Why Are Women AI Founders Starting Their Own Hacker Houses?
Inside FoundHer House and the summit it just threw at OpenAI HQ
Key takeaway: Yes — women AI founders are increasingly building their own support systems instead of waiting to be let into male-dominated ones. FoundHer House, an all-female AI hacker house started by two USC students in May 2025, grew into the FoundHer Summit held at OpenAI's headquarters on August 21, 2026, drawing…
By Dear Sarah · · Updated
Key takeaways
- FoundHer House is an all-female AI hacker house in San Francisco founded in May 2025 by USC students Anantika Mannby and Miki Safronov-Yamamoto.
- The house selected eight resident founders from more than sixty applicants and subsidized their rent well below San Francisco market rates.
- On August 21, 2026, the community hosted the first FoundHer Summit at OpenAI's headquarters, featuring speakers from Notion, Scale AI, and Google.
- Only about 3% of startup funding goes to female founders, which is the gap the founders say motivated the project.
- Women-founded startups raised $73.6 billion in 2025, with two-thirds of that going to AI companies specifically.
Two college students looked around at San Francisco's hacker houses this past year and noticed something: almost every room was full of men. So they built their own house instead.
That's the short version of FoundHer House, and it's still the best answer I've found lately to a question a lot of us have been quietly asking: if the AI industry wasn't built with women in the room, do we wait for an invitation, or do we build our own room? Anantika Mannby and Miki Safronov-Yamamoto, both students at USC's Iovine and Young Academy, chose the second option. In May 2025 they opened an all-female AI hacker house in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood, and this past August 21st, the community they started hosted its first FoundHer Summit at OpenAI's own headquarters.
What is FoundHer House, exactly?
FoundHer House started as a four-bedroom Airbnb and turned into something closer to a movement. Mannby and Safronov-Yamamoto picked eight resident founders out of more than sixty applicants, women from schools like Stanford, Cornell, and Penn, and subsidized their rent down to $1,100–$1,300 a month, well under San Francisco's typical $3,600-plus. Brad Feld, the venture capitalist behind Foundry, put up the first $10,000. A student opportunity fund at USC chipped in more. The house wasn't glamorous. It had a pool table and eight founders building real companies, including Safronov-Yamamoto's own Veyra Health, which catches errors in medical bills (up to 80% of them contain mistakes), and Mannby's Treffa, a social shopping app that's already pulled in 80,000 users.
Their reasoning was blunt when they talked to reporters about it: "We realized quickly that a lot of these hacker houses were very male-dominated," Mannby said. "We figured if there aren't many spaces for women, we might as well create them." She's also been direct about the number that started it all: "You hear the 3% — only 3% of funding goes to female founders." That's not a rounding error. That's most of an industry.
By this August, the experiment had outgrown a single house. FoundHer House organized the FoundHer Summit at OpenAI's headquarters, pulling in women already inside the machine of the industry: Lucy Guo, founder of Passes and co-founder of Scale AI; Sarah Sachs, Head of AI at Notion; Lucia Tian, who leads advanced energy strategy at Google. The summit's own materials cited a striking number: women-founded startups raised $73.6 billion in 2025, and two-thirds of that went to AI companies specifically. Progress is real. It's also concentrated, uneven, and still nowhere near parity with what male-founded AI companies raise.
Why this matters if you're figuring out where you fit in AI
If you're a young woman who's curious about AI, whether you want to build something, work at a company shaping it, or just understand how it'll touch your career, the FoundHer House story is a useful reframe. It's easy to read stats like the ones in our look at whether women are actually getting funded to build AI and feel like the door is basically shut. It isn't shut. It's just that almost nobody is holding it open for you, so the women getting furthest are the ones deciding to build their own doorframe.
That matters for more than founders. The same pattern shows up in why so few women end up leading AI research — the pipeline problem and the funding problem are cousins, both born from rooms that were never designed with women in mind. And if you're weighing whether to even try to break into this industry after reading about women getting left out of the AI hiring boom, FoundHer House is proof that "left out" doesn't have to mean "left behind." Two 18- and 21-year-olds didn't wait for the industry to fix itself. They rented an Airbnb and started building.
One thing to try today
You don't need a hacker house to borrow the FoundHer House playbook. Find one other woman in your circle who's curious about AI or building something, and set a standing 30-minute call or coffee, even biweekly. Community is the actual infrastructure behind almost every story like this one. It rarely starts bigger than two people deciding to show up for each other.
Quote to sit with
"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison
💌 Sarah
Frequently asked questions
What is FoundHer House?
FoundHer House is an all-female AI hacker house in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood, founded in May 2025 by USC students Anantika Mannby and Miki Safronov-Yamamoto. It housed eight female startup founders for a summer, with rent subsidized to $1,100–$1,300 a month, and has since grown into a broader community and event, the FoundHer Summit.
Who spoke at the FoundHer Summit?
The August 21, 2026 FoundHer Summit at OpenAI's headquarters featured speakers including Lucy Guo (founder of Passes, co-founder of Scale AI), Sarah Sachs (Head of AI at Notion), and Lucia Tian (Head of Advanced Energy at Google). The event brought together women founders, engineers, researchers, and investors working across AI.
How much funding do female founders actually get?
Roughly 3% of startup funding overall goes to female founders, a figure FoundHer House co-founder Anantika Mannby has cited directly as her motivation for the project. Even with recent record numbers — women-founded startups raised $73.6 billion in 2025 — that money remains concentrated in a small number of companies rather than spread evenly.
Are there hacker houses like this in other cities?
FoundHer House started in San Francisco, but its founders have talked about expanding the model to other cities, including New York and London. Similar all-female tech and founder communities have also started popping up elsewhere as more women look for spaces built specifically around their needs.
Do I need to be a startup founder to get involved in something like this?
No. The underlying idea — finding or building a small community of women who support each other's ambitions in AI or tech — works at any scale, whether that's a formal house, a study group, or just a standing coffee with one other curious friend.
Sources
Keep reading
- Who builds your AI? A few numbers worth knowing — You talk to AI like it gets you. But the rooms where it's built are mostly men. Here's what that quietly costs us.
- Are Women Being Left Out of the AI Hiring Boom? — New numbers just dropped: women are getting a fraction of the AI jobs, and an even smaller share of the raise that comes with them.
- Why Are There So Few Women Leading AI Research? — A new report followed women through AI classrooms, labs, and startups across six countries — and found the exact point where most of them get pushed out.
- Are Women Actually Getting Funded to Build AI? — That record $73.2B headline for women-founded startups? 89 cents of every dollar went to one company. Here's the real story.