Women Building AI: From Silicon Valley to Chennai and Johannesburg

When people picture the AI boom, they usually picture a handful of men on a stage in San Francisco. But AI is also being built by women in Palo Alto, Chennai and Johannesburg, and they are solving very different problems. This story looks at three of them, and at a funding picture that is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Fei-Fei Li, Ashwini Asokan and Pelonomi Moiloa are building AI in California, Chennai and Johannesburg. Funding for women-led AI is concentrated in a few very large rounds, so the headline numbers hide a tougher picture. The best opportunities are where big models don’t yet work well, such as local languages and industries.

The money picture

Headlines about record funding for women-led startups can mislead. PitchBook’s analysis found that in 2025, two companies, Anthropic and Scale AI, captured 40% of all venture dollars raised by female founders. It also found that all-female founding teams raised 22% less capital than the year before, while all-male teams raised 21% more.

The Female Founders Fund’s 2026 review points the same way. AI took about two-thirds of the venture money going to female-founded companies, and the top five companies took 79% of it. In 2024, all-female teams received just 1% of total US venture funding. The numbers show that AI has become the main door to big money, and that the door is narrow.

Fei-Fei Li: from research to founder (United States)

Fei-Fei Li is often called the “godmother of AI”. She was part of the team behind ImageNet, a database of more than 15 million images released in 2006 that helped computers learn to recognise objects and is widely seen as a catalyst for today’s AI boom. She is also co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and co-founded the non-profit AI4ALL, which works to bring more people into AI.

In April 2024 she launched World Labs while on partial leave from Stanford. The company builds “large world models” that understand three-dimensional space, with possible uses in robotics, games and design. In September 2024 it raised $230 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures, and it was reported to be worth more than $1 billion within months of launching.

Ashwini Asokan: taking AI home (India)

Ashwini Asokan started as a designer and became a mobile innovation lead at Intel Labs in Silicon Valley. In 2013 she left her job and teamed up with her husband, neuroscientist Anand Chandrasekaran, to launch Mad Street Den, an AI and computer vision company based in Chennai.

Their reason for building in India was practical. She has said the consumer market there was exploding, with new behaviours around e-commerce, mobile games and advertising. In 2016 they launched Vue.ai, a retail-focused platform for tasks such as product tagging and visual search. By 2019 Vue.ai had raised a $17 million Series B led by Falcon Edge Capital, with existing backer Sequoia Capital India taking part.

Pelonomi Moiloa: AI for African languages (South Africa)

Pelonomi Moiloa, an electrical and biomedical engineer, is the CEO and co-founder of Lelapa AI, an Africa-centric research and product lab started in 2022 in Johannesburg. Her co-founders include Jade Abbott, who realised in 2018 that research on how machines understand African languages barely existed.

The gap was easy to see. Abbott asked a well-known chatbot to count in isiZulu, and the results were, in her words, mixed and hilarious. Lelapa’s first product, Vulavula, converts speech to text and detects names of people and places in isiZulu, Afrikaans, Sesotho and English. Later the company released InkubaLM, a small language model that supports Swahili, Yoruba, isiXhosa, Hausa and isiZulu, languages with about 364 million speakers.

Moiloa argues that Africa should move from being a supplier of raw materials such as lithium and cobalt to being a creator of technology. Her work is a practical step in that direction.

What they have in common

Each of the three found a gap others had overlooked: a three-dimensional understanding of the world, AI for retail businesses in India, and language tools for millions of Africans. Each came from a technical or design background, and each built with a team rather than alone. And each built for a particular context instead of copying what already existed.

They also show that AI isn’t only about the biggest models. Some of the strongest opportunities are where large general-purpose models still work poorly: local languages, local industries and local problems.

What we can learn

Look where the big models are weak. Local languages, local retail and local data are gaps that global companies rarely fill well.

Build with a team. Both World Labs and Lelapa AI were founded by groups of researchers and engineers with complementary skills.

Know how the money works. AI funding is concentrated in a few very large rounds, so founders should plan for a tough fundraising market and look at every source of capital.

One key takeaway

AI needs builders from many places and backgrounds. The best opportunities often sit where the big models don’t yet work well, and the people closest to those problems are best placed to solve them.

Conclusion

The AI story is still being written, and it is not being written in one city or by one type of founder. From research labs in California to a start-up in Chennai and a language lab in Johannesburg, women are building tools that will shape how the technology works for everyone. The funding numbers show that the road is still steep, but the founders in this story show that it can be travelled.

Sources

• PitchBook: Even for female startup founders, the AI race defines the capital haves and have-nots (2026)
• Leading Ladies: The $73 billion headline, what female-founded VC funding actually looks like in 2026
• Bloomberg via BNN: AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li raises $230 million for new startup World Labs (2024)
• SiliconANGLE: AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li reportedly raises $100M for new spatial intelligence startup (2024)
• Quartz: Fei-Fei Li’s AI startup World Labs raises $230 million (2024)
• Sequoia (Peak XV): Mad Street Den, Enterprise AI for the World, Built Out of Chennai
• TechCrunch: Vue.ai raises $17M to equip online retailers with AI smarts (2019)
• YourStory: Mad Street Den raises funding (2015)
• MIT Technology Review: This company is building AI for African languages (2023)
• ITWeb: Local AI model is melting pot for African languages
• ITWeb: SA AI start-up in push to meet diverse linguistic needs

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