In today’s edition: an EU-Trump trade deal, the Lionnesses’ victory, and the improbability and impact of Mira Murati’s $2 billion.

– Mission impossible. Earlier this month, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab confirmed long-rumored news: the AI company had closed a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation.

It was the largest seed round ever, in the history of venture capital and startups. It was hardly underreported. And yet, there’s an aspect to this news that hasn’t seemed to have been fully appreciated—just how unlikely, and meaningful, this is for female founders.

Murati is, undoubtedly, in a league of her own as a founder. The Albania-born former CTO of OpenAI, she helped create ChatGPT and start the generative AI revolution. She left OpenAI earlier this year to build her own company. She brought top talent with her; the question everyone wants to know the answer to is what, exactly, she is building.

Not that many details are known about what Thinking Machines is doing. But a source familiar with what Murati is building tells me that it’s creating powerful AI systems capable of tackling the world’s toughest problems—climate change, disease eradication, and more. The company is eager to bring along the world’s smartest people in other fields—like science—rather than only those who work in the AI industry itself, all before AI systems become too powerful for that to matter. And its more open approach is expected to benefit businesses, policymakers, and others.

But Thinking Machines is entering the game late, hence the $2 billion: it needs compute and talent to compete with the AI leaders like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google that have a years-long head start.

In an environment where startups with at least woman on the founding team took in $38 billion in funding last year—and those founded solely by women earned 2.1% of VC dollars, for a total sum of $3.7 billion, across about 800 deals—the $2 billion number is extraordinary.

A report released by Female Founders Fund and Inc. last week showed what women are doing with the paltry share of venture funding they are getting; last year women were responsible for 24% of exits. They put capital to work more efficiently, earning 78 cents of revenue for every dollar raised, compared to 31 cents at male-founded startups.

So imagine what will be possible with $2 billion—and a generational founder at the helm. Known investors in the company include Accel, AMD, Cisco, Jane Street, Nvidia, and ServiceNow. They’re surely expecting their investment to pay off (see: $12 billion valuation). But more important is how Murati and her capital will impact humanity. The true entry of Thinking Machines into the AI race helps diversify the perspectives that will shape the future of our world. And Murati’s achievement lets other women know, in frontier tech and beyond—what seems impossible, can be possible.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

– Slam dunk. This weekend, the world’s best women’s basketball players will match up in Indianapolis for the WNBA All-Star Game. For the league’s stars, the weekend and the hype around it is a sign of how far the sport has come and how much opportunity there is for a top player today.

But 85% of the league’s players aren’t chosen as All-Stars—and despite the growing sponsorship opportunities in women’s sports, many players still must figure out what comes after their professional careers. Rasheeda Clark is a former WNBA player who has found excellence off the court, in a very different field: fast-food franchising.

Clark played D1 basketball at Pepperdine, played for USA Basketball, and was drafted in the WNBA’s third round in 2001 (she’d been expected to be a first-round pick, but suffered an injury her senior year). Between 2001 and 2003, she played for three WNBA teams—the Portland Fire, the Charlotte Sting, and the Connecticut Sun. Her time of play coincided with a change in fortunes for the WNBA as teams began folding following financial restructuring of team ownership. Of those three teams, only the Connecticut Sun is still around—although Portland’s new WNBA franchise will start play in 2026 with the same name in homage to the city’s first.

Courtesy of Elle Yeon

Clark’s injuries—and the WNBA’s low player salaries, around $37,000 at the time, she says—ultimately led her to leave the sport. She started looking elsewhere for the satisfaction she got from basketball’s teamwork and leadership opportunities. As an athlete, she felt she was sometimes at a disadvantage breaking into the business world; while her fellow students were interning and exploring job fairs, she had been training and traveling for games. She got into retail operations, and then was chosen for PepsiCo’s famed management training program, which helped her gain more formal experience—her business version of “training camp.”

Today she is the president of Flynn Wendy’s, the Wendy’s segment of the largest franchisee operator in the world. She oversees more than 300 Wendy’s locations, almost 10,000 employees—and $724 million in annual sales. She’s one of seven presidents within the Flynn Group, which also runs franchising operations for Applebee’s, Arby’s, Panera, Pizza Hut, Planet Fitness, and Taco Bell.

Post-retirement, today’s athletes are pursuing a range of paths, from podcasting and sports commentating, to investing and startups, to coaching and team ownership. Players are eager for more former athletes to work in league offices, too. For Clark, that didn’t feel like an option at the time. “It was almost like I had to cleanse my system of it,” she remembers. “I would have continued to try to be on a team or go, ‘Maybe I’ll give it one more shot.’ For me, it wasn’t an option. But those are very viable avenues for current players.”

She urges corporations to recognize athletes’ unique skill sets—helping those who wish to enter new industries to make the jump as she did. Athletes have a “die-hard mindset,” she says. At the same time, they know that “no one victory is won by the individual effort of one player on the team,” she says. “You’re always collaborating, learning the roles of other players on the court in order to be successful.”

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Sara Braun. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Elle Yeon