TERN has opened applications for a UK fund investing £50,000 to £100,000 in refugee-founded businesses. The starting pot is £300,000 against a planned £10 million.

The British Business Bank has committed £3 million to TSP Ventures through its Regional Angels Programme. It is the smallest of three such commitments traced this year, which may point to the programme spreading across more angel groups.

Founders, staff and early investors in UK startups now have more ways to sell shares before an exit. This guide compares private sales, company buybacks, tender offers, crowdfunding secondary markets, PISCES and tokenised shares.

Seed stage deal volumes in the UK fell 27 per cent year on year, according to the British Business Bank's Small Business Equity Tracker 2026, even as overall equity investment was propped up by a relatively small number of large AI transactions. Against that backdrop, professionally managed Seed Ent

A story tip landed in our inbox this week pointing to a piece in Private Markets Profile on what it called building investable regions: the idea that tokenisation can widen who is able to invest in a given market by removing geography as a barrier to access. It is a genuinely useful frame, and it ra

European tech funding dropped by around 63 per cent in August compared with July, according to new figures from Tech.eu, as the usual summer slowdown combined with investors pulling back into fewer, larger cheques. Deal volume fell by a smaller but still significant 38 per cent over the same period,

UK fintech founders raising this year are working against the toughest backdrop in a decade, and the data released this week makes the scale of that shift hard to ignore. The question worth asking is not whether the number is bad. It plainly is. It is what the shape of the decline tells us about who

A team of investors who left Phoenix Court, the London firm widely known by the name of its seed stage fund LocalGlobe, are in early talks to raise a fund of their own, Sifted reported on 12 August, citing sources close to the discussions.

There is a version of the UK funding gap story that gets told constantly, and it is true. Female founders raise less. Black and ethnic minority founders raise a fraction of what their numbers in the population would predict. Founders outside London and the South East compete for a shrinking share of

For founders trying to read the mood of the market this year, the number to watch is not a valuation. It is how much dry powder the funds backing them are sitting on. Index Ventures has just given the clearest signal yet that the answer, at least at the top of the market, is a great deal more than a

For UK founders keeping half an eye on whether domestic deal flow is holding up amid a wider debate about Britain's shortage of growth capital, the latest weekly snapshot from Tech.eu offers a genuinely encouraging data point, even if it comes with the usual caveats about lumpy, week to week numbers

Ask a UK founder why the biggest cheques in their round come from Boston or San Francisco rather than London, and the honest answer usually traces back to where the money sits, not who is willing to write it. Startup Coalition, the industry body representing UK founders and scaleups, published an an

Lockheed Martin Ventures, the US defence giant's venture capital arm, opened a London office this week and confirmed it will deploy at least $100 million into UK and European startups, giving founders building sovereign and defence relevant technology a new, well capitalised route to serious capital

Picture two founders, both running businesses that make money and make a difference. One has built a climate hardware company and can issue shares like any other startup. The other runs a care provider structured as a Community Interest Company, with an asset lock and a dividend cap baked into its c

A founder in Britain in 2026 can do almost everything right and still end up in someone else's market. She can spin tech out of a UK university, raise a seed round from UK angels, hire her first team in Leeds or Bristol or Oxford, and prove that the thing works. She can scale the business to unprecedented heights, well almost, and then! At the precise moment the company is ready to grow into something durable, she will find that the money to do that is not here. It is in

Picture a founder outside the story everyone is telling. She is not building a large language model. She is building a climate hardware business in Sheffield, or a healthtech tool in Cardiff, with early revenue and a plan to grow. This week the British Business Bank published the numbers that descri

Picture two founders raising a seed round in the same week. One has built and sold a company before, has a network of investors who already know the name, and has funds competing to lead. The other has an equally good product, early revenue and a sharper insight, but no track record and no warm rout

Equity crowdfunding made a simple promise: ordinary people could back a young company early, alongside the founders, and share in what it became. Monzo is the poster child. One early round filled in 96 seconds. In December 2018 the bank raised about £20m from roughly 36,000 people. Buying in was effortless, a few taps in an app. Getting out is the part nobody designed for. Most crowd investors do not sit directly on a company's share register. They invest through a nomi

For more than a decade the same story has played out at the top of Europe's startup ladder. A company built in London, Paris or Stockholm reaches the stage where it needs hundreds of millions to scale, cannot find a cheque that size at home, and takes one from a United States fund instead, often shi

Picture a founder in Leeds with a working product, paying customers and a credible plan to grow. She has no warm introduction to a fund, no prior raise on her record, and no one in her immediate network who has done this before. New UK data suggests her single biggest disadvantage is not her idea, h