeed? On one hand, with a new wave of automation and agentic AI tools, founders have more time than before. On the other, the traditional playbook for selling to an enterprise still involves an army of sales reps to lead demos and navigate the compliance-heavy sales cycle of the Fortune 500. —Silicon Valley doesn’t have many enterprise-sales companies that have reached this level of success with a startup squad the size of a football team (think Skild AI’s 25 staff and $1.5B valuation).
Still, with AI giants entering the digital-consultancy space—OpenAI announced on Wednesday this week the launch of its custom AI consulting services targeting enterprises at a minimum $10M price point (and entering the space mainly occupied by Palantir and Accenture)—the speed of enterprise sales could soon also be streamlined for AI startups using AI.
Fundraising
On long runways.
I had a few very interesting chats with founders this week—and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that there are two distinct camps of startups right now. There are those that see their markets as static and raise cash simply to ensure they have 18 months of runway. Then, there are those laser-focused on reaching their next major growth inflection point to be able to hit that acceleration pedal even further.
I meet still many people advising startups to aim for an 18–20 month runway these days—without any context. But 18-20 month runway is completely arbitrary without context! To me, what’s far more important is will this cash ensure that you’ll hit profitability, enable you to close that $1M enterprise contract, hit 5x MoM growth or 80% retention rate? (I simply made up these number btw, they depend entirely on your market, competition and its dynamics—but you get the idea).
And so, just as there are two types of founders, I also see two types of investors: those operating in the 1.0 or in 3.0 world. Let’s all think in the 3.0 way. Please, don’t raise just for the sake of runway. Runway by itself is meaningless unless it helps your company reach major (and I mean major) valuation milestones. That might take 10 months—not 18—and is totally possible if you happen to hit that market-product fit!
Europe’s sweetheart Lovable, announced this week it is on track to raise $150M at a $2B valuation in the coming weeks, that’s a mere 5 months after raising $15M earlier this year. Founders who focus too much on ‘runway’ and not enough on growth and then profitability ..might find themselves in the bubble of ‘irrelevant’. Value over time. 18 months is a long, long time for the whole world to change these days.
Analysis
Ultra Unicorns are Back.
A new cohort of ‘Ultra Unicorns’ is quietly reshaping the private-market scene.
While ultra unicorns, companies valued at $5BN, are not new, today they already make up about 13% of the roughly 1,600 unicorns worldwide, cumulatively holding $3.5TN of the $6TN valuation of all unicorns, and have so far captured half of the $1TN in funding that went to all unicorns.
Unsurprisingly, 2021 was a peak fundraising year for ultra unicorns with $102B raised that year alone. Even though in 2022 that figure got slashed to ‘mere’ to $41B, in 2025 already ultra unicorns have raised nearly $79B (!) —This is mainly thanks to two monster rounds: $40B by OpenAI led by SoftBank in March and $14.3B by Scale AI backed by Meta in April.
Apart from valuation and funding what else do we know about this special breed?
Born mostly between 2011 and 2018, ultra unicorns are now seven to fourteen years old and mainly clustered in—surprise, surprise—the US–101 firms, China–36, India–19, and the UK–11. About 50% of them got their massive valuations during the frothy 2021–2022 period, while 30% have been repriced just in the last two years. Only last year, there were 27 newcomers that joined the group (see them here) and inn 2025 already, 17 more have joined, adding $699B to the cohort.
With the AI race in full swing, how many more ultra unicorns do you think we will see this year?
Community
Women in Sports with IRIS Ventures
Our friends at IRIS Ventures are hosting an exclusive Women in Sports event on July 10th sponsored by Biomel.life and in collaboration with Mumble Forum and Heaf.
Women in Sports is perhaps an overlooked but an important topic! The event will explore the correlation between women in sport, leadership, and peak performance, bringing together influential guests from venture capital, sports, and culture.
If you are in London on Thursday next week, join the event to discover how the endurance, discipline, and resilience found in sports can translate to exceptional leadership and successful venture building!
Hiring
This week hiring:
Wallet Studio ➯ Founders Associate | snuggs ➯ Junior Influencer Marketing Specialist | Green Fusion ➯ Customer Success Manager.
Events
This week
Monday, July 7, London ➯ The Politics of Health & Technology | Wednesday, July 09, Amsterdam ➯ AI Agent World Tour in Amsterdam, Berlin ➯ Inside the Lab - Black Forest Labs | Thursday, July 10, London ➯ Pitch and Run London.
Meet me
This week, on Thursday, July 10, I will be speaking at CivilizationX’s ➯ The Deep-Tech Frontier: Powering AI with Smarter Infrastructure in London about how AI is creating new growth opportunities for some of the most innovative founders right now.
Same evening, I will be joining Startup Magazine’s Hustle Awards Ceremony as a judge. Grab one of the last tickets ➯ here.
Coming up
The London Stock Exchange (our key sponsor for the Female Foundry Female Innovation Index) is hosting the ➯ Female Founders Forum 2025 on the 23rd of September, for investors and founders. If you are a female-founded startup and would like to pitch at the event, complete ➯ this application. Applications close on 31st July 2025, 17:00 BST.
Have a great week ahead! See you next 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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