Pre-seed founders outside the AI hype cycle are having a harder time raising than the headline numbers suggest. The British Business Bank's Small Business Equity Tracker 2026, published in July, found that UK equity investment into smaller businesses fell 4 per cent to 12.3 billion pounds in 2025, w

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

QuantumLight, the venture firm founded by Revolut chief executive Nik Storonsky, has closed 500 million dollars for its second fund, doubling the size of the 250 million dollar debut vehicle it closed just over a year ago. Sifted reported the close on 18 August, citing people familiar with the deal.

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.

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

London based defence startup Uforce, which builds autonomous drones for land, air and sea operations, is in talks to raise fresh funding at a valuation above 4 billion dollars, sources told Sifted on 12 August. The talks come less than six months after Uforce reached unicorn status at a 1 billion do

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.

This is the question this publication keeps circling back to, because it is the one genuinely open piece left in an otherwise settled picture. If a UK seed investor holds SEIS qualifying shares represented as a token, what specific custody and nominee structure lets that token satisfy HMRC's conditi

Most of the debate about who gets funded starts and ends with the initial cheque: who wins the pitch, whose warm introduction lands, which fund says yes. It is the right place to start, but it stops the story too early. A less visible shift is under way further up the capital stack, in how venture f

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 a founder building outside London, the hardest part of raising is rarely the pitch. It is getting in front of the right person at all. Warm introductions cluster around a handful of postcodes, and the funds with cheques to write are disproportionately based in the capital. A new £100 million com

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.

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 a later funding round tend to come from Boston or San Francisco rather than London, and the honest answer usually comes back to where the money sits. A proposal now on the table from two of Britain's largest pension providers is aimed directly at that prob