🚢 Seabound Sets Out to Decarbonize Shipping
FemWealth Issue #61
Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!
In today’s edition, meet Seabound, a London-based startup on a mission to change the course of shipping decarbonization.
Founded by Roujia Wen (CTO) and Alisha Fredriksson (CEO), the company is currently prototyping carbon capture equipment that connects to ships’ smokestacks to cut up to 95% of carbon emissions.
Seabound’s technology traps emissions from a ship’s exhaust via an onboard device filled with porous, calcium oxide pebbles, which bind to carbon dioxide to form limestone. Seabound plans to process the CO2 on land and sell it for utilization or sequestration.
The company has raised a $4.4 million seed round led by Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital with participation from Eastern Pacific Shipping, Emles Venture Partners, Hawktail, Rebel Fund, and Soma Capital. Previously, Seabound has been part of the Y Combinator Winter 22 batch.
Check out Seabound’s YCombinator profile and open roles.
Read more: Carbon capture is headed for the high seas
Carbon-removal startups could be essential to avoid catastrophic climate change. We profiled 11 that investors say are poised to take off. (Business Insider $)
FemWealth Favorites ❤️
Politics: 🇫🇷 Élisabeth Borne appointed as next prime minister of France - French President Emmanuel Macron named Élisabeth Borne as his prime minister — the second female prime minister in French history. She has most recently served as labor, employment, and integration minister in the outgoing government.
Startups: 💸 Southeast Asian payments infrastructure unicorn Xendit banks $300M - Tessa Wijaya is the co-founder and COO of Xendit.
💸 Byrd nabs $56M to grow its European e-commerce logistics and fulfillment network as an alternative to Amazon - Petra Dobrocka is a co-founder and CCO of the Austria-based startup.
💸 Mirvie Raises $60 Million For Blood Test To Predict Pregnancy Complications - Physician-scientist and women’s health advocate Michal Elovitz serves as Mirvie’s Chief Medical Advisor. Olympic runner Allyson Felix who gave birth to her daughter eight weeks early due to preeclampsia complications, has participated in the funding round along with institutional investors BlackRock, Foresite Capital, General Catalyst, GV, Khosla Ventures, and Mayfield.
“If we can understand how the placenta should normally function, and how its function may get perturbed around pregnancy, we can then begin to say how do those perturbations identify women at risk for the disease months before it happens.” - Dr. Michal Elovitz
💸 Can We Fix Ovarian Aging? Here Is One Startup Up For The Task! - Features Dr. Daisy Robinton, scientist, entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of Oviva Therapeutics. The 15-month-old New York startup is developing therapeutics targeting ovarian aging and has raised an $11.5 million seed round from Cambrian Biopharma. Harvard pediatric surgeon Patricia Donohoe is also a co-founder.
💸 Greater Good Health Raises $10M To Fix America’s Doctor Shortage - Co-founded and led by Sylvia Hastanan, Greater Good Health employs nurse practitioners and pairs them with doctor’s offices and medical clinics, thus allowing nurse practitioners to take on patients who would otherwise have to wait weeks, or even months, to see a doctor.
💸 Keep Financial raises $9M led by a16z to help employers offer forgivable loans as a retention tool - Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Kathryn Petralia, Keep Financial is building a platform to help employers provide retention bonuses in the form of forgivable loans.
💸 Women's sexual health startup Pique nails $4M seed - The virtual sexual health clinic founded and led by Leslie Busick focuses on enjoyment rather than reproduction. Pique primarily targets women experiencing menopause.
💸 Isabl’s rapid whole-genome analysis opens the playbook for cancer treatment - Co-founded and led by Elli Papaemmanuil, Isabl provides rapid sequencing of cancer cells’ entire genomes, potentially showing which therapies will and won’t be effective within days. The company has received a breakthrough designation from the US Food and Drug Administration and raised $3 million.
💸 Romania’s Cyscale nabs €3 million to boost cloud security - Co-founded by Manuela Ticudean, Cyscale helps companies that adopt a cloud-native tech stack understand their cybersecurity risks in context.
💸 Included Launches With $1.9M to Help Companies Improve Diversity With AI - Co-founded by Laura Close, Included’s AI platform can search a company’s employee data and pull insights about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and analyze metrics like pay, promotions, employee lifecycle and more. It helps companies not only track their progress on diversity initiatives but also proposes areas for improvement.
🍼 A Startup Wanted To Make A Better Baby Formula. It Took Five Long Years. - Features ByHeart, one of just five manufacturers of baby formula in the US and the first new manufacturer of baby formula in 15 years. The startup, co-founded and led by Mia Funt (President), has raised $190 million in funding. | Read founder profile.
👩🏽💻 Meet the women leading Europe’s top fintechs (Sifted $)
VC: 💸 Pear, now nearly 10 years old and with numerous hits, looks to close its biggest fund by far - The Palo Alto, CA-based venture firm co-founded and led by Mar Hershenson is raising a fourth fund targeting $410 million in capital commitments, according to a new SEC filing.
😇 Carmen Rico launches Cocoa Ventures, a VC fund designed to act like an angel - Carmen Rico, a former partner at Blossom Capital, has raised a $17 million VC fund that aims to write angel-sized cheques of $150k-500k in pre-seed and seed-stage Europe-based startups, sector agnostic.
“In 2021 everyone was raising larger and larger funds, and Series A was getting so much more competitive. Such large sums were being raised that everyone needed bigger stakes [in startups]. Our thesis is to not play that war for stakes.” - Carmen Rico
💸 HSBC’s new $1bn debt fund expands support for women entrepreneurs - The British bank HSBC has established the Female Entrepreneur Fund, a $1bn debt fund aimed to invest exclusively in women-led businesses. The standard bank loan program led by Sam Cooper-Gray is currently available in 11 countries and focuses on profitable women-led SMEs with an annual turnover of up to $50m who aim to grow.
💸 The Young Venture Capital Partner Blazing A Trail For Women In VC - Features Sapphire Venture’s Partner Annalise Dragic, the youngest female VC Partner in Europe.
Web3, Economy & Business: 🎧 Lightspeed’s Mercedes Bent on why the metaverse isn’t overhyped
“I think what this era — the 2021 and 2022 era of the metaverse terminology — has shown is that it’s not about the headset, it’s not about what physical apparatus you use, it’s about the sense of [a] collective being together, and presence.” - Mercedes Bent
🎧 Is Beyoncé Recession-Proof? - An interesting podcast on the current economic environment with Katie Koch, the chief investment officer for public equities at Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
❤️ Tinder’s CEO met her husband on the app. Now she’s trying to fix the problems that drive women off the platform (Fortune paywall $) - Features Tinder’s CEO, Renate Nyborg.
Women’s Health: 🩸 To Better Understand Women’s Health, We Need to Destigmatize Menstrual Blood
“With serious efforts by diverse, collaborative researchers from academia and industry, and engaged study participants, menstrual blood will be developed into a clinically useful resource for better understanding uterine health and uterine dysfunction, as well as for diagnostic purposes. It will no longer be considered solely as trash—something to be tossed every month—but as a vital biological specimen for women’s health.” - Christine N Metz, PhD, Professor and Co-director of the Research OutSmarts Endometriosis (ROSE)
Sports: ⚽ US women’s and men’s national soccer teams close pay gap with ‘game-changing’ deal - The United States became the first country to achieve equal pay for its men’s and women’s teams after the men’s and women’s national soccer teams struck a labor deal that closes the pay gap between the squads, equalizing both salaries and bonuses.
“It’s going to be game-changing for what women’s football looks like in general. It’s historic, and I think it’s going to trigger a lot of other things in the sport, not just in the United States but globally.” - US women’s national team forward Margaret Purce
⚽️ Qatar World Cup: Women referees to feature for first time in men's competition - Women referees will make World Cup history this year by officiating games at a major men's tournament for the first time in Qatar.
🎾 Naomi Osaka And Serena Williams Make A Fortune But Remain Outliers Among The Highest-Paid Athletes
What I’m Reflecting On
The many, many costs of breastfeeding. - ‘Breastfeeding isn’t free — and it isn’t a solution to the national baby formula shortage.’ | Also read Formula Is a Lifeline [US focus]
Science Is Redefining Motherhood. If Only Society Would Let It
“Through each advancement, society has remained wedded to social constructs, refusing to see that those too must change as experiences change. As a result, every scientific development has been viewed as a threat to motherhood, rather than an opportunity to provide reproductive support to all who seek it.”
Groping, Derision, Bias, Threats: Women in Science Face It All - A long-term study of gender roles in the field, sponsored by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and the American Institute of Physics shows the scale of harassment in academia.
“We felt that it was important to report on the nuance about where harassment happens, who’s doing it, and what power structure is being reinforced.” - Dr. Rachel Ivie, senior research fellow at the American Institute of Physics (AIP)
Thank you for reading FemWealth! 🥰 Wish you a creative and exciting week ahead!
Anamaria
Founder & Writer of FemWealth