The Women building The Future of AI 💪
Mira Murati's record funding and other Female Founders to watch
Women-founded startups attract less than 2% of all global venture capital, a figure that has barely shifted over the past decade. In deep tech and AI, the gap is even wider. Yet, a new wave of women-led AI startups is breaking records, raising billions, and proving that the future of AI will be diverse ⚡🚀.
Just last week, Mira Murati founder and CEO of Thinking Labs raised a staggering $2B seed round; by far the largest ever recorded.
Because visibility and role models matter to change the paradigm, I’ve listed 8 female founders behind some of AI’s biggest breakthroughs and boldest bets:
1. Mira Murati – Founder & CEO, Thinking Machines Lab
After serving as CTO at OpenAI, Mira Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab. Last week, the company announced closed a record-breaking $2 billion seed round at a $10 billion valuation—the largest-ever seed raise in Silicon Valley and the biggest led by a woman. As the former CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati was instrumental in shaping GPT-4 and the multimodal technologies that defined a new era in artificial intelligence. Now at Thinking Machines Lab she aims to build general-purpose, collaborative AI systems that are multimodal and widely customisable. The company is attracting top-tier engineers and researchers from across the AI landscape and is becoming one of the most closely watched startup on the planet.
2. Daniela Amodei – Co-founder & President, Anthropic
Daniela Amodei is co-founder and president of Anthropic, an AI safety company spun out of OpenAI. Before co-founding Anthropic, Daniela served as VP of Safety and Policy at OpenAI, where she helped develop safety frameworks and policy architecture for frontier AI models. Anthropic has raised over $13.7 billion from investors like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, with its latest major round closing in March 2025 and the company valued at $61.5 billion. The company is behind the Claude family of Models and the the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI assistants to enterprise systems and contextual data sources. This week, Anthropic announced it has reached $4 billion in annualized revenue, marking a major milestone in the race to commercialize safe, general-purpose AI.
3. Fei‑Fei Li – Co-founder & CEO, World Labs
Fei-Fei Li, a computer vision pioneer, former director of Stanford’s AI Lab and co‑founder of ImageNet, launched World Labs in 2024 to advance “spatial intelligence.” The company quickly raised $230 million from top investors and achieved unicorn status within its first year. World Labs is developing AI systems that can understand and navigate the physical world, combining perception, reasoning, and action to power next-generation robotics, embodied agents, and real-world human-AI interaction.
4. Éléonore Crespo – Co-founder & CEO, Pigment
Éléonore Crespo is co-founder and CEO of Pigment, an AI-powered business planning platform based in Paris. Pigment has raised nearly $397 million in total funding and is valued above $1 billion. The platform enables large organizations to dynamically model, forecast, and visualize complex business data, replacing static spreadsheets with real-time, collaborative planning tools. Prior to founding Pigment, Éléonore was an investor at Index Ventures and held various roles at Google.
5. May Habib – Co-founder & CEO, Writer
May Habib is co-founder and CEO of Writer, a full-stack generative AI platform that builds its own foundation models and enterprise-grade tools to help companies automate and optimize knowledge work across functions like marketing, finance, legal, and operations. Since its founding in 2020, Writer has raised $326 million, including a $200 million Series C in November 2024 at a $1.9 billion valuation, and is deployed at major organizations like Accenture, Intuit, UiPath, Spotify, and Deloitte.
6. Raquel Urtasun – Founder & CEO, Waabi
Raquel Urtasun is founder and CEO of Waabi, a Toronto-based autonomous trucking startup. In June 2024, Waabi closed a $200 million Series B round, bringing its total funding to over $280 million. The company is developing a next-generation AI-first approach to self-driving technology, with a strong focus on simulation-led training and safer, more scalable deployment. Prior to founding Waabi, Urtasun was Chief Scientist at Uber ATG and a tenured professor at the University of Toronto, widely recognized as a leading researcher in machine learning and computer vision for autonomous driving.
7. Emmanuelle Rolland-Martiano – Co-founder & COO, Aqemia
Emmanuelle Rolland-Martiano is co-founder and COO of Aqemia, a Paris-based startup using quantum-inspired physics and generative AI for drug discovery. In December 2024, Aqemia raised $38 million in new funding, bringing its total funding to over $100 million. Aqemia’s approach accelerates the design of new drug candidates for critical diseases, focusing initially on oncology and immuno-oncology.
8. Elisenda Bou – Founder & CEO, Cala AI
Elisenda Bou, previously co-founder and CTO of Vilynx (acquired by Apple in 2020), launched Cala AI in Barcelona in 2025. Cala AI is building A Better Way to Access Knowledge, bringing trusted clarity to today's information landscape and enabling access to Fair, Trustworthy & Explainable Information, sustainably. Cala AI recently secured one of Spain’s largest pre-seed rounds in 2025. This the company was included in Creandum’s #EuroSeed50 list featuring the most promising early stage startups in Europe.
Side note: A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to share a panel with Elisenda at an event hosted by H2 Barcelona Chapter Forum, and I was truly impressed by her vision and boldness. Big thanks to Marta Álvarez and Olivia Calafat for making it happen!
Women participation is essential for creating responsible and inclusive AI systems that serve the needs of all of society. A lack of gender diversity in AI teams can result in biased algorithms and products, perpetuating existing stereotypes and inequalities. However, recent data highlights significant gender imbalances in the AI sector: women hold only 20% of technical roles in major AI companies and account for just 12% of AI researchers. A lack of diversity in development teams increases the risk that AI systems will fail to adequately serve diverse populations or safeguard their fundamental rights.
It’s well known that increasing the visibility of women in AI and technology provides role models for future generations, encouraging more girls and young women to pursue STEM careers.
This article is my small contribution to the cause.
These founders are redefining what’s possible for women in AI, showing that with vision and determination, the funding gap can be closed 💪.
If you'd like to contribute, feel free to add in the comments any other women you believe should be included in the list.