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

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

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

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

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

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

Lockheed Martin Ventures, the US defence giant's venture capital arm, opened a London office this week and confirmed it will deploy at least $100 million into UK and European startups, giving founders building sovereign and defence relevant technology a new, well capitalised route to serious capital

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

For more than a decade the same story has played out at the top of Europe's startup ladder. A company built in London, Paris or Stockholm reaches the stage where it needs hundreds of millions to scale, cannot find a cheque that size at home, and takes one from a United States fund instead, often shi

The money lands at the scaling stage, where British companies have long struggled to find patient equity at home.

Category: FOUNDER ACCESS & CAPITAL REFORM

The European Commission announced on 18 May 2026 that it had selected Swedish investment firm EQT to manage the new Scaleup Europe Fund, a vehicle with a target size of €5 billion designed to back the continent's most promising technology companies at the growth stage. The fund will invest across th

The world's largest asset manager just made two moves that will define the next chapter of tokenised finance. On 9 May 2026, BlackRock filed to launch a new tokenised Treasury fund and proposed creating onchain share classes for an existing $7 billion money-market fund. Taken together, these filings

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 British Business Bank recently announced that the British Growth Partnership Fund I has reached its first close with £200 million raised. This fund marks a significant moment as it brings pension money into UK startups, a move that has long been discussed but rarely executed at this scale. The question many are asking is whether this is a one-time effort or the start of a lasting change in how UK pension schemes invest in venture capital. Why Pension Money Matters for UK