M&G Investments and Schroders are among the asset managers bidding to run Britain's proposed £1 billion Scale Up Fund, Sky News reported on Wednesday, as the consortium of pension providers behind the vehicle moves from announcement to execution. A number of other firms, including specialist early s

Over 230 founders, 17 roundtables, 11 cities, all four nations of the UK. Earlier this year Startup Coalition ran the kind of listening tour that policymakers usually only manage in an election year, sitting down with founders from Belfast to Cardiff and Aberdeen to Leeds to hear, unfiltered, what i

The headline number in Beauhurst and NatWest's latest New Startup Index looks like bad news at first glance. New company incorporations fell 5.7 per cent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year, with 402,000 businesses registered at Companies House. Read only that far and t

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

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,

For a deeptech or life sciences founder in Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester or Sheffield, the hardest part of scaling has rarely been the science. It has been getting a cheque of meaningful size from an investor who understands the sector and is prepared to back a second or third round without demanding

Over the past year at TokenisingStartups, we have watched tokenisation move from something that could still be dismissed as an interesting experiment into an increasingly serious part of the financial infrastructure conversation. Banks are issuing tokenised bonds and exploring tokenised deposits. Asset managers are putting funds on-chain. Exchanges are developing tokenised securities infrastructure. Regulators are creating new frameworks for digital assets. And in the UK, PIS

US based venture firm Accel has raised 800 million dollars for its ninth early stage Europe and Israel fund, alongside a further 2.7 billion dollars across three other funds, the firm confirmed on 12 August.

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

A small pre-seed round announced this week is a useful reminder of how much of the UK's early stage capital still flows through SEIS wrappers, and how directly that scheme shapes which founders get their first cheque.

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

Humanoid, a two year old London founded robotics company, has closed a $152 million Series A round at a $1.35 billion post money valuation, a jump that makes it Europe's first pure play humanoid robotics unicorn and one of the largest early stage rounds any UK deeptech company has closed this year.

Haatch Ventures has closed its fourteenth Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme fund after hitting its £4.5 million hard cap, the pre-seed B2B SaaS investor told backers on 11 July, two days after flagging that only £500,000 of headroom remained in a raise it runs partly through Crowdcube.

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

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

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

One of Britain's best known fintech names is trimming its workforce, and the reason it gives says a good deal about where the sector is heading. Starling Bank is cutting about 130 jobs, roughly three per cent of a workforce of more than 4,000 people, as it restructures its banking and technology tea

For most of 2023 and 2024, the tokenisation conversation ran on projections and pilots. McKinsey's $16 trillion market by 2030. Bank proofs of concept that never reached production. Consultations with no output. The gap between the narrative and the working infrastructure was wide enough to justify genuine scepticism. What is different now is that the plumbing is being built in places where it cannot easily be unbuilt. DTCC is not a startup running an experiment. It is the or