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.

Seed deals are down and SEIS funds keep selling out. For founders running social enterprises, community interest companies and purpose-led businesses, there's a large pool of non-dilutive money that rarely comes up in startup circles.

A 500,000 pound pilot fund in South Yorkshire is trying to answer a question that most impact investors gesture at but rarely test with real capital: what type of finance actually suits what type of organisation, and can that matching be done well enough to build something much bigger.

Oshen, a Plymouth based ocean robotics company spun out of Imperial College London, has raised just under £3.7 million (around 5 million dollars) in a funding round led by Lunar Ventures, with participation from AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures and a number of angel investors. The company was

HexSeed Technology, a deeptech startup based in Banchory near Aberdeen, has raised more than £600,000 in early stage funding led by Carbon13, with participation from the Net Zero Technology Centre and Vento Ventures, backers confirmed this week. The round was written through Carbon13's SEIS Fund IX,

A 700,000 pound pre-seed round is a small number against the billions moving through tokenisation headlines this week, but for founders trying to read how blended capital, grant funding stacked with angel and climate tech VC money, actually gets deployed at the earliest stage, it is a more useful da

Mark Pascall, co-founder of The Wellbeing Protocol, recently published an account of governance experiments being run through hum, a platform managing shared community treasuries. Although these are not investment funds, they are managing a familiar problem: how groups decide where capital should be allocated. The first governance model, Gov1, was straightforward where every member could propose spending and every member voted equally. In theory it was highly democratic. I

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

Picture a founder in Bradford with a working product, early revenue and a plan to grow. She has never raised institutional money before, knows no one who has, and has no warm route into a London fund. For years, the honest answer to whether she gets funded has been decided long before she opens her

Most of the experiments did not survive in their first form. The problem they were probing is still the most important one in early stage capital.

A founder building a women's health product, a food system fix or a financial inclusion tool in the UK today is working on exactly the problems the country says it wants solved. New data suggests they are also among the hardest founders in the market to fund, and the reason is not returns. It is inf

For the second time in three years, London has claimed the top position in Europe's technology ecosystem rankings. Dealroom's Global Tech Ecosystem Index 2026 has placed London ahead of Paris and every other European hub, ranking the UK capital fourth globally behind the Bay Area, New York and Bosto

A freedom of information request that nobody should have needed to file found that 81 per cent of the assessors for Innovate UK's Women in Innovation programme were male. Not a percentage from an anonymous third-party study. The publicly funded body specifically designed to support female founders w

Aurora has run the Aurora Tech Award since 2021. The programme accepts applications from women founders of technology startups, assesses them through a structured evaluation process, and connects finalists with mentors, networks and recognition. The scale of the pipeline it has built is striking: applications grew from 116 in 2021 to 3,400 in 2025. That trajectory tells a clear story. The founders are there. The problem is not a shortage of women building technology compan

The UK investment landscape has taken a significant step toward gender diversity with the recent first close of £130 million for Bootstrap4F’s Women Backing Women fund of funds. This fund, backed by four major institutions, aims to support female-led investment teams, addressing a critical gap in the venture capital ecosystem. The move signals a fresh approach to improving funding for female founders by focusing on the fund managers who decide where capital flows.

Building Sustainable Tokenised Communities That Empower Users as Stakeholders. Turning users into stakeholders is a powerful way to build engaged, loyal communities. Tokenised community mechanics offer a practical path to achieve this by giving members real ownership and influence. But success depends on designing these systems with sustainability in mind, avoiding pure speculation, and aligning tokens with genuine value creation. This post explores how token-gated access, co

This is the quiet rebellion of tokenisation. It is not merely a new technology for fundraising; it is a new philosophy for building. It dismantles the old architecture of equity and replaces it with something more fluid, more granular, more alive. It suggests that a start-up's soul. Its mission, its community, its very reason for being can be woven into the fabric of its ownership structure.