Dear {{first_name | friend}},

Two weeks ago, we did the math on membership. Last week, the research on why the room matters. This week, the data on what's happening to the checks themselves.

PitchBook's Female Founders Dashboard tracks every US venture deal involving a woman founder back to 2008, and one line in it tells the whole story. Deal count climbed for 13 straight years, peaked in late 2021, but has fallen ever since. This year, it's running in the 600s, back to where the market sat in 2016.

The dollars didn't disappear, they concentrated, with fewer, bigger rounds, most flowing to AI, and most going to mixed founding teams rather than companies built by women alone. → See the dashboard

If you're raising, here's what that means in practice. When the number of checks shrinks, the number of doors shrinks with it, and warm introductions start deciding who gets through. In a market this narrow, proximity is the game.

And proximity is exactly what we're building. The Womansplain Summit is 87 days out. It will be on October 16 at The Malin Chelsea with 120 founders, operators, and investors in one place, keynoted by Robinhood CIO Stephanie Guild. Most seats are already spoken for. General admission (Early Bird) is $175 here.

If one day isn't enough, founding membership in The Collective gets you the room all year at $400, locked for life before the rate moves to $500. Your Summit ticket comes with it, along with the private Slack, 1-1 founder matching, members-only dinners, and quarterly office hours with the two of us. → Join The Collective

On the fence? Come to a virtual member info session and we'll walk through everything The Collective includes and take your questions live. → Raise your hand here

Now, about that episode.

Until next week.

—Brooke Sowa & Sola Park, Womansplain Co-Founders & Co-Hosts

Kailey Bradt was 16, running around her high school telling anyone who’d listen that she was going to start a sustainable beauty brand.

She studied chemical engineering to make it real, mixed her first waterless shampoo on her bedroom floor with a scale she ordered off Amazon, and took that formula all the way to Sephora shelves.

Years later, after building an innovation hub that connects beauty brands with new technology, she started getting calls from Pamela Anderson's team. She came on to develop the cleanser, reformulated the lip balm with peptides, and created the Adapt Cream that put the brand on the map. Then one day Pamela asked the obvious question — why isn't Kailey CEO?

In this episode, Kailey gets into what she calls Clean Beauty 2.0, why Sonsie lists the exact percentage of every active ingredient on the label, and the packaging she calls the most exciting thing she's seen in her career, using a plant-based material that looks and feels like plastic but breaks down in soil. She also talks about closing a $3 million round at 26, the lesson she learned about trusting other people's judgment over her own, and what it's like to run a brand that carries someone else's name and your own blood, sweat, and tears at the same time.

→ On Clean Beauty 2.0: the first wave of clean beauty ran on vague claims and left everyone exhausted. Her fix is radical transparency, showing exactly what goes into a product and how it's made, instead of asking you to take it on faith.

→ On the label nobody else will print: Sonsie lists the precise percentage of every active. Her reasoning is practical. Niacinamide can irritate skin above 5%, so if you're layering three products that contain it, you deserve to know how much is actually going on your face.

→ On packaging that disappears: the Adapt Cream ships in a bio-based, biodegradable polymer made by Shellworks. It costs more and is harder to work with than plastic. She builds the margin for it anway and her advice to founders is to price for your values from day one, because you can't bolt sustainability onto a $29 product later.

→ On trusting yourself: at 26 she closed a $3 million round and leaned on the people around her to tell her how to run things, trusting them more than herself. She calls that her biggest early lesson and why she brought on a co-founder for her second company.

🎁 A gift from us + Sonsie: Use code WOMANSPLAIN15 at checkout on sonsieskin.com for 15% off individual SKUs, one use per customer, valid through July 31. Nine days only, so don't sit on this one. Your skin will thank you.

Find Sonsie: 🔗 sonsieskin.com 📲 @sonsieskin

🌟 Community Win: Vanessa Rissetto, co-founder and CEO of Culina Health (a name you'll hear on the show this season), is having the run every founder wants. TIME named Culina one of the 100 Most Influential Companies of 2026, citing patient outcomes that beat published clinical benchmarks by 50% on diabetes markers, weight, and LDL cholesterol. The virtual nutrition platform she built with fellow dietitian Tamar Samuels has raised $20 million, served more than 10,000 patients, and is in network with most major insurance plans. And Vanessa herself has become one of the most visible voices in American food policy, appearing on the Today show twice a month and briefing members of Congress on nutrition access. → Read the profile

💰 Funding: JiYu, a science-backed Korean skincare brand, raised $6.5 million in growth funding to expand across North America and deepen its clinical dermatology research. The brand is projecting over $70 million in 2026 revenue, driven by Amazon and TikTok Shop, and is betting on evidence-based formulation and ingredient transparency. Clinical proof and transparent labels are becoming the price of entry in skincare rather than a differentiator, which is exactly the shift Kailey from Sonsie is building her brand around. → Read the announcement

📈 Trend: Women's health is setting up for a rebound. SVB's 2026 Innovation in Women's Health report tracked a $1.2 billion pullback in US women's health VC in 2025, but projects deal volume and total funding both recover this year, with a new wave of seed and Series A companies coming up behind it; 210 new startups dedicated to women-specific health challenges launched over the same stretch. One number to sit with if you're building here: startups using AI to personalize care are commanding valuations roughly triple their non-AI counterparts. → Read the report

💡 Resource: The Breakthrough Grant from Her Agenda awards $5,000 in unrestricted funding to one woman entrepreneur with an operating US business, and Volume III is open through September 18. It's fully community-funded, the application centers on one tight 500-word impact statement, and you must be subscribed to the Her Agenda newsletter to qualify. There's a small admin fee, and every dollar of it goes back into the winner's pool. → Apply at grant.heragenda.com

🎧 Listen: Season 6 keeps rolling. Episode 3 with Kailey Bradt of Sonsie is live now, and if you're catching up, Episode 2 with Sandra Powers Murphy of Scarlett Chase and Episode 1 with Robinhood CIO (and Summit keynote) Stephanie Guild are both waiting → Listen on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts.

🥂 Sisley in the City by WSNYC and Womansplain, Tuesday July 28th

We're taking over Sisley's boutique for the night with Women Shaping NYC: champagne, mini facials, blowouts, and makeup touch-ups while you catch up with founders, operators, and investors you'll actually want to see again. Everything is on us and Sisley so just bring yourself. Treatment chairs run first come, first seated, so come early if you're set on a blowout. It's invite-only with limited capacity so request your spot now. → Request to join on Luma

🎀 The Womansplain Summit, October 16, The Malin Chelsea, NYC

Our inaugural Summit: keynotes, founder-led panels, hands-on workshops, and the first Womansplain Awards. 120 founders, operators, investors, and creatives, one full day. Founding members get in with their membership; General Admission (Early Bird) is $175. → Reserve your ticket on Luma: here.