100+ female founders in AI you should know

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Female Founders Fund is changing its strategy to get a bigger stake in the AI boom

Emma Hinchliffe

Most Powerful Women Editor

Profile

Fidji Simo's Chronicle Bio is part of Female Founders Fund's growing AI portfolio.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mira Murati. Daniela Amodei. Fei-Fei Li. At this point, many of us know the names of the top women in AI. But there’s still a perception that these women are rare, the exception.

While it’s true that men dominate the largest AI companies and funding rounds—the ones that seem to be determining the fate of humanity—there’s also a universe of female founders quietly building in this space. We can see just how many in a new report from Female Founders Fund.

The VC firm created a map of 100+ female founders in AI across six categories; the largest is AI-native enterprise. Sixty-five percent of female-founded companies in that space have raised at least $25 million. The largest funding rounds are going to the frontier labs and companies doing AI research. Then there’s consumer AI, AI infrastructure, physical world AI, and AI health and biotech. Consumer AI commands the least investment capital.

Some founders and companies of note beyond the biggest names: Minna Song’s Elise AI (automation for housing and health care); May Habib’s Writer (agentic AI for large enterprises); Raquel Urtasun’s Waabi (gen-AI autonomous driving); Jaime Lien’s Archetype (deploying physical agents); some I’ve written about before like Corner Health and Daydream; and many, many more.

Female Founders Fund is releasing this report as it adjusts its own strategy. The firm founded by Anu Duggal invests in female-founded companies, typically at the seed stage targeting 8-10% ownership. In the competitive AI space, where seed rounds have run as large as $2 billion, that’s not usually possible. The firm is now writing checks in AI companies without its typical ownership target, allocating between 10% and 20% of its $29 million fund. “We decided to come up with a new strategy that basically enables us to get that access to what we feel are the category-defining female founders within AI,” Duggal explains.

Its AI portfolio so far includes Divanny Lamas’s storytelling/video platform Dollhouse; Preeti Krishnan’s compliance infrastructure company Leela; and Chronicle Bio, the health and diagnostics company founded by Fidji Simo, who departed her role as CEO of AGI deployment at OpenAI.

Explore the full map of 100+ female founders in AI here—and let me know if anyone catches your eye who you’d like to learn more about!

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.

Were you forwarded MPW Daily? Sign up here.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

It wasn't just Blake Lively. Five other women have filed lawsuits alleging they were the targets of malicious digital PR campaigns executed by the same network. The campaigns created websites smearing the reputations of women who said they had been victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault.

The gender gap is changing. When it comes to political beliefs, the strongest predictors are not just men vs. women but how men and women relate to their own gender. For instance, men who see themselves as "extremely masculine" and women who self-identify as "highly feminine" are more likely to support Trump.

James and Kathryn Murdoch are interested in "in the business of ideas." So says Kathryn, explaining the couple's recent purchase of New York magazine. The goal is to have a "very attractive, very profitable business that does not have to be an algorithm, sort of a mechanized panderer," James says.

Gender pay equity takes center stage in New Zealand. The Labor Party says if it wins the country's election in November it will restore laws that allow "female-dominated industries to seek redress if they can show they are paid less on the basis of gender." Those laws were amended last year to make it more difficult to file claims.