For women building AI startups, finding community has been the key to success

Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI

For Saumya Bhatnagar, being the only woman in a room is far from a novel experience. An engineer by training and currently the co-founder and chief product officer at AI sales rep startup Jeeva, she remembers being the sole girl in her high school's 170-person coding class — and that none of her male peers would sit next to her.

"I had to make space for myself, and there were plenty of micro and macro aggressions in the grand scheme of things that...