💸 Mallun Yen’s Operator Collective Raises Fund II
FemWealth Issue #83
Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!
In today’s edition, read the latest and greatest in women-led startups, VC, women’s health and more:
In the Spotlight 💸
Operator Collective, a San Francisco-based organization founded and led by former operator Mallun Yen, has raised $92 million for its second fund to back early-stage enterprise companies.
“I think what’s been super exciting is the reaction from the entrepreneurs and the market. The feedback is not only that Operator Collective is incredibly valuable but brings so much advice to the table for entrepreneurs. It’s also really rewarding for them to tap into a diverse set of operators on their cap table and get to know a really diverse set of talent.” - Mallun Yen
The Operator Collective’s goal is to create a community where startups and operators can help each other. It provides its portfolio companies access to operators across different functions.
The new fund’s LP base includes 152 operators, in addition to a few institutions. It also launched a pilot program of 25 early-career LPs.
Read more: Operator Collective was early to bring on operators as LPs. Now it’s doubling down
FemWealth Favourites ❤️
💸 Meet The Woman Pioneering Semi-Private Jet Travel - Led by Uma Subramanian, Aero Technologies, a company which offers flyers the experience of private jet travel at a fraction of the cost of a private charter, has secured $65 million in Series B financing.
“I’d love to see more women thinking about a career path in air travel. Aviation is a sexy industry but there’s not enough women in it. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to push more in regard to gender diversity, but also other areas of diversity, particularly in the pilot world.” - Uma Subramanian
💸 Viral TikTok Frozen Dumplings Company Xiao Chi Jie To Rebrand and Enter Retail Upon Raising $10 Million Series A Led By Imaginary Ventures - Co-founded by Chinese-American entrepreneur Jennifer Liao, the company aims to transform its social media frenzy into an omni-channel business. It has recently raised $10 million in a series A funding, led by Imaginary Ventures, with participation from prominent angels including Sarah Guo (Conviction), Katrina Lake (Stitch Fix), and Shan-lyn Ma (Zola).
💸 Women’s Health Leader FEMSelect Secures US$9M Series B Financing - Debbie Garner and Renee Selman are the Co-CEOs of FEMSelect, an Israel-based developer of a minimally invasive, meshless approach to pelvic floor ligament fixation.
💸 How a medication abortion startup raised $6.1 million after the fall of Roe v. Wade (Fortune $) - The US-based telehealth abortion clinic, founded by Kiki Freedman, Gaby Izarra and Dr. Kate Shaw, provides patients with medication abortion via mail. It plans to offer additional telemedicine services, including treatment for postpartum depression and anxiety. Most of the VC funds backing Hey Jane are women-led, including Ulu Ventures, The Helm, Amboy Street Ventures, Portfolia, and G9 Ventures.
“We saw a huge surge of interest after the decision came down. People very much want to take a stand on the right side of history. It’s a moment when you can’t be neutral anymore.” - Kiki Freedman, co-founder and CEO
💸 This startup wants to reimagine egg donation - Cofertility, a US-based startup founded by Halle Tecco, Lauren Makler, and Arielle Spiegel, is on a mission to create a new model for egg donation and make egg freezing more accessible in the process. This week, the company announced its launch and $5 million seed round led by Initialized Capital and Brit Morin’s Offline Ventures, with participation from female angel investors.
“We’re really bringing egg freezing and egg donation together because you can’t have one without the other.” - Lauren Makler, cofounder and CEO of Cofertility
💸 Two kids in every classroom have a development language disorder — this startup wants to help - Noala, a London-based language therapy platform for children, co-founded by Emilie Spire, has raised $4m in a seed round led by LocalGlobe. The startup plans to expand into the US market.
💸 Hello Divorce Raises $3.25M to Span More of the Divorce Lifecycle, Including Financial Planning - Divorce attorney Erin Levine is the founder and CEO of the US-based startup whose platform facilitates low-cost do-it-yourself and attorney-assisted divorces. The investment was led by The Artemis Fund.
“What’s most exciting to me is the opportunity to help women who weren’t very involved in finances during marriage, to empower women to not only make good decisions, but actually understand them and be proactive going forward.” - Erin Levine
💸 Upkeep Announces $2M Seed Funding to Accelerate Growth and Expand to New Markets - The LA-based MedSpa treatments booking and payments platform, founded and led by Tiffany Faith Demers, raised $2 million in seed funding, co-led by the Anthemis Female Innovators Lab Fund and 1517 Fund.
💸 Pillar of the community: How Talkbase plans to power user-led growth for any company - The Prague-based startup, co-founded and led by Klara Losert, recently launched out of stealth and announced its $2 million pre-seed funding.
💸 Meela Picks Up €400K; Launches Its Therapist-Patient Matchmaking Platform for Women - Founded by Tiffany Boswell and Natali Suo with the mission to help women find their best-fit therapist from day 1, Sweden-based Meela has launched this week and announced its first funding round.
🐶 The Search for a Pill That Can Help Dogs—and Humans—Live Longer - Features Celine Halioua, antiaging scientist, founder and CEO of Loyal, a startup working to hack canine aging.
👧🏽 Meet E-liza Dolls, the startup that’s building dolls to help young girls learn to code - Founded by Eliza Kosoy, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley focused on the intersection of child development and artificial intelligence, the Berkeley-based startup, aims to challenge the gender gap in STEM by helping young girls learn to code using dolls. The startup is currently fundraising its pre-seed round.
“We want to expose young girls to technological concepts and encourage creative thinking through hardware and software, preventing girls from being influenced by generational stereotypes. Parents have so few options; they feel they need to force their daughters to play with STEM products designed for boys in order to get their daughters on a STEM path.” - Eliza Kosoy, Founder of E-liza Dolls
👩🏻⚕️ NXgenPort aims to detect early signs of infection in cancer patients before symptoms arise - The US-based startup, co-founded by Cathy Skinner (CEO) and Rosanne Welcher, PhD (COO), is raising its seed round.
👩🏾💻 Mother Honestly’s new offering aims to give employees more freedom when it comes to caregiving spend - Features Blessing Adesiyan, founder and CEO of Mother Honestly, a platform that propels women forward in motherhood, work and life.
🙌🏼 The New Role Models Proving Entrepreneurship And Motherhood Aren’t Mutually Exclusive
“(…) how do we manage entrepreneurship and motherhood? How do we change the (very stale) archetype of what a founder should look like? And how do we put a new generation of female founder role models forward?” - Maren Thomas Bannon, founding partner of January Ventures
Women’s & Family Health: 🤱🏽 Meet The Black Entrepreneur Working To Save The Lives Of Birthing Mothers And Their Babies - Features Leseliey Welch, a former public health official who leads Birth Center Equity, an organization whose goal is to offer capital and operational funding for birth centers around the US led by people of color.
🤱🏽 ‘She Matters’ is the name and mission of a BIPOC-focused postpartum care startup - Features Jade Kearney, founder and CEO of SheMatters, a digital health platform focused on supporting Black women experiencing postpartum comorbidities, and providing cultural competency training for care providers. In 2023 the startup plans to launch We Matter, an additional product line to better serve other historically marginalized communities.
“It’s not only up to Black women to understand terminology around postpartum care, and understand maternal health and submerge ourselves in all things birthing. It’s up to the healthcare system and healthcare professionals to meet us halfway and be culturally competent and help us.” - Jade Kearney
♀️Hormona wants women to track their ‘hormonal health’ with at-home testing - Features London-based femtech, Hormona, co-founded by Karolina Lofqvist (CEO) and Jasmine Tagesson (COO). The startup recently launched in the US.
📣 Shout-out to Meredith Brunette, co-founder and CEO of Bunnii, a US-based personal health record and digital care navigation platform dedicated to fertility. The all-female founding team is currently raising their pre-seed round.
VC: 💸 Arati Sharma, Founding Partner Of Backbone Angels, Is Flipping The Script On Funding’s Old ‘Boys’s Club’ - Features Arati Sharma of Backbone Angels, a collective of ten female angels who invest primarily in Black, Indigenous, and women of color-led startups. Since its founding in 2021, Backbone Angels has invested in more than 42 women-led startups.
“We wanted to give our experience back to women who are starting businesses (…) We realized there were a lot of programs to help women around education and pitching, and offering support, mentorship, and allyship. But we noticed there were so few that were writing the check. And I think that’s one of the most impactful things that you can do for a woman who is starting a business and raising funding – just write her first check.” - Arati Sharma, Founding Partner of Backbone Angels
👩🏻💻 Sequoia’s Sonya Huang: The generative AI hype is ‘absolutely justified’ - Sequoia’s Partner Sonya Huang is bullish on gen AI.
🎧 Key Moment for Women in VC - Features Ruth Foxe Blader Anthemis Partner and organizer of the Women in VC: Europe
Business: 👉🏼 Why members-only club Chief, with a waitlist of 60K, hates the term ‘girl boss’ - Features Chief co-founder Lindsay Kaplan
“How can we celebrate women, not tear them down, not infantilize what it is to be a woman leader by calling them a ‘girl boss’ and truly make sure that women can lead and do it in their own way.” - Lindsay Kaplan
Tech: 📱 Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker - Features Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, a popular messaging app that offers encrypted communication.
⛓️ From Wall Street to Uniswap: COO Mary-Catherine Lader sees the future of finance decentralized - Features Mary-Catherine Lader, COO of Uniswap, the company developing the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum.
“One of the things I love about DeFi is that the technology has the potential to remake financial services, which means you have an opportunity to change where points of influence are. You have an opportunity to change and think differently about who you’re serving. Most of today’s financial services have been designed by a somewhat homogeneous group of people.” - Mary-Catherine Lader
Science: 👩🏻🔬 She’s made 1,750 Wikipedia bios for female scientists who haven’t gotten their due - Features Jess Wade, a British physicist on a mission to correct gender and racial biases in the science community, and advocate for women in STEM.
“Wikipedia is a really powerful way to give credit to people who, for a long time, have been written out of history. Not only do we not have enough women in science, but we aren’t doing enough to celebrate the ones we have.” - Jess Wade.
Politics & Women’s Rights: 🇺🇸 Stacey Abrams’s Last Stand. The candidate for governor in Georgia talks about protecting abortion, preserving the franchise, and making history. - Features Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in the state of Georgia.
(…) the attention is always focused on the sexy federal level, but our lives are lived at the local level, and governors are the most powerful forces that few people understand. I will not only be the best governor for Georgia, I will be the first Black woman in American history to be governor. And you don’t elect someone for history, but, by God, why miss an opportunity to make history? - Stacey Abrams
🧗🏼♀️ Iranian Climber Who Competed Without Hijab Receives Hero’s Welcome In Tehran - Iranian climber and multiple-time medal winner, Elnaz Rekabi, who competed at an event in Korea without wearing the headscarf mandated for all Iranian female athletes, received a warm welcome from supporters upon her arrival at the Tehran airport, amid nationwide protests. To learn more about the protests in Iran, read “No going back”: Gen Z at the forefront of protests in Iran.
“We kept being told that it’s going to be one long, lonely, hard and fruitless journey, being an actor. (…) They helped us to mentally prepare for failure, but they did not prepare us for success.” - Lupita Nyong’o, Kenyan Mexican actress
What I’m Reflecting On 💭
2021 top year for startups in the Nordics — but not for female founders
“There is a clear correlation between the cheque writers, decision makers and general partners and the founders receiving funding, therefore we’re not seeing more change in who is getting funded. That has a clear impact on the ecosystem, which is not improving.” - Nora Bavey, Founding Partner of Unconventional Ventures
What a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks – in pictures - In 13 US states, abortion is banned even in the earliest stages of pregnancy. Images supplied by the MYA Network, a network of clinicians and activists show what tissue in the first nine weeks of pregnancy looks like.
“A lot of early pregnancy images are driven by people who are against abortion and feel that life begins at conception, or by prenatal enthusiasts who want women to be excited about their pregnancy. What about people who aren’t?”
- Dr Joan Fleischman, member of the MYA Network
Thank you for reading! 🥰 If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with a friend. Wish you a lovely Sunday and a great week ahead! 🫶
Anamaria
Founder & Writer of FemWealth