I Went BRONDE, A Woman Raised $450 MILLION For Rockets, And A Supplement Brand Became A Doctor's Office...Let Me Explain

I fell for the bronde propaganda. Reader, I dyed my hair.

If you have been blonde your whole life like me, you understand the weight of that sentence. Blonde has been my thing since I was a little girl in Kentucky, the detail people remembered about me before they remembered my name. So sitting in the salon chair and saying the words “let’s go darker” felt a lot bigger than a hair appointment.

Somewhere between the foils and the blowout, I realized I was ready for a new season and wanted something in the mirror to prove it. I have spent this year building for other people, their launches, their content, their events, and I love that work.

This season is about putting myself and my growth first, and apparently my hair got the memo before I did.

Then Friday happened, and it felt like the season had officially started.

We hosted our Claude workshop on AI for marketing at Mindspace in Downtown Miami. Everyone walked in with a laptop, a charger and a few posts they had written themselves, and we started with Claude basics before each woman built an agent trained on her own voice and offers. By the afternoon we were making video and mapping out thirty days of content, and the room had gone quiet, everyone heads down, building.

It was one of my favorites yet, because everyone left happy and completely exhausted, since we did SO much work. Every single woman walked out with a workflow to help her business, and that, my friends, is what makes me wake up in the morning. I built this club to show the girl from a small town that she gets to build her own life, and on Friday a room full of women did exactly that.

Here is my hot take. The tools got very good very quietly, so the real work now is getting what you already know out of your head and into something that can use it. The women in that room already had the expertise, and Friday gave it somewhere to go.

New hair, new season, and a new rule I am keeping: my growth comes first, and then I help you with yours. Welcome to the bronde era.

Before you scroll, hit reply and tell me: what is the one task in your business you would hand to an agent first, and what has stopped you so far? I read every reply, and your answers decide what we build at the next workshop.

AI Release Radar

Three launches, one theme: the assistants started doing the job.

Claude for Small Business, expanded (Anthropic, September 15). The small business plugin now includes 43 workflows and picked up 27 new integrations, including Shopify, Square, Stripe, Xero, Gusto and Zapier, which pushes it into lead generation, inbound inquiries and proposals. It has been installed more than 900,000 times since May, and Anthropic is running free half-day workshops in ten US cities.

What it means for you: if your business runs on Shopify, Stripe or Square, Claude can now work with your real numbers instead of guessing. Claude

Sponsored agents and an AI-native Ads Manager (OpenAI, September 16). Ads inside ChatGPT can now open a separate labeled chat with a business’s own agent, and advertisers can build and analyze campaigns in plain language. Sponsored agents are in test with select US advertisers, and new HubSpot and Shopify connections went live on September 16.

What it means for you: paid discovery is moving inside the chatbot, so the prep work is getting your brand facts written down somewhere a model can read them. The Next Web

Nova (Pipedrive, September 16). Meeting intelligence that briefs you before a sales call, transcribes during it, then drafts your CRM updates for you to approve. It is included in every Pipedrive plan at no extra cost.

What it means for you: one customer Pipedrive quotes says it saves him at least half an hour to an hour per deal meeting, and the approval step keeps your pipeline yours. Pipedrive

Women-Founded AI Spotlight

Daydream, co-founded by CEO Julie Bornstein, the former Stitch Fix COO. On September 14 Daydream shipped two features built on Apple Intelligence: you can shop straight from outfit photos in your camera roll, and you can ask Siri to search the app without opening it, as in “Hey, Siri, search Daydream for a cool blazer for my board meeting on Monday.”

Why I care: being inside Siri, where people already search, is a more durable win than a funding round. TechCrunch

ScrollEd, co-founded by Rebecca Neff with Utsav Gupta. ScrollEd turns textbooks and PDFs into a vertical scrollable feed of AI-generated video, audio and quizzes, where you swipe up for a new topic and sideways to go deeper. Neff and Gupta are married, both students, and they will launch the consumer product at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield in October.

Why I care: they aimed the format everyone blames for our attention spans at the thing we say we want more of, and if you sell a course, this is what your students will soon expect. TechCrunch

AI Tools for Builders

Constant Contact, inside Claude (September 10). Describe your business, audience and goal in Claude, and it builds the email campaign or social post with live desktop and mobile previews, then sends it to Constant Contact in one click. Available to existing Constant Contact customers.

How to use this this week: write your next newsletter in Claude with your voice rules pasted at the top, and only open Constant Contact to hit send. PR Newswire

The Claude Move

The question I get after every workshop is what to do with the recording, so here is a move you can run tonight.

Take one thing you have already said out loud, a webinar, a podcast episode, a client call you have permission to use or a long voice memo to yourself, and turn it into a week of content without writing from scratch. Upload the transcript to a Claude project and paste this:

Here is a transcript of me talking about [topic]. It is my real
voice, so treat it as the source of truth for how I sound.

Step 1: Pull out every distinct idea I actually argued, with the
exact sentences I used. Quote me. Do not smooth my phrasing.

Step 2: Rank those ideas by how useful they are to [your audience,
in one line], and tell me which three would make someone stop
scrolling, with your reasoning.

Step 3: For the top three, draft:
- one short post for [platform], in my voice, using my own words
- one email opening paragraph
- three hooks, each under 12 words

Step 4: List what I said that I should NOT publish: anything
half-argued, anything that needs data to back it up, anything
that names a client.

Step 4 is the one people skip. A transcript is full of things you said with total confidence and zero evidence, and that separate pile keeps you from publishing something you have to walk back.

Come build workflows like this live at our AI workshops, October 16 in Miami and October 23 in Austin.

The Wellness Read

A supplement company became a doctor’s office this week, and that sentence is the whole story of where wellness is going.

What is happening. On September 9, Elysium Health opened the Elysium Longevity Institute, which bundles personalized supplements with prescription therapies and peptides plus ongoing clinical support. It launched with 18 protocols in oral, intranasal and injectable forms, led by chief medical officer Dr. Omar Baker, formerly deputy CMO at UnitedHealth Group, with co-founder and chief scientist Dr. Leonard Guarente of MIT. Pricing is not disclosed. PR Newswire

Evidence strength. Weak overall. This is a commercial launch rather than a study, and the peptide layer is the softest part, described in June trade coverage of the program as evidence quality that remains frustratingly uneven across compounds. Longevity.Technology

Safety flags. Injectable peptides sold on a membership are the live risk, and on September 1 the FDA made public warning letters to five online peptide sellers. The same company also recommends the protocol and sells you everything in it.

What it means and what I would do. Recurring revenue with a prescriber attached has a moat a capsule never will, so I expect copycats by spring. Watch it as a business model and stay out as a customer until pricing and protocols are public.

One more thing, because it made me mad. A study saying four weeks of diet changes improved biological age went around again last week as if it were new. It is a real human trial, published in May, and ScienceDaily re-posted it on September 15. Check the date on the original paper before you repost the miracle. University of Sydney, May 12

The Raise

Five rounds with a verified named woman founder, largest first. One number first: of the twenty-one biggest US rounds Crunchbase tracked across these two weeks, roughly $13 billion in total, the only one we could find with a woman co-founder was Encoded Therapeutics. The biggest women-founded raise of the fortnight came from Europe, and it came from space. Crunchbase, Sept 5 to 11 · Crunchbase, Sept 12 to 18

1. The Exploration Company, $450M Series C (September 8). Founded by CEO Hélène Huby with a team of aerospace veterans, building Nyx, a reusable cargo capsule designed to fly to any space station and come back. Co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico and the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund, and the largest Series C ever raised by a European space company.

Why it matters: the next time someone says women do not raise hard-tech mega-rounds, this is rockets. The Exploration Company

2. Evvy, $40M Series B (September 15). Co-founded by CEO Priyanka Jain with Laine Bruzek and Pita Navarro. Evvy does at-home vaginal microbiome testing, and this round funds new AI diagnostic and care models built on data from more than 100,000 patients, starting with fertility and IVF. Led by Catalio Capital Management.

Why it matters: Jain says women hear the word unexplained constantly, about infertility, recurrence and pain, and owning the dataset in a field nobody studied properly is a strategy worth stealing. TechCrunch

3. Highstock, $30M Series A (September 10). Founded by CEO Camille van Horne, formerly a director of product management at Instacart, with CTO Sean Cashin. A B2B marketplace where beauty and consumer brands quietly sell surplus inventory to vetted wholesale buyers. Led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Why it matters: the money in consumer is going to the picks and shovels, and she built one. a16z

4. Complir, $11M seed (September 16). Co-founded by Tine Kühnel with Gustav Bang and Marc Kaa Brejner in Copenhagen, using AI to work out which regulations and certifications each retail product needs. Led by General Catalyst, and Kühnel was one of the few women in Y Combinator’s spring 2026 batch.

Why it matters: compliance is unglamorous and enormously expensive, which is exactly why it gets funded. Tech Funding News

5. Resolutiion, $10.4M (September 14). Founded by Fayola-Maria Jack, who previously ran contracts for the Royal Air Force and the UK Cabinet Office. Her system, Octavia, reads a company’s emails, invoices and project trackers and flags disputes weeks before they become claims. Backed by LocalGlobe, Cherry Ventures and Octopus Ventures.

Why it matters: your unglamorous operational knowledge is a product. Tech Funding News

Also worth knowing. Tenzin Seldon closed Pulse Fund I at $63M on September 18, a climate fund run by a solo woman general partner, and Thandiwe Maqetuka launched Grindstone Ventures Fund II this month, targeting R500M for African startups. Professor Anwesha Sarkar raised €8.7M for MicroLub, her Leeds spinout that lets food makers cut fat by up to 75%, and Feisty, the protein soda built by Vy Cutting and her mother Dr. Hong Huynh, took its first outside investment. Pulse Fund · MicroLub

The Edit

1. The Makers Mindset x Equity Studio grant. SPEND, it only costs an application. Five brands will each get $10,000 in equity-free funding plus group mentoring, from Nancy Twine of Makers Mindset and investor Anna Sweeting of The Equity Studio. It is open to US beauty and wellness brands that are at least 51% women-owned, with 10 or fewer employees, $50K to $2M in annual revenue and at least a full year of sales. Applications close October 9, so start this week. Makers Mindset

2. The Quest panel inside Apple Health. SPEND, when it arrives. Quest Diagnostics announced on September 9 that you will be able to order a panel of more than 50 biomarkers from the Apple Health app for $119, with the draw at one of around 2,000 Quest locations, later this year and not in every state. Basic biomarker testing is becoming a commodity, and the optimization story on top is marketing. Quest Diagnostics

3. The first Congressional hearing on menopause, ever. SPEND the twenty minutes. On September 16 the Senate Special Committee on Aging held a bipartisan hearing led by Kirsten Gillibrand and Rick Scott, and the number to carry around is $78M spent on menopause research in 2025, against $768M for a newly created men’s health research category. The same week, the NIH committed $21M to computer models of how hormones regulate themselves in women’s bodies, so drugs can be tested with female biology in mind. Femtech Insider · NIH

Trend radar

• “The AI is wrong about women” became a named argument. A Women’s Health op-ed on September 18 opened with a woman told by a chatbot that her symptoms were perimenopause while she was having a heart attack, and a day later a study of 477 adults found a warm, chatty AI tone makes false health information more believable, with only half of people bothering to check. Ask your AI for its sources, every time. Women’s Health · StudyFinds

• The kegger is becoming the “wellness darty.” Daytime parties built on run clubs, cold plunges, coffee, matcha and a DJ. One Gainesville run club went from about ten people to more than a hundred regulars, then charged $10 as a demand test and had roughly 300 people pay. Runner’s World

Where to Be

Our rooms

• Sep 22 and 29 · ADHD Work Day · Zoom

• Sep 23 · Founder Dinner · Miami Beach

• Sep 30 · Weekly Roundtable: longevity science, how to live to 100 · Zoom

• Oct 7 and 28 · Founder Coffee Hour · Miami

• Oct 8 · Hot Seat Mastermind, business advice for female founders · Miami

• Oct 16 · AI Workshop · Miami

• Oct 20 · Anti-Networking Night · Miami

• Oct 21 · Founder Dinner · Austin

• Oct 22 · Founder Dinner · Miami

• Oct 23 · AI Workshop · Austin

• Oct 26 · Quarterly Goal Setting · Miami

Out in the world

• Sep 24 to 26 · Ultimate Wellness Conference · Miami Beach · Wellness

• Oct 6 to 7 · Women’s Capital Summit · New York · Women. Around 150 women founders matched with around 150 investors.

• Oct 21 · Fast Pitch, Women Founders Network · Los Angeles · Women. Ten women founders pitch for $55,000 in cash grants.

• Nov 18 to 20 · Singapore FinTech Festival · Singapore · AI

• Dec 3 to 4 · Adopt AI Summit · Paris · AI

• Dec 9 to 11 · Wellness Tokyo · Tokyo · Wellness

Close

If one thing in here was useful, forward it to a founder friend, because that is how this room grows. And if you have not replied to the question up top yet, this is your sign.

Countdown

We are 2 days out from the Founder Dinner in Miami Beach, Wednesday, September 23 at 7pm.

One long table, a dozen women building businesses, and an evening of honest conversation about the work. The restaurant gets revealed by email 24 hours before, which is half the fun.

RSVP HERE

See you in there.

Bailey