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

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.

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

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

The British Business Bank has published annual results showing statutory pre tax profit of 426 million pounds for 2025 to 2026, nearly triple the 144 million pounds it reported the year before, alongside a record 9.4 billion pounds of finance supported for smaller UK businesses over the same period.

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.

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

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

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

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.