British Business Bank Extends Lifted Ventures Partnership to Widen the Pipeline of Female Angel Investors Across the UK
- Shawn Jhanji
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Only around 14% of UK angel investors are women. That figure has not shifted meaningfully in years, and it matters because the composition of the investor base directly shapes who gets funded. Female angel investors are significantly more likely to deploy capital into female-founded businesses. If the pipeline of women angels is thin, the pipeline of capital reaching female founders stays thin too.
Lifted Ventures, the female angel investor network operating across the North of England, announced on 12 May 2026 that it has extended its partnership with the British Business Bank for a further year. The collaboration focuses on building that pipeline: training new angels, activating regional networks, and ensuring that the infrastructure of early-stage investment is not concentrated in a handful of London networks populated predominantly by men.
What the Partnership Does
The extended collaboration will scale the Lifted Ventures Angel Network, increasing regional investment capacity and accelerating the onboarding of women angel investors nationally. Lifted Ventures delivers structured education and investment facilitation programmes, enabling new investors to understand due diligence, build deal flow, and deploy capital with confidence.
A priority of the renewed collaboration is regional activation outside major financial centres, ensuring that founders and investors in the North, the Midlands and elsewhere have access to the same networks and opportunities as their London-based counterparts. The British Business Bank's involvement signals institutional endorsement of the model and provides the financial capacity to extend reach.
Why This Is a Structural Problem, Not a Preferences Problem
The data on gender and angel investment is not about individual choices. It reflects how investment networks were built and who was in the room when they formed. The UK angel investor ecosystem developed largely through informal networks of high-net-worth individuals, predominantly male, who backed founders they knew or had been introduced to through shared professional or social circles.
The result is a structurally skewed pool. When 86% of angel investors are male, and deals flow through networks, the statistical likelihood of a female-founded business reaching a funding-ready angel is materially lower than it would be if capital allocation tracked commercial fundamentals. Research from the British Business Bank and Extend Ventures consistently shows that diverse founding teams, including all-female teams, perform comparably to or better than their all-male counterparts on measures including revenue growth and capital efficiency. The funding gap is not explained by returns.
All-female teams accounted for 9% of deals in recent years but received only 2% of funding. That gap has persisted for more than a decade without structural intervention.
What Is Changing
Initiatives like the Lifted Ventures model represent one part of a multi-pronged response. At the institutional end of the capital stack, the British Business Bank has committed a £500 million package to back diverse and emerging fund managers, aiming to increase the number of fund managers from underrepresented backgrounds who have capital to deploy.
The goal is to make diverse investment leadership a condition of participation rather than an afterthought.
The angel layer matters differently. Angel investment is often the first external capital a founder receives, before any institutional fund is involved. It is pre-institutional, high-risk, and dependent on personal conviction and network access. If the angel community becomes more representative, the range of founders who can get that first institutional-style backing widens, which in turn makes them viable candidates for the next stage of funding.
The geographic dimension matters too. Concentrated networks reproduce concentrated capital. Lifting the number of female angel investors outside London does not just benefit female founders in the North. It builds regional ecosystems in which capital circulates more broadly and the range of companies that can grow without relocating improves.
For founders watching this space, the message is practical. The programmes Lifted Ventures delivers are accessible, and the British Business Bank's partnership gives them institutional credibility. If you are building outside London, or building with a team that traditional VC networks have overlooked, these regional angel networks represent a realistic route to early capital.
Key Takeaways
Lifted Ventures and the British Business Bank have extended their partnership for a further year, focused on building female angel investor capacity across UK regions.
Only 14% of UK angel investors are women, a structural imbalance that directly reduces the flow of early-stage capital to female founders.
The partnership will deliver education, investment facilitation, and regional activation to grow the number of women angel investors outside London.
Research consistently shows diverse founding teams perform comparably to all-male teams on commercial metrics; the funding gap reflects network structure, not commercial fundamentals.
The British Business Bank is simultaneously deploying a £500 million package to back diverse and emerging fund managers at the institutional level.
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