My Car Got TOWED, A Cookie Went To JAIL, And Women Raised $531M...I Have So Much To Tell You

I asked the universe for direction, and four days later it towed my car and ended my biggest contract.

Reader, it was the most useful week I have had all year.

Here is how that went. Thursday night, the night before the Claude marketing workshop, I did something I had not done in years. I asked for direction. Out loud, alone, feeling faintly ridiculous about it. Call it prayer, call it talking to the universe, call it a woman at the end of a long week asking to be pointed somewhere. What I asked for was protection, and some sign of where I was actually supposed to be going.

Friday, the workshop exceeded my expectations. I made so many new friends, saw women start new collaborations, and more than eight breakthroughs with Claude. This was the first event I did with a full team, and I finally got to meet everyone in person, and they ROCKED.

At the end of an eight-hour day on my feet, brain in overload mode, I’m ready to take the team to dinner and then…
I walked outside and my car was GONE. Towed, over parking tickets I had apparently been ignoring with real commitment. I would like the record to show that parking tickets are a blue job and I am a girl.

So there I am on the sidewalk, staring at an empty parking spot, thinking: I ask the universe for ONE thing, and this is the response I get.

I sat with it overnight and it landed completely differently.

This was not a punishment, this was the hand on my shoulder telling me to slow down. I’ve been moving too fast in certain areas of life and in others, I’d become too comfortable.

Then, a few days later, my main client and I parted ways. Mutual, but still a heartbreak. A year and a half of work, an account I grew organically from 1,500 followers to 18,000, a community I helped take from about 200 people to over 1,200. That one knocked the wind out of me.

Here is the part I keep turning over. Sometimes the people around you can see your next chapter before you can, and life moves the pieces whether or not you were ready to move them yourself. Every door I would have kept propped open out of loyalty or habit got closed for me inside a single week. Which is inconvenient, and also efficient.

“We ourselves are always in motion, in progress. We are perpetually in flux. We keep learning even when we’re tired of learning, changing even when we’re exhausted by change.” Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry, 2022

None of it was failure, it was progress. The closed door and the open one are usually the same event, and you only get to see the second half of it later, from further down the road.

So I got what I asked for. I asked to be pointed somewhere, and the answer showed up as a tow truck and a suddenly empty calendar, which is not the delivery format I had in mind. The direction was in there anyway. If your world is coming apart right now, let it come apart, and then go look at the wreckage for the instruction. Something in it is pointing.

Alright, let us get into this week.

The hot take: we are moving out of the “can you tell?” era of AI and into the receipts era. Anthropic said this week it will watermark text generated by its models, and by the next morning there were people online genuinely upset that their bosses and professors might be able to tell (TechCrunch, Aug 11, TechCrunch, Aug 12). That is good news for anyone who was already doing the work. If a label on the output is enough to sink your business, the AI was never the problem, the missing piece was a point of view. The women I know who use Claude every day are not hiding it, they are shipping four times as much with their name on all of it.

What I am watching: the gap between people using AI to make more content and people using it to make better decisions. That gap is about to get very visible, very fast.

🫶

Gemini 3.7 Flash. Google, Aug 13. Google’s new workhorse for coding, agents, and high-volume everyday work, launched at an introductory price half that of the previous Flash. (Google, VentureBeat, Axios) For you: the cost of bulk work fell through the floor. Run your whole back catalog through it in one sitting, every reel transcribed, tagged by topic, sorted into a spreadsheet of what you actually talk about. It is the cheapest content audit you will ever do, and most people find they have three pillars instead of the eight they claim.

Anthropic will watermark AI-generated text. Aug 11. The method is statistical rather than cryptographic, an implementation of Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text, so nothing is added to your words. It applies to models released on or after Aug 2, with older models following, there is no opt-out, and the driver is the EU AI Act transparency code. A detection API is planned. Within a day the story had a sequel, which was people upset about being caught. (Anthropic, TechCrunch, Fortune, Forbes on the backlash) For you: treat AI output as a first pass you rewrite in your own voice, which was always the better workflow and now has a business reason behind it.

Claude Code runs on your own compute. Anthropic, Aug 6. Self-hosted environments went to public beta for Team and Enterprise, letting sessions run on your own infrastructure with your internal tooling and compliance controls. GitLab merge request support followed on Aug 14. (Anthropic) For you: take the one task you always do on Sunday night, your analytics pull, your content log, your invoice chase, and set it up to run without you sitting there. Even automating the pull and writing the summary yourself buys back your Sunday.

ChatGPT desktop lands on Linux. OpenAI, Aug 11. (TechCrunch) The day before, OpenAI said Premium seats are coming to ChatGPT Business, at $125 per user monthly or $100 annually against $25 and $20 for Standard, with five times the usage and no five-hour cap. (OpenAI, Aug 10) For you: mostly a signal. The assistant layer is going ambient, so the differentiator stops being access and becomes what you feed it.

OpenAI expands Daybreak with a cyber-specific model. Aug 10. Two tiers, Daybreak Blue for defensive work and Daybreak Red for vulnerability research, plus a model called GPT-5.6-Cyber, available through the Daybreak Cyber Partner Program OpenAI set up in June, whose ten members include Accenture, Akamai, Cisco, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, PwC, and Sophos. (OpenAI, Axios, SecurityWeek) For you: you are not buying this, and that is the point. AI-run attacks are scaling, so turn on two-factor everywhere, rotate the passwords you have reused since 2019, and stop sending client logins over DM.

Two launches from the last two weeks, both with an actual company announcement behind them rather than just community upvotes.

Assembly Studio, Aug 11. A no-code builder that turns natural language into working apps for professional service firms, delivered inside a branded client portal on your own domain, with logins, payments, and notifications handled. Y Combinator backed. (Assembly) For you: if you have been quoting out a members portal or a client app, price this against the quote first. Community and course businesses are exactly the shape it is built for.

Dograh. An open-source voice agent platform with a visual flow builder, your own model key, and self-hosting with no per-minute fee. BSD licensed, and a member of NVIDIA’s Inception programme. (Dograh, GitHub) For you: intake calls, booking confirmations, and the follow-up you keep meaning to make. Worth a look if you are a service business drowning in phone tag.

YouTube raised the bar to get paid. Aug 10. From Feb 1, 2027, new Partner Program applicants need 8,000 watch hours in a year or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days, double the old thresholds. The 1,000-subscriber requirement stays. The part most coverage missed: from the same date, creators earning from Shorts need to hold 10 million qualified Shorts views per 90 days to keep their share of the Shorts pool, so existing partners are not entirely untouched either. (YouTube’s own blog, Social Media Today, TechCrunch)

For you: if you have been sitting on a channel you never turned on, turn it on before February. Getting in under the old bar is materially easier than clearing the new one.

The biggest rounds raised by women-founded companies in the last two weeks, largest first, each traced to a different outlet so you are not reading one wire service’s week.

1. Volta. $300 million, seed and Series A combined, at a $2.4 billion valuation, Aug 4. Co-founder and chief corporate development officer Sofia Gumuzio, alongside CEO Ricard Boada, both out of Brookfield’s infrastructure arm. Volta finances, builds, and runs GPU-packed data centres and rents them to AI companies on long contracts, aimed at the middle of the market that is too big for a credit card and too small for a Microsoft deal. It came out of stealth with a reported multi-billion compute agreement already signed. Backers include a16z and Altimeter as co-leads, plus Nvidia, Michael Dell’s family office, Azora, and Matter Venture Partners. (a16z, Businesswire) Why it matters: the largest women-co-founded round of the fortnight by a factor of three, and it is in infrastructure rather than apps. Note that most coverage names only her male co-founder, which is its own small lesson about whose name gets printed.

2. Expedition Therapeutics. $115 million Series B, Aug 5. Founder and CEO Yi Larson. An oversubscribed round to advance a once-daily pill for COPD that targets the specific lung inflammation driving the disease, with the first patient already dosed in a global Phase 2. General Atlantic led, with RA Capital, Vivo, Sofinnova, Novo Holdings, Forbion, and Sanofi Ventures among a long list of existing backers. (Fierce Biotech) Why it matters: a woman founder who is also CEO, raising nine figures in clinical-stage biotech, which is one of the hardest rooms there is.

3. Ore Energy. $43 million, or €37.3 million, Series A, Aug 4. Co-founder and CSO Yaiza Gonzalez Garcia, with Aytac Yilmaz and Rutil Ozdemir, out of TU Delft. They build grid batteries that store renewable power for up to 100 hours by rusting and un-rusting iron, using iron, water and air instead of lithium or cobalt. Plural and HV co-led, with Positron Ventures. (The Next Web, Electrek)

4. CoreMap. $37 million Series C, announced Aug 4. Co-founder, president and CEO Sarah Kalil. Medtronic led an oversubscribed round for a heart-mapping system that gives doctors a far sharper picture of the electrical signals behind atrial fibrillation, so ablation hits the right spot. The financing itself closed on July 29, so this is the announcement date. (MassDevice)

5. Remepy. $36 million Series A, Aug 12. Founder and co-CEO Michal Tsur, with Or Shoval. Remepy pairs a conventional prescription drug with a personalised AI app delivering physical, cognitive and behavioural exercises, so the pill and the software get prescribed together as one treatment. O.G. Venture Partners and Merck KGaA’s M Ventures co-led, taking the company to $62 million total. (Calcalist)

Also worth your attention

• Silicon Data, $30.5 million Series A, Aug 11. Founder and CEO Carmen Li, previously Bloomberg’s global head of strategic alliances for enterprise data. They publish independent daily price benchmarks for renting AI chips, the way an index publishes a closing price. CME Group plans to launch GPU futures in October using those indices as the reference price. (HPCwire)

• Ambrook, $30 million Series B, Aug 4. Co-founder and CEO Mackenzie Burnett. Accounting software built for farms, trucking fleets and contractors, the businesses QuickBooks handles badly. Grew from about 2,500 customers to more than 8,000 across all fifty states in a year. (Upstarts Media)

• June AI, $20 million pre-seed, Aug 3. Co-founder and CEO Efrat Rapoport, one of four co-founders, whose team previously built Bonobo AI and sold it to Salesforce. Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures led, with Michael Dell, Diane Greene and Aaron Levie in. (Calcalist)

• AGent Energy, $11 million series seed, Aug 13. CEO and co-founder Stephanie Hendricks. They wire up the backup generators sitting idle at hospitals and factories and switch them on remotely when the grid is strained. Seventeen million dollars raised in the company’s first twelve months. (Axios)

• Design Arena, $7.9 million seed, Aug 3. Co-founders Grace Li and Kamryn Ohly, Harvard computer science students. Millions of people rank AI-generated designs head to head, and that aggregated human taste gets sold to AI labs so their models learn what actually looks good. Index led, with Sarah Guo’s Conviction. Reportedly 5.3 million users on a team of ten. (TechCrunch)

• Dr. Vivien Karl, seven-figure seed, Aug 12. Founder Dr. Vivien Karl and co-founder Julia Huhnholz, building intimate and vaginal health products in Germany, with zwei.7 Gruppe leading and DvH Ventures following on.

• Intropy, $11 million seed, Aug 3, co-founder Franziska Kirschner, led by Felix Capital. Ore Energy aside, Europe had a good fortnight: Shiplog in Paris (Khushi Mehta), Aavalynx in the UK (Hanna Roos), FlairMakers (Raluca Epureanu), AquaNab in Hamburg (Dr Ruth Tamara Montero), imagi in Stockholm (Dora Palfi and Beatrice Ionascu), and rrreefs in Zurich, founded by four women restoring coral reefs. Cashflows also took a stake in Blackpool’s Tap & Go, founded by Anna McDonald and Nichola Eagle, making it two women-led fintechs in one deal.

Founder of the week: Helen Oleynikova, Exclaim Robotics

Zurich-based Exclaim came out of stealth on Aug 4 with roughly $4.95 million, or €4.29 million, in pre-seed funding, co-led by Founderful and Playfair. The company builds robots that maintain AI data centres, which in practice means navigating a data hall unaided, parking at a rack, and handling the unglamorous work: reseating drives, reconnecting copper, swapping optical components. Oleynikova has fifteen years in robotics across Willow Garage, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and ETH Zürich, plus a PhD from ETH in navigating messy, unstructured environments. (EU-Startups, Data Center Dynamics)

Why this one: she is not the biggest raise on this list, she is the most interesting bet. Everyone is funding the model layer, and she went and found the physical bottleneck underneath it. The unsexy middle of a boom is usually where the durable business lives.

The capital behind the capital

Cross-Border Impact Ventures closed $58 million, a first close on its second Women’s and Children’s Health Technology Fund, on Aug 6, against a $125 million target with a final close expected in 2027. Managing partners Annie Thériault and Donna Parr invest in women’s and children’s health technology, and their LPs include KfW on behalf of Germany’s BMZ, the Skoll Foundation, Ceniarth, the Equality Fund, and Wire Group. Parr put the thesis plainly, saying advances in AI, diagnostics, medical devices and precision medicine are creating entirely new opportunities to improve care for women and children while building highly valuable companies. Thériault calls it a true blue sky opportunity, one where competition remains limited. (Businesswire, BetaKit) Why it matters: two women writing the cheques, in the category most of you are building in. Put them on your raise list.

And a reminder that grants are capital too. Opal Therapeutics won a $1.25 million NSF SBIR Phase II award on Aug 6. Founder and CEO Morgan M. Stanton, PhD, started the company after her own five-year fibroid diagnosis saga, and Opal’s platform grows patient-derived organoids from menstrual blood and surgical biopsies so drugs for endometriosis and fibroids can be tested on real human tissue. Non-dilutive federal money is a real strategy for deep science and far too few founders apply. (Businesswire) In the same window, Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation programme handed £75,000 each to 61 women founders, so if you are UK-based, that application is worth your afternoon.

The harder story

Bloomberg reported that Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni knew their shopping startup Phia had been cookie stuffing since December, meaning claiming affiliate commissions on purchases it did not drive, and that it was a feature that could be toggled rather than a bug. Phia says the misattribution features were removed on July 7, that it is reviewing every transaction and issuing reversals to brand partners, and that it is hiring a head of compliance. (TechCrunch, Aug 11)

I am including this because a newsletter that only ever celebrates women founders is a press release. Two of the most visible young founders in tech had a genuinely bad week, and the lesson underneath it is boring and universal: your revenue reporting is a trust product, and the moment it stops being accurate you are borrowing against a reputation you have not finished building.

The longevity product world had a loud two weeks. This is the version you will actually text the group chat.

The $3.8 billion trust fall. Procter & Gamble, the company that brings you Metamucil and Vicks, agreed to buy Thorne for $3.8 billion. Thorne is the supplement brand your functional medicine doctor keeps recommending, and it went from $229 million to over $500 million in revenue in three years, largely by being the rare brand that certifies what is actually in the bottle. (CNBC, Thorne)

Same week, opposite playbook. Alix Earle joined the Cymbiotika cap table alongside Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, and The Weeknd. So one fortnight gave us both theories of wellness in a split screen: Thorne bought credentials, Cymbiotika bought attention, and only ONE of them just got a $3.8 billion mark. (PRNewswire, Inc.)

The $16 smoothie that comes with lab work. Erewhon and Mark Hyman’s Function Health launched what they are calling the world’s healthiest smoothie, a $16 bottle designed around 160 lab tests and built to funnel you into telehealth blood panels. A grocery store smoothie now ships with a diagnostics strategy, which tells you EVERYTHING about where wellness marketing is in 2026. (Glossy, BevNET)

The inconvenient study. A JAMA cohort followed 390,124 healthy adults for twenty years and found the daily multivitamin did NOTHING for lifespan, and a review of 84 randomized trials agreed. Certification tells you what is in the bottle, it cannot tell you that you needed the bottle. Documented deficiency, pregnancy, and specific clinical indications are the real exceptions. I did not want to hear it either.

The fact I keep repeating at dinner. St. John’s wort can quietly make hormonal birth control less effective, and green tea extract, turmeric, and ashwagandha are now among the leading causes of supplement-related liver injury in the US. If you take anything daily, run your list past a pharmacist, they check interactions as routine and it costs you nothing. None of this is medical advice.

And some genuinely good news. Chelsea FC Women made Fertility Plus its first official fertility partner, with a fund open to every player on the team covering assessments, treatment, counselling and workshops. A football club got there before most of the Fortune 500. (Chelsea FC, She Kicks)

Spend or skip

• Thorne, spend carefully. Certification is the reason to buy, so pick the products you have a reason to take.

• Cymbiotika, skip the signal and read the label. A celebrity round tells you about distribution and nothing about formulation.

• The $16 smoothie, spend once for the story. It is a marketing funnel you can drink, and honestly, respect.

• Longevity clinic memberships, wait. The category is consolidating, so let the networks with research arms separate from the ones selling vibes and a blood panel.

• Substack, spend your time. Owning your list is still the least glamorous and most reliable move available to you. (The Hill)

Where to Be

With us

The full Longevity Social Club calendar lives at luma.com/thelongevitysocialclub, and here is what is coming up.

• ADHD Work Day, online, every Tuesday 12 to 5pm ET through Sep 29. Free. Body doubling, timed sprints, cameras optional. Drop in for one sprint or stay the whole block.

• Coffee Hour, Miami, first Thursday of the month, 9am at Studio 24. Next one is Sep 3, and your coffee or matcha is 10% off.

• Workout Club, Miami, third Thursday of the month. First up: a female founder walk across the Venetian Causeway, Thursday Sep 17 at 7pm. One full hour, 2.8 miles of bridges and bay views. Meet at Margaret Pace Park.

• Hot Seat Session, Miami, Thursday Sep 10, 6pm. Bring the problem you have been circling.

• Claude 101, Miami, Friday Sep 18, 9am to 4pm. Learn the basics of Claude in a workshop, then get 1:1 help with your own business issues.

• Mentorship Event, Miami, Saturday Sep 19, 10am.

• Founder Dinner, Miami, Thursday Sep 24, 7pm. Small table, real conversation, no panel.

• Content Shoot, Miami, Friday Sep 25, 10am to 4pm. A full day of assets so you stop posting from your camera roll.

• Further out: Practice Pitch Night Oct 1, Quarterly Goal Setting Oct 5, Pitch Night Oct 15, The Anti-Networking Event Oct 20, Personal Branding Seminar Oct 29, How to Get Funding Night Nov 10.

Everywhere else

• Sept 11 · APT Women 11th Kick-off, Tokyo, Chiyoda-ku · Women

• Sept 12 to 13 · AMWC Japan, Tokyo, The Prince Park Tower · Wellness

• Sept 15 to 16 · Big Data & AI Paris, Paris, Porte de Versailles · AI

• Sept 22 to 24 · HumanX EMEA, Amsterdam, RAI · AI

• Sept 23 to 24 · AI Engineer Paris, Paris, Station F · AI

• Sept 24 to 26 · Ultimate Wellness Conference, Miami Beach, Faena Forum · Wellness

• Sept 30 to Oct 2 · Health & Wellness Japan, Autumn, Tokyo, Big Sight · Wellness

• Oct 2 to 3 · Healthspan Summit, Los Angeles, Above the Block · Wellness

• Oct 5 to 8 · Advertising Week New York, New York, The Penn District · AI

• Oct 12 to 14 · Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, Santa Barbara, Ritz-Carlton Bacara · Women

• Oct 13 to 15 · TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco, Moscone West · AI

• Nov 9 to 12 · Web Summit, Lisbon · Women

• Nov 15 to 18 · HLTH USA, Las Vegas, The Venetian · Wellness

Two notes before you book anything. The Fortune summit is invite-only behind an annual membership, so treat it as a room to aim at rather than one to plan around. And APT Women is a ninety-minute session on the evening of Sept 11, run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, so treat it as the entry point into their women’s startup program rather than a conference in its own right.

Here is my question this week, and I actually want the answers in the comments.

Now that AI text is getting labeled, are you going to put your AI use on the record, or keep it behind the curtain? Tell me which, and more importantly, tell me why. I suspect the answer splits hard by industry and I want to see if I am right.

Countdown

We are 25 days out from Claude 101, Friday September 18 in Miami.

Learn the basics of Claude in a workshop, then sit down for 1:1 help with your own business issues. Bring your laptop and the thing you have been stuck on, and leave with it handled.

Grab your seat on Luma

See you in there 🫶

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