It’s Still a Femininomenon: Meet Some of the Women Taking the Stage at Startup Boston Week 2026

Last year, we declared Startup Boston Week a Femininomenon. And, well, we have some news: it’s happening again.

This September, hundreds of founders, investors, operators, technologists, startup leaders, and ecosystem builders will take the stage at Startup Boston Week. Among them is a pretty incredible lineup of women building companies, writing checks, developing new technology, scaling teams, challenging industries, and generally getting things done.

There are also far too many of them to fit into one blog post. Seriously. The women below are not even close to the full list of women speaking at Startup Boston Week 2026. Consider this your introduction to just a few of the people you’ll be able to learn from September 14 - 18 and a warning that building your agenda might be harder than expected. 

Also…grab your free ticket right here! 

The Women Building the Companies

Some people come to Startup Boston Week because they’re thinking about starting a company. Others are somewhere in the messy middle of actually doing it. Luckily, we have plenty of founders taking the stage who know exactly what that looks like — across AI, biotech, healthcare, legal tech, consumer products, and beyond.

Take Mireia Torello, co-founder and CEO of Aikreate, an AI literacy platform helping students and educators become responsible AI creators. She brings more than a decade of experience teaching AI and has worked with schools across the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Then there’s Pavana Rotti, co-founder and CEO of Nervoid, who spent more than 10 years working in disease modeling, phenotypic screening, and translational biology before turning that expertise toward laboratory automation and biomanufacturing.

They’ll be joined by founders taking on some very different problems. Deanna DeFelice, founder of Ovease, is rethinking menstrual pain relief through wearable heat technology. Mary Delaney, co-founder and CEO of Tamarin AI, is applying AI to procurement after spending more than seven years at McKinsey. And Julia Rodgers, founder and CEO of HelloPrenup, looked at the traditional prenup process and decided that maybe — just maybe — there was a better way to do it. She went on to become the first legal tech founder to pitch on Shark Tank.

There’s also Henna Ahuja, who built Givvy solo around a deceptively simple idea: it’s hard to ask for help. Her platform lets people exchange skills, time, and services instead of money, inspired by the kind of community where people simply showed up for one another.

Different industries, different founder journeys, and very different companies. Which, frankly, is exactly the point.

The Women Writing the Checks

Building the company is one side of the startup equation. Convincing someone else that it should exist — and is worth putting money behind — is another.

Luckily, some of the women joining us this year spend their days making exactly those decisions. Laura Rippy, Managing Partner and Board Member at Alumni Ventures, helps lead a venture firm with $1.6 billion raised and 1,600 portfolio companies. Before becoming an investor, she sat on the other side of the table as a serial CEO, chair, board member, advisor, and technology executive, giving her a perspective on startups that extends well beyond the pitch deck.

Liz Christo, Partner at Stage 2 Capital, also brings an operator’s perspective to venture. She now writes pre-seed through Series A checks, but spent the first decade of her career operating companies, including launching and scaling NetSuite’s BDR team into a 170-person global organization. Lily Toto, an investor at Two Lanterns VC, focuses on early-stage AI startups after working in both consulting and startups herself.

And then there’s Allison Byers, founder, investor, author, and capital-access advocate. After experiencing the fundraising ecosystem firsthand as a founder, she built Scroobious to help address some of the barriers underestimated founders encounter when trying to access capital.

So yes, we’re going to talk about fundraising at Startup Boston Week. But more importantly, we’re putting founders in rooms with people who actually understand what happens on the other side of that “Send Deck” button.

The Women Building What’s Next

We could probably make every section of this blog about AI and call it a day. But rather than spending five days debating whether AI is going to change everything, we’re much more interested in hearing from the people who are already figuring out what building with it actually looks like.

Zara Perumal, co-founder and CTO of Overwatch Data, works at the intersection of AI and cybercrime. Before founding the company, she researched machine learning for malware detection at MIT and worked with Google’s Threat Analysis Group. She has since testified before Congress on AI and cybercrime and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Meanwhile, Kara Peterson, co-founder and CEO of Descrybe, is tackling another industry with no shortage of complicated information: the law. Her company is changing how people and AI systems access and work with legal information and has collaborated with Anthropic on the launch of Claude for the legal industry.

AI is also reshaping what happens inside existing companies. Shailja Dedakia, Head of Product at Capsule, is using AI and LLMs to streamline prescription processing and improve the digital pharmacy experience. Sheila Phicil, founder of Phicil-itate Change, is helping healthcare leaders think through how to use AI responsibly. And Becky Kusko, Head of Strategy at Cellino, brings more than a decade of biotech experience, two successful exits, and $275 million across financing, M&A, and business-development deals to conversations about what it actually takes to move innovation forward.

In other words, these aren’t people theorizing about what technology might eventually do. They’re already in the weeds figuring it out.

The Women Who Know How to Actually Scale This Thing

There’s a funny thing that can happen after you start a company: sometimes it starts working. Customers show up. Employees show up. Investors have expectations. Suddenly, the scrappy systems that worked when there were seven people in Slack are being held together with metaphorical duct tape and one extremely stressed spreadsheet.

That’s where another group of Startup Boston Week speakers comes in.

Jen Paxton, VP of People & Talent at Roofr, is a three-time startup-to-acquisition People leader who has built the systems growing organizations need to perform, while also helping managers navigate the considerably less glamorous parts of scaling a company: difficult conversations, organizational changes, and tough people decisions.

On the revenue side, Mary Wilds, Head of Performance Marketing at Triple Whale, builds demand-generation engines designed to turn awareness into actual revenue. Before joining Triple Whale, she spent five years at Klaviyo as the company scaled from startup to IPO. Meghan O’Hair, Enterprise Customer Success Leader at Workato, works with complex global organizations to turn automation and AI strategies into business results, while Allison Mairena has built and scaled People functions at startups from seed stage through Series E and acquisition.

And scaling doesn’t only happen inside individual companies. Julia Travaglini, Head of Greentown Boston, oversees strategy, operations, and the experience supporting more than 150 climatetech startups at Greentown Labs’ flagship incubator. After spending a decade helping grow Greentown itself, she has had a front-row seat to what it takes not just to scale one startup, but to build an environment where hundreds of them can grow.

Because eventually, every founder who spends years asking “How do we get this thing to work?” gets introduced to an entirely new problem: “Oh no. It worked. Now what?”

And This Isn't Even Close to Everyone

Here’s where writing this blog gets difficult: we could keep going.

We haven’t properly introduced you to Ashley Olafsen, who now leads campus programming for student builders at Lovable after advising more than 500 founders at Harvard Innovation Labs. Or Sandra Perez Botero, who brings 20 years of experience across innovation, entrepreneurship, brand strategy, and business design. Or Amina Altaf, whose career has spanned go-to-market, product, and product marketing. Or Felicia Jadczak, co-founder of Inclusion Geeks, whose work spans executive leadership, workplace culture, change management, and ethical AI.

And those are still only some of the women taking the stage.

That’s what makes bringing back the Femininomenon particularly fun this year. It would be easy to write a roundup of impressive women and their impressive résumés, but what’s much more interesting is the range of experiences they’re bringing into the same conference.

Some are raising their first rounds while others are deciding which companies get funded. Some are figuring out how AI changes an industry while others are dealing with the very human problems that emerge when a startup goes from five employees to 50. Some are building their first companies, while others have already lived through acquisitions, IPOs, exits, and everything that happened before anyone wrote the celebratory LinkedIn post.

For five days, we get to put all of those perspectives in rooms together.

So come learn from them. Ask them the questions you can’t answer with a Google search. Find the speaker who has already made the mistake you’re currently trying very hard not to make. Introduce yourself after the session. And maybe, somewhere between Monday morning and Friday afternoon, meet someone who changes what you think your own startup journey could look like.

The Femininomenon is back….and these are only a few of the women behind it.

Startup Boston Week returns September 14–18, 2026. Registration is completely free.