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

London Tech Week in review. Instead, in line with the current mood in Number 10, much of the headline address was given over to a lecture and a warning. Tech firms were told they had three months to prevent children accessing, creating and sharing harmful material or face new legislation, with the Prime Minister telling the room that the pace of change cannot be an excuse for harm and that nobody is getting a free pass. Protecting children online is an entirely legitimate pr

The model widened who could invest. The next one has to fix what it left unsolved: liquidity, selection, and the cost of staying in.

The technology mostly works now. The harder problem is that most people still do not trust or understand it, and that gap is where adoption stalls.

When London Tech Week opens its doors at Olympia on 8 June, a founder sitting in the audience of the new Founders Stage will hear a question asked out loud that, until recently, was mostly muttered in private. Do I really need to raise? For a decade the assumption ran one way. You built something, y

From 6 April 2026, the income tax relief available to investors in Venture Capital Trusts dropped from 30 per cent to 20 per cent. The change was announced in the 2025 Autumn Budget and took effect in the new tax year. Two months on, the implications are still being absorbed by the startup ecosystem

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 quiet signal is worth paying attention to. Two independent reports have recently set out to rank and compare the tokenisation platforms now operating across Europe and beyond. One, published by the Austrian firm Onino, focuses specifically on white-label tokenisation platforms operating within the

The legal case unfolding in a London court between the founder of Cognism and five of its investors, including Balderton Capital and AVP Capital, would be notable at any time. A court hearing this week appears to have dealt an early blow to the investor defendants, according to reporting from Sifted

18 May 2026 | Category: FOUNDER ACCESS & CAPITAL REFORM

The venture capital industry runs on reputation. Relationships are currency. Warm introductions open doors that cold calls cannot. And dissent about how the system works can be career-limiting in an industry small enough for word to travel fast.

White-label tokenisation platforms have moved from niche offering to recognisable category. Several are now active in or accessible from the UK market. Here is how the landscape is taking shape and what founders should be looking for.

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 t

The statistic that frames this announcement has not changed in a decade. Female founders in the UK receive less than 2% of all venture capital deployed. Despite numerous initiatives, codes, commitments and pledges from investors, the number has barely shifted. Against that backdrop, the British Busi