Female funding in 2026

Anna Wood is the Editor of Startups Magazine. She joined the team in June 2023 as Deputy Editor, and has since been promoted to Editor of the publication. When it comes to the startup sector, Anna has a keen interest in spacetech, biotech, medtech, anything that flies, and shining a light on the gender and diversity funding gap.

Sedinam Simpson is co-founder and strategy lead at The Tech Bros. Prior to this, she completed an MPhil in Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence at the University of Cambridge where she was a Google DeepMind Scholar. During her undergraduate degree, she was awarded the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Fellowship through which she founded a sustainable fashion brand called Chara. She previously worked as a Data Scientist, and in her free time enjoys attending music events and deep-diving into the fashion world.

David is a seasoned VC and startup operator that has spent the last 25 years working with and advising more than 1,000 founders across Europe, Asia and Africa. He co-founded Bramble.club to support founders and investors with practical hands-on work on building and scaling VC backed startups. The startups David has supported have raised more than $800m over the years. David was CCO and COO at Wefarm which raised ~$40m and scaled to 3.5m users with 150 employees across 10 different countries. Before Wefarm, David co-founded ADV, a £150m VC fund focused on early stage startups. David led the corporate venture arm for Telefonica and worked on M&A deals across the globe. Before moving into venture David built Fintech and Telco products in Israel. Where he grew the team from 4 to 60 employees and reached 70% market penetration.

Agata Nowicka is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and the Managing Partner of Visionaries—an AI incubator launched in partnership with Google, focused on accelerating the growth of the most ambitious female entrepreneurs using AI. With 12 years of experience as a VC investor and founder across the UK, US, and Hong Kong, Agata is also the writer of the weekly Female Foundry newsletter and the author of the Female Innovation Index—Europe's largest report mapping the funnel of innovation driven by female entrepreneurs.