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

There is a cost that does not appear in any startup's profit and loss account, that no investor has to justify on a returns attribution sheet, and that no regulatory framework currently requires anyone to measure. It is the cost of raising a round.

Two pence from every pound. That is the share of UK venture capital that reaches all-female founding teams, according to data from the British Business Bank's own research. In a year when UK equity investment fell 2.5% to £10.8 billion and deal numbers dropped 15.1% to 2,048, the concentration of capital in a narrow slice of the founder population is not a minor inefficiency. It is a structural constraint on how much economic potential the UK's startup ecosystem is capabl