The Bostrom Line

While existential risk from AI has hit the news a number of times over recent years, this is the week it finally went properly mainstream, with even the King raising concerns. It’s been a long time coming.

All the way back in 2018, when the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence flippantly dismissed the warnings of thinkers like Nick Bostrom, I wrote that this should be a serious concern for policymakers. At the very least, we should keep an open mind about this.

To be clear, thinking this risk is legitimate doesn’t come with a ready-made set of policies, nor does it mean that AI companies need to pause or even slow down. Some argue the opposite — that democratic countries should do everything to win this race in order to mitigate the risk of despotic countries winning.

To that end, our friends at the Centre for British Progress have just released a report looking at how the UK can lead on AI. Among other things, it recommends pricing grid capacity and opening transmission connections to competition, and letting data centres run on their own gas while they wait for the grid. It also calls for a Building Britain Act to fast-track planning in AI Growth Zones, with one environmental assessment per zone rather than per project.

Diary Notices

Some dates for your diaries:

• Civil servants should join us in the House of Lords on 1 October to discuss how AI and digital transformation can deliver better public services.

• Female founders, investors and anyone working to close the gender funding gap should join us at IDEALondon in Shoreditch on 7 October to discuss the barriers women face raising capital and scaling their businesses.

• Entrepreneurs and everyone who believes in what international talent brings to Britain should join us in London on 14 October to discuss the foreign-born founders behind our fastest-growing companies.

• Anyone interested in the future of self-employment should join us in the House of Lords on 21 October to discuss what AI is doing to self-employment.

• Join a dozen fellow founders in Bloomsbury on 5 November to discuss whatever is actually on their minds, over coffee and pastries, with no agenda, no pitches and no panels.

• Ecosystem builders and founders in our network should join us in Bristol on 19 November as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Do you want to be proactively invited to our events? If so, fill in this form so we know what you’re interested in. We have a lot coming up — and there is something for everyone.

Pillar Talk

The Invest in Women Taskforce has published its 2026 manifesto, Driving Lasting Change, built on five pillars: gender balance in investment policy, better representation among decision-makers, transparency, tax incentives and education. The fifth draws on Ideas to Impact, specifically our finding with Barclays through the Female Founders Forum: fewer than 8% of UK spinouts had all-women founding teams, against more than 75% all-male.

Among other things, the Taskforce calls for the seven-year Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) eligibility limit to be removed and a carry-forward mechanism introduced for unused EIS and Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) allowances. Read it here.

Leave to Trade

The Cedar Review, an independent review into refugee entrepreneurship led by Small Business Britain, has now reported. I sat on its Steering Board. People seeking asylum can’t work at all for 12 months, and after that only as employees in a narrow set of listed roles — self-employment is excluded outright at every stage, whatever the person did before they arrived. Read it here.

Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia, who supported our first Job Creators report in 2019, is a reminder of what that contribution can look like. He arrived from Uganda in 1972 at 13, fleeing Idi Amin, and spent more than a year in temporary accommodation. He was working the markets at Petticoat Lane and Liverpool Street by 15, and in 1978 opened a single car parts shop in Willesden. Euro Car Parts eventually ran to more than 300 sites and 12,000 employees before selling in a deal reported at up to £280 million.

Board Room

When Parliament returns after the party conference season, the Advisory Board of the All-Party Parliamentary Group will resume its monthly meetings. For this group, we’re looking for those in trade and membership bodies, associations, research centres and universities, as well as think tanks and quasi-public bodies. If you’re keen to be considered, drop Mann Virdee an email.

Chasing Unicorns

John Healey gave his first big speech as Chancellor on Monday. It set out a broad vision rather than focus on detail. Nevertheless, there was much to welcome — the Fingleton Review on nuclear regulation to be delivered in full and its approach extended into other sectors; a commitment to cut the administrative burden of business regulation by 25% by the end of the Parliament; and judicial review reforms extended from energy to all major infrastructure to prevent the kinds of “vexatious legislation and vexatious litigation” that currently block economic growth.

Healey also set out a commitment to cross-economy sandboxing powers, covering pavement robots to drones to medical treatments — which is in line with what founders told us they needed when we brought together robotics founders with the Regulatory Innovation Office. There is also to be an end to what the Chancellor called the “consultation culture” at the Treasury. These are good signs, but we’ll be watching the Autumn Budget closely on 28 October for more detail. In particular, we’ll be keeping an eye out for the recommendations we submitted via the Treasury’s stakeholder portal earlier this week.

One of the lines that struck me from the speech was that the Chancellor set out “an ambition now to double the number of unicorn firms.” The Hurun UK Unicorn Index 2026 finds 80 unicorns in the UK, worth £242.4 billion, third in the world behind the United States and China, and more than Germany, France, and the Netherlands combined. Dealroom, meanwhile, says it currently tracks 205 unicorns in the UK. Tracxn finds there are 102, using a definition that keeps counting companies after they list or get bought. On top of this, the Chancellor gave no date by which this target of doubling the number of unicorns should be measured against. If a target doesn’t have a baseline or a deadline, it’s a fairly movable goal. Is the target 160, 204, 410 unicorns, or some other number altogether — and over what timeframe?

As we noted in Perennial Gale in June, revisiting Josh Lerner’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, there are two ways for a government to help venture capital. One is to raise the demand for it by making the country somewhere worth building in. The other is to raise the supply by providing finance. Too often, we choose the latter. On Monday, we saw £150 million from the British Business Bank for scale-ups in the North, as well as a Northern 500 to convene the region’s most ambitious mid-sized firms. But as Keith Griffiths of The Entrepreneur Festival pointed out, the Government shouldn’t confuse writing cheques with creating growth. The cost of electricity, tax levels and bureaucratic burden still need to be addressed.

Healey’s speech also championed the idea of the state as early first customer. As founders have told us, a first public contract can be worth more to a startup than a grant because it’s also an endorsement. But in May we wrote about a British company knocked off G-Cloud for negative EBITDA and a light balance sheet, which describes nearly every growth-stage technology company. Officials looked at it again and reinstated the listing, and yet the rule that blocked it is still on the books. The Government cannot be a first customer when the process is designed to avoid first-time suppliers. If the Chancellor wants the state buying from the next wave, he should undo the financial-health tests that disqualify loss-making growth companies and stop marking bids on everything except the bid.

Corner Shop

Healey told his audience the economy was turning a corner. This morning’s figures have given him something to point to. Monthly GDP grew 0.4% in July, against an expectation of no growth at all, following 0.3% in June. On the three-month measure the ONS prefers, output also rose 0.4% against the three months to April (the eighth consecutive three-month rise) and was 1.3% up on the same period a year earlier.

This growth was down to services, which are up 0.6% over the three months, with professional, scientific and technical activities up 2.1% and information and communication up 2.5%. By contrast, production and construction each fell 0.5%. That’s not ideal for a speech delivered at an advanced manufacturing centre.

Three Big Ideas #69

💾 Mann Virdee, Head of Science and Technology

The year is 1978. The TV show Dallas has premiered on CBS. Over on BBC1, Grange Hill has started, and Kate Bush has released her debut single, Wuthering Heights. The UK Government under prime minister Jim Callaghan has just put £50 million into INMOS, a new semiconductor company in Bristol.

This is the UK’s industrial strategy. Public money, channelled through the recently established National Enterprise Board, to build a British chip industry from scratch. As with most chipmakers of its time, INMOS made much of its early money manufacturing memory.

But it didn’t last. INMOS opened a fabrication plant in Newport in 1982, was sold to SGS-Thomson in 1989, and by 1994 the brand was gone (although the building is still there). The Newport site passed through several owners before being bought by Nexperia, then made subject to a government divestment order on national security grounds. A US company, Vishay, acquired it in 2024.

I thought about this while reading the Semiconductor Sector Study 2026, published this summer and updated last week. On computer memory, which accounts for almost 30% of the global market and is an area where the report sees an opportunity for Britain, it warns that leading British firms face scale-up barriers that could see them move operations overseas — risking a repeat of the UK’s INMOS experience.

Semiconductor design accounts for roughly 80% of UK sector revenues. Manufacturers report that government support is concentrated on the R&D side rather than the capital-intensive work of scaling production. They also stress that high energy costs are damaging their competitiveness.

Manufacturers responding to the 2026 sector survey also reported 18% of their cleanroom floorspace as under- or unutilised, and said that absent labour constraints their production could more than double. One suggestion in the report is to look at Fraunhofer in Germany and Tyndall in Ireland, where shared facilities get long-term support for running costs, not just capital.

🛒 Ian Ng, Researcher

The Government spends roughly £400 billion a year through public procurement and much has been said about how it should use that spending to support wider policy objectives, most recently on backing home-grown innovation.

The Competition and Markets Authority published two reports on public procurement yesterday. Both are filled with case studies of the procedural burden facing SMEs. A digital startup was rejected from the G-Cloud 15 framework, the Government’s key digital marketplace, because it used a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) contract. SAFE is commonly used by early-stage startups but in this case was mistaken by the Government as a form of debt. The Startup Coalition later identified over fifty suppliers that had been rejected for the same reason. Separately, an SME with only five employees decided against bidding for an NHS England medical equipment tender due to the administrative burden of having to publish a current Carbon Reduction Plan, undertake an Evergreen supplier assessment, complete a Modern Slavery Assessment, and undertake Cyber Essentials certification. It reported that exemptions for SMEs from some of these requirements can themselves be burdensome to complete.

Loading every tender with competing secondary objectives produces everythingism: nothing much gets achieved, and the bar rises until only firms with the manpower to tick every box can clear it. The Government should heed the CMA’s advice to narrow its priorities to a meaningful number and to be honest about the trade-offs between them. It has been striking the right tone lately, from exempting smaller tenders from social value requirements to limiting the measurement of social value to job creation, skills and local opportunities.

Every procurement review since the Procurement Act 2023 has arrived at broadly the same conclusion: the system has an incumbency bias and a preference for the safety of a giant consultancy. Since April 2025, central government departments and their arm’s-length bodies have been required to set and publish their own three-year targets for direct spend with SMEs, and to report against them annually — a weaker mechanism than a single mandated figure, and one that has so far done little to change who wins the work. The problem, as the CMA identifies, is that reform has focused on rules and processes without touching the incentives facing procurement teams. Changing the rules alone will not be enough; unless the incentives on decision-makers change too, SME targets will go the same way. British investors are already seen as more risk-averse than their US counterparts — the Government cannot afford to be the same.

📈 Sophya Mashkoor, Research Intern

Two studies published in June push back on the idea that total founder control is good and investor oversight is just friction to be minimised.

Researchers at Imperial College London and Emlyon Business School examined 12 companies across 27 US securities fraud cases brought between 2000 and 2023. A separate study from the University of Toronto looked at 654 fraud cases against US venture-backed startups over the same period. Its headline finding is that fraud remains rare overall — but that startups with founder-controlled boards were twice as likely to face fraud charges as those with investor-controlled or shared-control boards.

The Imperial and Emlyon paper’s contribution is a mechanism it calls “façading”, a slow escalation that often starts innocuously. In the first stage, surface façading, founders overstate how successful the company is or is becoming. In reinforced façading, they manufacture evidence to support those claims — one company in the study fabricated customer contracts and invoices to book revenue that did not exist, then used it to raise at a unicorn valuation. In deep façading, the deception extends to the product itself, complete with staged demos.

Investors aren’t always the victims. The researchers describe some of them setting growth expectations so aggressive that founders feel there is no honest route to hitting them. The investors who push founders towards hockey-stick projections are also the ones best placed to catch the deception that follows — but in hot markets they compete for access by conceding exactly the governance rights that would let them do it, which is how founder-controlled boards become common in the first place. The paper argues that investors can unwittingly “co-create” fraud, and that continuing to back founders previously accused of it normalises the behaviour.

The Toronto study also found that startups launched during overheated markets, with weak oversight and thin due diligence, were 19% more likely to commit fraud later — which suggests board control is less a question of founder autonomy than of what market conditions do to governance. The proposed remedies are stronger; holding directors liable when façading happens on their watch, and formal audits of later-stage private companies. Both carry costs, not least making good people warier of taking early-stage board seats, and neither maps neatly onto the UK, where nothing polices private markets the way the SEC does.

Back Catalogue

On Monday, Chancellor John Healey will give his first big speech. Everything briefed about it says it will focus more on vision than policy. That’s fair enough; we are only seven weeks out from a Budget, with the Treasury’s deadline for submissions looming on Wednesday.

Some credit first. The last Budget took two numbers straight from Backing Breakthrough Businesses. The Enterprise Management Incentive (EMI) asset cap went from £30 million to £120 million and the employee limit from 250 to 500. Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Venture Capital Trust limits doubled, though relief on the latter fell from 30% to 20%. So I’ve delved into our archives to pull out the policies that haven’t yet been implemented.

First, rule out equalising capital gains tax with income tax. As I wrote in May, Entrepreneurs’ Relief went from £1 million to £2 million to £5 million to £10 million, back to £1 million, was rebranded, then ratcheted from 10% to 14% to 18%, the last step landing in April. A 20% charge on unrealised gains at the border was floated last Budget and dropped rather than ruled out. Founders can’t price a 15-year bet against a system that lurches annually. Is it any surprise that our polling revealed that 62% of founders know another founder who left after the 2024 Budget?

Second, restore the Business Asset Disposal Relief lifetime limit to £10 million, where Entrepreneurs’ Relief sat, and tie it to reinvestment. According to our Entrepreneurs Survey, 72% of founders would put the proceeds of a more generous relief into someone else’s startup and 70% would launch another venture. Sweden deferred tax on gains from unlisted shares reinvested in unlisted companies in 2003, left it alone for two decades, and now produces more unicorns per head than almost anywhere.

Third, index the thresholds. Backing Breakthrough Businesses recommended that we uprate the investment and gross asset limits on tax reliefs annually. The EMI limits were set in 2000 and sat frozen until April. Every few years the ecosystem campaigns to drag them back in line with inflation. This should be automatic.

Fourth, fix the plumbing on the venture schemes — three repairs from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Entrepreneurship’s Funding to Flourish, outstanding three years on. Make SAFE notes eligible for the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) and EIS rather than voiding relief when they don’t convert within six months. Scrap the 2014 financial health test, which disqualifies any company whose liabilities exceed its assets, or that has spent more than half the capital it raised. And make HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) ring an applicant with a clarifying question during advance assurance instead of refusing in silence.

Fifth, abolish Stamp Duty Reserve Tax (SDRT). The UK Listing Relief was the right instinct: three years’ exemption for new listings, about £50 million a year, while the 0.5% charge sits on everything else. SDRT taxes the investment and the return on it, including when the return is negative. It doesn’t come cheap — so if not this year, at least set the direction.

Sixth, treat HMRC as growth infrastructure. Making Tax Simple asked for a callback service, on the evidence of a Chartered Institute of Taxation survey in which 94% were dissatisfied with service levels and one in five would give up rather than keep trying to get through. We also suggested surfacing eligible reliefs inside Making Tax Digital software. A relief nobody knows about doesn’t change behaviour, and 74% of the founders we surveyed knew of none they could claim. Take-up would rise and it would cost something, but it would also incentivise the activity those reliefs were set up for.

Seventh, reset procurement rather than layering on it. Building Blocks found single-bid tenders rose fivefold between 2012 and 2018, against procurement worth around 15% of GDP, a tenth of which reaches SMEs. In May I wrote about a British company blocked from G-Cloud for negative EBITDA and a light balance sheet, which is normal for any growth-stage tech company. To its credit, the Government took note and the listing was reinstated. The rule that blocked it is still there.

Eighth, cut the cost of coming and hiring. A founder arriving alone on an Innovator Founder visa pays £6,862, or £18,694 with a partner and two children, with the health surcharge payable up front for the whole visa. June’s reimbursement scheme for scaleups doesn’t cover founders at all. Last year’s Job Creators argued Britain should stop filtering out the people it says it wants. The fees are doing the filtering. More from us on this shortly — sign up for our next Job Creators launch here.

Ninth, regulate sterling stablecoins for growth. A Sterling Opportunity makes the case for principles-based rules on transparency, reserve backing and custody, rather than redemption obligations and holding caps low enough to rule out corporate treasury use. Sterling stablecoins are backed by gilts, and Healey has the highest cost of servicing government debt in decades.

Tenth, close the online marketplace value added tax (VAT) gap. In February we joined 18 other business organisations in calling for a consultation on extending liability rules, where overseas sellers avoid charging VAT and pocket a 20% price advantage. It closed on 18 August and nothing has followed. Reform could recover an estimated £700 million a year.

Rent Free

“Political entrepreneur” is one of those terms with too many definitions to be useful — the oldest being someone who profits by shaping rules rather than by creating value. A new NBER working paper, Political Entrepreneurs, proposes a more flattering one.

Across 26 US states between 2009 and 2023, the paper reveals that more than 40% of state legislators both owned and actively managed a firm. Britain has no comparable figure. The nearest thing is the LGA’s councillor census, which in 2022 found 15.8% of English councillors describing themselves as self-employed or freelance, against 8% of the adult population. Twice the national rate, but nowhere near 40%.

These US “political entrepreneurs” don’t sponsor more bills overall, but they initiate a greater share as first or sole primary sponsor. Nor are they any more likely than colleagues with other business ties to sponsor pro-business bills, or bills endorsed by state Chambers of Commerce:

“Instead, they selectively advance pro-entry legislation, especially bills related to deregulation and innovation rather than antitrust or access to capital.”

In other words, entrepreneurs with political power in the US are more focused on levelling the playing field than on tilting it.

In our Operation Innovation essay collection, David Stallibrass and John Fingleton CBE quote John Kay:

“You can become wealthy by creating wealth or by appropriating wealth created by other people. When the appropriation of the wealth of others is illegal it is called theft or fraud. When it is legal, economists call it rent-seeking.”

As Kevin Murphy, Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny argue in Why Is Rent-Seeking So Costly to Growth?, rent-seeking is self-reinforcing. The more of it there is, the more attractive it becomes relative to producing. It also falls hardest on innovators, because new firms need the permits and licences that incumbents have already bought, and the people best placed to extract rents prefer dealing with insiders they know to outsiders trying to get in.

Not that all lobbying is duplicitous. Much of it helps regulators understand what they are regulating, as Stallibrass and Fingleton are careful to say. The trouble is that the same channel serves both purposes, and incumbents have far more practice using it.

Writing on the paper in Network Effects, Eamonn Ives set out three responses: “Political parties could do more to encourage founders to stand for office; governments could make it easier for them to spend periods inside agencies and departments through appointments, fellowships or advisory roles; and policymakers could be more deliberate about bringing entrepreneurs into the room before rules are written, rather than consulting them as an afterthought.”

The third is the one we spend most of our time on. But if you want to be a political entrepreneur in the model of Baroness Lane-Fox, Alex Depledge, Matt Clifford, Emma Jones or Lord Bilimoria, the evidence suggests you would push for market entry rather than for protection.

Three Big Ideas #68

🏦 Ian Ng, Researcher

For those of us who follow Europe’s startup ecosystem, it won’t come as news that the late-stage funding gap is often seen as the binding constraint on startups scaling up. Much of this has already been mapped out in the Draghi report and elsewhere — the internal barriers within the European Single Market and the need to funnel wealth towards risk-taking VCs who can back scale-ups. While the Draghi report stated that the EU’s productivity growth over the past two decades could be on par with the US if you strip out the tech sector, a new NBER paper finds that the valuation gap between US and European firms persists even when comparing companies within the same narrow industry. Strip out the very largest companies in each region and the gap barely budges, so this isn’t mega-caps skewing the average. Instead, the authors identify the gap as concentrated among young, small, R&D-intensive companies — what stockpickers would call growth stocks, whose value lies in future growth rather than today’s cash flow.

The paper attributes the gap to two constraints. On the demand side, European firms’ sales are tied to the size of their home country’s economy. A 1% rise in local GDP raises a European firm’s sales by 0.8%, a dependency that does not exist for American firms and their home states. On the finance side, Europe has less venture capital than the US. US venture capital investment ran at 0.5% of GDP in 2023, against 0.15% even in Denmark, the most VC-active country in Europe. The paper links this to a structural difference in the supply of long-term capital between the US and Europe, with US retirement assets mostly in defined-contribution (DC) schemes carrying heavy equity exposure, whereas European pension systems remain mostly pay-as-you-go.

In the UK, the state pension is pay-as-you-go but workplace pensions have shifted towards DC schemes. There is progress on turning that pot towards venture capital. The Mansion House Accord commits 17 of the UK’s largest DC providers to allocate 10% of default funds to private markets by 2030, half of it in the UK, while the Pension Schemes Act 2026 gives the Government a reserve power to require providers to hit the target if voluntary progress stalls.

The private sector has already made the shift from defined benefit to DC. Given the ballooning state pension bill is at around 5% of GDP and forecast to climb towards 8% of GDP by the early 2070s, perhaps it’s time to ask the same question of our state pension. Our state pension is simply moving cash from today’s workers to today’s pensioners without investing a penny of that money into British growth. Germany has kickstarted its pension reform in this direction, as the government-appointed pension commission has recommended a compulsory contribution starting at 0.5% of pre-tax income and rising to 2% by 2031, split evenly between employer and employee and paid into a centrally managed public fund modelled on Sweden’s.

Europe is not broke — we remain among the wealthiest continents — but we must put that wealth to work. Closing the gap needs businesses willing to take risks and more capital willing to back them. It is essential for the UK and Europe to plug our gap in late-stage funding if we want to keep our best scale-ups.

🏛️ Eamonn Ives, Associate Director, Public First

Whether it’s Alex Depledge advising the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Matt Clifford holding the pen for Britain’s AI Opportunities Action Plan or Emma Jones taking the reins as the Small Business Commissioner, entrepreneurs going into the heart of government seems to be in vogue. Most readers will probably regard this trend as an unalloyed positive. In addition to bringing valuable domain-specific expertise, founders tend to have an uncanny knack for challenging established ways of working and breaking through the institutional inertia that besets modern governments.

A new working paper from Aaron Chatterji, Jorge Guzman, Joyce Ma and Ryan C. McDevitt puts some numbers behind the theory. Studying a dataset of American state legislators, they conclude that those who own and actively manage a firm not only propose a larger proportion of bills as first or sole primary sponsor but also “selectively advance pro-entry legislation, especially bills related to deregulation and innovation.”

Entrepreneurs, it seems, really do bring a particular perspective on economic growth into politics: one focused less on protecting the interests of incumbent companies, and more concerned with making it easier for new businesses to emerge. Perhaps due to having experienced the frustrations of starting up and running a firm first-hand, they seem especially attuned to how rules, regulations and institutional sclerosis can stand in the way of new entrants.

American state politics is not Westminster, so we should be wary of assuming the paper’s findings travel intact. But they ought to make us think more seriously about entrepreneurial experience as a form of talent that government should actively seek out. Political parties could do more to encourage founders to stand for office; governments could make it easier for them to spend periods inside agencies and departments through appointments, fellowships or advisory roles; and policymakers could be more deliberate about bringing entrepreneurs into the room before rules are written, rather than consulting them as an afterthought.

📍 Sophya Mashkoor, Researcher

The internet was supposed to kill the postcode, so why hasn’t AI finished the job?

With access to a computer, an AI coding agent, a Stripe account and a Zoom link, every founder can easily build their business from anywhere in the world. A great engineer in Lagos could build the same thing as one in San Francisco, and perhaps at a cheaper cost. However, in practice the map has gotten lumpier.

Findings from earlier in the year show that around two-thirds of US venture dollars land in the Bay Area, which takes roughly 60% of global AI funding. New York, Los Angeles and Boston take most of the rest, and everywhere else is left to split the crumbs.

So why are the tools that were meant to make location irrelevant the same ones pulling capital back into one postcode (or zip code, if you will)?

The old case for hubs was to cluster where the engineers are so talent is concentrated in one area. Now, with AI, a two-person team anywhere can ship what used to take a department, so the need for density weakens. But when building takes just an afternoon, engineers stop being the scarce resource, and it instead becomes the judgement of people who can tell whether an idea is worthwhile or not. Those people — repeat founders, ex-lab researchers, investors on their third AI cycle — are still mostly having coffee in the same few square miles.

So the idea that AI democratises entrepreneurship and that capital keeps re-concentrating in a handful of cities can coexist. AI has shifted gatekeeping away from capital and infrastructure but ideas are still better communicated in person.

It is therefore worth asking: is this temporary, or does judgement being scarce mean hubs never really dissolve?

Network Errors

There’s a kind of founder network in the UK that meets after 5pm, usually in the pub, and is attended by people who have nobody waiting for them at home.

It’s a world Maria Kardakova once felt she had no choice but to live in, staying out late to keep pace with her peers, all while worrying about after-school pickups and whether she was spending enough time with her two young children.

For female founders, that expectation is a tax. Around 70% of UK venture capital deals still happen through informal networks like these.

Maria says lockdown gave her the excuse to stop, and she’s glad it did. Because in her newly free evenings, she realised the room didn’t have to be the one with everyone else in it.

With her two children at home and a husband recovering from cancer, she found herself overpaying for a meal-kit box and becoming frustrated by half-cooked recipes nobody actually wanted to eat. Out of that frustration came iCook, the AI nutrition platform she’s since built into a 250,000-user business across 176 countries, integrated with retailers from Tesco to Walmart.

She built it on a set of firm refusals, most of which she still holds. We spoke about what it costs to build outside a system designed for someone else, why she won’t sell supplements, and why she’s waiting for a Series A to say what she thinks.

• How a lockdown argument with a meal-kit box became a 250,000-user nutrition platform.

• Who can afford to network: 7.30pm events, self-funded pitch trips and the founders who aren’t in the room.

• Why every scientific nutrition platform pivoted into supplements and why she won’t.

• Childcare is startup policy. In Sweden, leave is genuinely shared, childcare from year two is good, and the state pays the same per child regardless of income.

• Nothing sits between retailers and what they promote. Over 70% of food advertising spend goes to confectionery, sugar, salt and sweet snacks; under 2% to fruit and vegetables.

• Hold your ground. She was told more than once, in terms she calls mansplaining, that recipes were finished and ChatGPT would replace them. She smiled and nodded, but now thinks she should have pushed back.

• Chase. Scientists are trained to let the work speak and wait to be approached. She now chases investors, and prepares a market proposal in hours where she once would have taken a month.

• Boldness has a price. She’s holding her opinions until Series A, on the theory that a funded founder with opinions is read differently from an unfunded one.

• Children’s rooms beat lactation rooms for a founder doing back-to-back meetings.

• A free ticket for a spouse or nanny changes who can attend.

• A founder invited to pitch is usually paying their own airfare.

You have a doctorate in biosciences and a decade across food, retail, catering and biotech. Where did iCook start?

The idea came in 2020 when I was stuck at home with my two younger children and my husband, who had recently had cancer.

I had to feed the whole family, and we tried different boxes and within a couple of deliveries we realised we were overpaying by five times for peeled carrots or some garlic cloves. The food then gets stuck in the fridge, and nobody wants to eat it because it’s already half-cooked and prepped. You still end up spending the same amount of time and money on cooking and buying at the regular supermarket.

So I thought: why not generate a balanced menu instead? A simple machine-learning model that takes the family’s allergies, ethnic background, ages and size, builds the menu, works out how much of each ingredient you need and sends it to the shopping list.

What did the next two years look like?

Execution came in 2022, when I found an investor for £50,000. I already had an iOS prototype, which we launched as a paid app; revenue from that paid for the Android version, a designer, and a food photographer — we had our own kitchen for production and I wanted a minimalistic look. We ran ads on Amazon, the App Store and Google Play to work out which markets to expand into, and broke even within a year on £100,000 of revenue, which went back into the AI.

2024 was the groundbreaking year, when a helpful household tool turned into something closer to an agent. I built the infrastructure myself — probably too precisely — but it means I have hands-on knowledge of every ingredient, policy and nutrition recommendation behind it.

My biotech background means I also know GDPR, so I know what we can and can’t share with third parties, and what sits on Google Cloud versus AWS. After that we put money into the AI rather than advertising, brought a few more people on, and we’ve been raising ever since.

What are you building now?

We’re testing a digital avatar version of the AI assistant. It isn’t just a Duolingo for cooking, teaching you nutrition from a young age. It also gives advice if you’ve been diagnosed with something.

The avatar can support you instead of you going to social media for advice, which is why we want to build trust around it. We’re currently testing a video version that will be available on iPad, where you can discuss your nutrition with it, and the same avatar will show you how to cook anything from boiling an egg to making a crème brûlée.

Where does your conviction about home cooking come from?

I used to live in Sweden, and my roots are in Russia. In both, we still really value home-cooked food. It’s the top luxury you can afford, because you’re preserving nutrients, controlling the salt, sugar and fats you add, and it has not been reheated multiple times. It’s still the best way to feed your family.

Teaching kids and teenagers to cook also takes load off mothers. I learned young because my parents weren’t home and I had to feed myself, not because anyone enjoyed cooking with me. Mine are 13 and 15 now, and they cook for themselves and love it. Even travelling, they’d rather find a grocery store. They’ve got picky about fast food and delivery, and I think that fussiness is a good thing. We’re not against the occasional Five Guys.

Where do you think iCook stands apart from the rest of the nutrition space?

The ethical line for me is supplements. No way. The meta-analyses are clear. They don’t improve quality of life or long-term health, and they don’t extend lifespan. They’re a very small fix.

Meanwhile the food market isn’t developing. Waste keeps growing, and so does the energy and CO₂ cost of producing all of it, and people have no tools to do anything about that. The kitchen hasn’t caught up either. The last real upgrade to the home kitchen was the microwave. That was 1967. We've had sixty years of nothing digital between the fridge and the plate. There’s nothing digital that helps someone planning around a child’s allergies, a partner’s allergies, or their own diabetes.

People go to the supermarket with none of that support, and get bombarded by whatever influencers are pushing, three-for-two deals on sweets dressed up as recommendations.

Is that an outlier, or is it how the industry works?

The UK produces one of the best nutrition reports in the world. The Broken Plate clearly shows how much money we spend promoting confectionery, sugar, salt and sweet snacks — over 70% of all food advertising spend — while fruit and vegetables get less than 2%.

No matter what health campaigns we launch, there’s no intermediary between retailers and what they’re promoting to consumers. I’ve raised this with retailers at several conferences, and they tend to say it’s hands off — we’re selling what our consumers want — even though there’s a good deal of research on how marketing shapes behaviour. If the recommended portion size of a snack is 30 grams, but what’s sold is much larger packs, people under financial pressure may go for the bigger packs, which are better value and eat past the recommended portion regardless. As a registered nutritionist and public health expert, I find that hard to follow.

And that’s why I won’t pivot into supplements, because every other platform that took a scientific approach to nutrition has. All of them. My favourite influencers from five years ago are all selling them now, because there’s no money in recipes.

I want to build an ecosystem for people who still cook from real recipes, preserving the authentic ones and making them healthy with a balanced menu.

I also want guidelines for people who outsource the cooking, a nanny picking the kids up from school, so they know what to cook, that it’s balanced, and that the groceries are there.

What makes a founder credible to investors and retailers now?

I worked for a kefir company, Beautiful Dairy then and Beautiful Kefir now, on the R&D side, on bacterial cultures and their health benefits. I assembled a scientific advisory board, chasing down microbiome professors and top nutritionists, because we wanted a more credible slide for pitches to Sainsbury’s and Tesco.

The response was so low. People said, this isn’t for me. Now it’s the opposite. They turn up at pitch events asking to join your advisory board. The funding narrative has shifted to commercial traction plus institutional backing.

You’ve said startup culture — the pub, the late nights — isn’t built for founders with families. What have you seen work better?

My husband works for a large US tech company, and as a manager he isn’t allowed to do gatherings outside working hours. After 5pm or 6pm, everyone goes home.

I think that’s brilliant, and fair. When my kids were younger I was sending them to after-school clubs they hated, then calling my husband to do the pickup, because everyone was going to the pub and I had to go too.

I went to an event yesterday that ran from 7.30pm to 10pm. Most people there were men, or women without children. They’re 100% dedicated, but they don’t have small kids at home, and I barely see female founders who do.

It’s not that they’re less creative or won’t work hard. They have other duties that come first. I feel lucky to have teenagers now, otherwise I’d feel the FOMO constantly.

Last week I spent four days in Madrid at South Summit, where I pitched. The invite came a week before, so I shifted all my plans and paid for the travel and hotel myself. Nobody reimburses founders for that. I paid £500 for the flight and hotel to stand on a stage for eight minutes. The ROI calculus on pitch trips is brutal, and it filters out anyone who can't absorb that cost. And you’re doing that against 30-year-old guys with no families who won’t be expected to have kids for another fifteen years.

How would you redesign these events?

We don’t need female-friendliness. We’re fine with just having the same opportunities.

I’ve seen lactation rooms at major tech summits, which is great, but with the noise and heat I wouldn’t use one twice. A founder has meetings back to back, a pitch to prepare, and still needs to eat. Even on my own I was overwhelmed by the end of the day. Children’s rooms would be amazing. So would a free ticket for a spouse, or a nanny. I love how IKEA takes care of kids so parents can shop normally.

Beyond the events, childcare is the game-changer. In Sweden, parental leave is genuinely shared, and from year two the childcare is good enough that both parents can go back to work. The government pays the same for every child, whatever you earn.

What does doing everything right look like now, and why isn’t it enough?

The calibre of startups now is completely different from two years ago. With AI, we’re all learning faster what we’re expected to show up with. People who weren’t confident with a pitch deck now are, including me.

I prepared my cap table in a day, and that used to take several consultations with advisers. AI as a co-worker is brilliant for market research. If I meet an investor from Brazil, a proposal for that market takes hours, not a month, something solid on what happens if they invest and we advertise there.

It takes a lot of mental resilience. I’ve watched founders get overwhelmed by the sheer number of pitches and emails.

Scientific-minded people don’t like to chase. We want to be chased. That ego doesn’t help, and it doesn’t help with being visible either. I fought it for years, and I’m putting out more public content now, which has brought the ego down, because it forces you to explain things so people understand them.

What would you tell a founder starting where you started?

Hold your ground. Nobody knows better than you do. If you believe in your idea, and you have the competencies to back it up, and you see the potential, don’t let anyone ruin it.

I've been told more than once that recipes are dead and ChatGPT replaces them. Those people have never had to feed a family of four with two different allergies on a Tuesday night.

I smiled and nodded. I don't do that anymore. I should have said: ask your mum. Is she cooking, or ordering delivery and buying meal kits? She’ll tell you she wouldn’t overpay £100 a week when she can do better herself. I once asked my mum why she still peels potatoes with a knife, and she said it’s because her dad did it that way.

Those things are what make us human, and delegating cooking entirely isn’t going to end well. Every founder needs to hold their idea firmly and be vocal about it, more vocal and bolder than I am.

I've learned to pick my moments. I have strong opinions on food advertising, supplement culture, and how the industry treats evidence. I'm more vocal now than I was two years ago, and I'll keep going. I work hard and overdeliver, but I have my own opinions and I’m not quite brave enough to put them out there. Maybe after a Series A. Just not yet.

Why does a Series A make it safe to be bolder?

Funded founders get read as visionary. Unfunded founders with the same opinions get read as difficult. I know that dynamic, and I'm navigating it, but I'm not waiting for permission to build what I believe in.

Is there anything you’ve read or listened to recently that you’d recommend to our readers?

I read Isaacson's Musk biography. Not for the success — for the failures. The scale of what went wrong and how much one person can absorb and still make decisions. That's what I took from it. What fascinated me was the scale of his actual failures, not just potential ones, and how much a person can process. He’s still across the engineering himself, knows the weight of every detail, and makes huge decisions anyway. We spend too much time worrying what people think of us, and as women especially, we worry so much we forget to do the job. I’d rather not spend that capacity on overthinking. So when people ask if I’m a feminist, yes, but I’d rather prove it through actions than volume.

I also love Michelle Obama’s Becoming, two ambitious people with similar but different ideas about what they want from life. That’s very much my husband and me, and our friends call us a power couple. I have strong family values, I love raising children, and I’d love more. Maybe not as many as Elon Musk.

This series is run in partnership with the Jessica Vollman Foundation, a non-profit founded to honour the legacy of the late CEO, founder and advocate for women in entrepreneurship: Jessica Vollman.

Last Orders

Next Friday is the last day to nominate someone for the latest wave of UK honours. Twelve days after that, HM Treasury’s Budget representation portal closes. We’ve been asked to spread the word on both, so consider this the week we’re doling out homework.

On Thursday we — and some of you reading this — were on a call with the honours team at the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST). We’ve bemoaned the shortage of entrepreneurs on the list for years, and in Honours for Innovators, Anton Howes and Ned Donovan went further and proposed building a new order of chivalry from scratch — the Elizabethan Order. Short of getting that built, we’ve decided to stop complaining and help out.

The honours committees can only pick from those who are nominated, and they have some first-rate members. Driving up nominations will drive up competition, and with it the number of entrepreneurs, innovators and ecosystem builders who receive recognition.

So have a think about someone you know whose achievements merit recognition, and submit a nomination. The deadline is a week today. While you’re at it, the King’s Awards for Enterprise Young Founder category we flagged a fortnight ago closes on 8 September.

If you’d like to sit in on future meetings with the honours team, join us (for free) as a Member so we know how to contact you.

Portal Recall

We flagged the Budget representation portal three weeks ago, when John Healey — who has incidentally just joined LinkedIn in case you want to give him a follow — confirmed 28 October as the big day. The portal closes on 9 September. From conversations I’ve had over the last week, it seems founders still assume representations are something that can only be done on their behalf by trade associations. Anyone can submit, individuals included, though the Treasury asks that submissions address effectiveness and value for money, revenue implications, how the measure supports growth and wider macroeconomic effects.

Four things separate a submission that gets read from one that doesn’t. First, cost it. If you can’t produce a number, say what the number depends on and give a range. Second, pick one thing. Submissions are triaged by policy area, so a document containing six vague, unrelated ideas will be routed to nobody.

Third, match the Government’s objective where you can. This Budget has an explicit frame — moving money and power out of Westminster — and a submission that explains how your measure delivers it stands a better chance of being taken up. (Though there’s no point hammering a corporation tax cut into a devolution-shaped hole.)

Fourth, use your own firm as the evidence. You know what a policy actually did to a real company’s hiring, pricing or investment decisions. Two paragraphs of specific operational detail carry more weight than a page of citations. Say what you do, how many people you employ and where.

Submit your own representation directly to HM Treasury — and if you would like to share it with us for consideration in our submission, send it over.

On Call

Halfway through our interview, Amber Vodegel’s 16-year-old daughter texted to ask for a lift. She was sitting in the same room. Amber was mid-sentence and didn’t reply, so a handwritten note arrived instead, with tick boxes for yes and no. Amber ticked yes, then broke off to explain it would have to be after five, because she had one more meeting.

For many female founders, this is what building a business looks like.

Amber has been building healthtech companies for the better part of two decades. She bootstrapped her first company, Pregnancy+, without investors or a network, while raising a family, before selling it to Philips in 2017. Pregnancy+ has since gone on to reach 150 million users worldwide.

In 2023 she started again with the women’s health platform 28X, backed by £1.2 million from the Philips Foundation and angel investors — and by a list of the things she wishes she’d known the first time.

Capital, networks and time constrain every high-growth female founder in the UK. Amber has worked around all three twice.

What we discussed

• How she bootstrapped Pregnancy+ without knowing that grants or investment existed, sold the business to Philips and saw the product go on to reach 150 million users worldwide.

• Why she started again after the Philips exit, and the book that shaped what she built next.

• How 28X stays free for every user.

• Her proposal for a basic certificate before you can register a company.

Lessons for policymakers

• Reform grant assessment panels to include entrepreneurs. Amber argues that assessors, often drawn from research backgrounds, are trained to reward long feasibility studies over founders who say a problem can be solved quickly. A panel split between an entrepreneur, a researcher and a policy specialist would change who gets funded, and for what.

• Exempt care costs from benefit-in-kind tax for scaling companies. Employer-paid childcare, school care and elderly care are taxed as a standard benefit, so the employee pays income tax on the value and the company pays Class 1A National Insurance on top. She would exempt high-growth companies from that treatment on care costs.

• Give Companies House a teaching job. There’s no basic knowledge requirement to register a company. Plain-language videos on what alternative capital is, which sort suits which company and what grants exist would point founders in the right direction.

Lessons for founders

• Constraints buy you the right to say no. Bootstrapping let her turn down beauty-product sponsorships aimed at pregnant users, which she doubts she could have done under investor pressure.

• Ask what your kind of capital demands in return. Venture and private equity suit some businesses but not others, and most founders treat money simply as money.

• Architecture is a business model decision. Because 28X runs on-device with no cloud back end, there’s no incremental cost per user. One woman or 100 million costs the same, which is what makes free viable.

You bootstrapped Pregnancy+ without investors or a network, sold it to Philips in 2017, and the product has since reached 150 million users worldwide. Six years later, you started again from scratch. Why?

I bootstrapped the first company simply because I didn’t know funding existed. I made some money, put it back in and made some more. I never joined a network or went to an event. I worked in complete isolation. I had no idea what I was doing in terms of preparing for an exit, structuring the company or getting a grant. I just wanted to make the best product there was for our users.

I learned a lot at Philips over the years that followed the exit. We integrated with Medicaid in the US and went deeper into low-income countries, where Philips is excellent.

After I left Philips, I read Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition. It argues that the biggest waste of our generation is ‘a waste of talent’, that our best mathematicians are spending their brains on dopamine triggers and TikTok feeds when they should be working on climate change and cancer. Everyone follows the money. Everyone wants to be the next big tech entrepreneur, no matter the effect their product has on society.

Today’s tech products are often venture-backed, which means the user pays one way or another. The best period trackers cost £4 to £8 a month. That’s fine for a small percentage of affluent women. Unfortunately for a lot of women and girls, it simply isn’t affordable.

Imagine a 14-year-old girl from a low-income household where English isn’t her first language, who wants to track her period and understand her own body. She downloads an app and immediately hits a paywall. We treat that as normal. And if she doesn’t pay, her data gets shared instead, or she’ll be exposed to endless advertising. One way or the other, investors need to see a return on their investment, so the user becomes ‘the product’.

So I thought: let’s rethink the healthtech space. We’re building a women’s health app with no subscription and no data business behind it. We don’t use cloud servers at the back end, so we can’t access your data ourselves. We give women back the power over their own data, without having to pay for it. Your body. Your data. Your choice.

If there’s no subscription and no data being sold, what pays for 28X?

The good news is that if you don’t have cloud servers, you don’t have costs that scale. Our core technology costs don’t rise in proportion to the number of users, which fundamentally changes the economics. You download the same binary from the store onto your phone, and everything happens on-device. You can still share your data with your GP if you want, or back it up to your own Google Drive or email. It’s your own safe, not mine. There isn’t a meaningful incremental infrastructure cost attached to each additional user.

That’s the first part: we’ve dropped the cloud, and the costs that come with it. The second part is sponsors, the same way I did it with Pregnancy+. You can make tens of millions a year from ESG sponsorships that actually mean something. Educational partnerships, for example, and health solutions and products that are genuinely useful to women.

What did bootstrapping force you to do differently?

I think you become more creative. There’s less pressure, and you end up in a more ethical position, too. At Pregnancy+, before we were acquired, we were offered certain sponsorships that I didn’t think were helpful. Beauty-enhancement products, mostly. When you’re pregnant, you should be focused on life — your mental health, your social network — not worrying about your appearance. We were offered substantial sponsorships like that quite early on. If we’d been VC-backed, I don’t think I could have said no.

Bootstrapping gives you much more space to make the right decisions. You also have time, so you cut fewer corners on security and privacy. If getting it right takes a month longer, there’s nobody telling you it has to ship by June.

Venture capital is wonderful for certain businesses, but definitely not for all of them, and the same goes for private equity. There’s very little education on that. People see money as money. They just think, “I need money”, without knowing what it means or what the consequences are.

You built Pregnancy+ without knowing that funding, grants or networks existed. What needs to change so the next generation doesn’t have to learn it the hard way?

I think entrepreneurship should be on the school curriculum. It’s going to be huge, because in this new world, everyone can build anything with AI. You’ll see lots of micro-companies starting up, each doing something very specific for one area.

My co-founder’s son is 13. Over a few weekends he built a game — AI lets you do that now. He can now invite his school friends to play, and in return they invite another school to play against them. So now you’ve got kids in Guildford schools playing a game together, and they like it more than playing something global like Roblox, where you have no idea who you’re playing against. You’ll get far more companies built for a local purpose, and some of them will turn out to be valuable.

But those kids, in those schools, need to know what’s actually available to them in the UK, and how to access it. That’s where it has to start.

So where should that information come from?

Look at what happens when you register a limited company with Companies House. There’s no basic knowledge test, the way there is for almost everything else you’re allowed to do. You need a theory exam for a driving licence. You need a PADI qualification before you’re allowed to scuba dive. But you can set up a company with no understanding of what you’re getting into at all.

Companies House could put out a series of plain-language videos. One in seven adults in England has literacy skills at or below the level expected of a nine- to 11-year-old, so explain it at that level. This is what alternative capital is. This is what’s good for which kind of company, and why it’s not suited to others. These are the grants you can apply for. Just enough to point people in the right direction.

I’d push for some kind of basic certificate. At the moment starting a company is like having a child. Everyone says good luck, and that’s the training.

You want childcare treated differently for growing companies. What’s the thinking?

If you’re a growing company with a good revenue track record, you’re bringing new money into the country, because you’re selling a product or a service. Those are the building blocks of society. You have surplus value.

I think companies above a revenue growth threshold — set it at 20%, or tier it — should be able to claim care costs back, whether that’s childcare or elderly care. I think that makes total sense. With all of these suggestions, there are always people who find ways around the system, so it’s difficult to do perfectly. But there must be something we can do, especially for women, around childcare that you can claim as a benefit.

You’ve also mentioned proposing a minimum proportion of government spend going to UK-based companies. What’s the example that makes the case for you?

Take AI scribe software for GPs, the kind that allows a doctor to focus on the patient rather than typing throughout the consultation, with the conversation captured and the relevant information added to the system automatically.

When public bodies procure technology like this, I think there should be much more consideration given to where the economic value ultimately goes. It is not just about where a company employs people, but where the ownership sits, where the money flows and whether we are helping to build capability in the UK.

Supporting British companies should be a factor in those decisions. There should be a requirement for a meaningful proportion of public and grant-funded spending to remain in the UK. If a company has received an Innovate UK grant, for example, there should also be an expectation that a reasonable share of that funding is spent with UK subcontractors and suppliers. I think Innovate UK is already relatively good at encouraging that.

Quotas draw pushback. How do you answer it?

You do get that, and I see it. But maybe you frame it as either UK-based or female, like setting a few really important pillars, rather than one narrow box. That’s the only way to get people moving in that direction, if there are mandates around where the money goes.

I don’t think you can just hand money out. But you can set guidelines where a company has to tick some of those boxes — UK-based, female-founded, whatever the pillars are — so it falls into one of those categories rather than being excluded outright. If you do it that way, you don’t end up with a group of people against you.

You’ve said government grant programmes, including Innovate UK, tend to favour applicants from research or institutional backgrounds. What did you mean by that?

I didn’t know any of this until I won a grant myself. I’m getting better at them now, but the mechanism is revealing. In my experience, the process can feel heavily weighted towards research and institutional thinking, and I’d like to see more successful entrepreneurs represented on assessment panels.

So when I wrote my first submissions, I’d say something like: I only need this much money, and I can get you that much return, by just doing these three things. Very simple. They didn’t like that wording at all. They really don’t like it when you say it’s easy, that you can just do it, because that’s seen as far too entrepreneurial.

Every grant writer told me the same thing: say the idea is high-risk, say you have no idea whether it’ll work, ask for a feasibility study, then another, possibly a third. And always include well-known research partners as part of your funding proposal. That’s the setup and wording most assessors prefer.

What would a better process look like?

I’d want assessor panels to include a successful serial entrepreneur alongside someone from a research background and someone from policy. The three of them vote together. Right now, successful serial entrepreneurs are missing from these panels entirely.

What’s one thing you’ve read, listened to or come across recently that you’d recommend to readers?

I was really impressed by an article about Thuria Wenbar in The Times.

I know her personally, and I think the best businesses are built on strong ethics and a genuine desire to solve real problems.

She wanted to help improve access to healthcare, so she founded an online pharmacy and digital healthcare business. Through the service, people can complete a clinical assessment online and, where appropriate, receive treatment following review by a qualified healthcare professional. The information can also be shared with their GP to help support continuity of care.

I used the service this morning to request travel health support ahead of a safari in a high-risk malaria area. I completed the assessment online, and the relevant information was shared with my GP.

She’s a female founder who set out to improve the system and built a business to do exactly that. What makes her story even more remarkable is her journey. She was an asylum seeker, fleeing first to Egypt, then Germany, before arriving in the UK at the age of eight. She is one of many extraordinary women who have come to the UK from around the world and built businesses that make a real difference.

When you read a story like hers, an asylum seeker, a doctor, now running a technology business, you might think, how brilliant is that? But I suspect there is still a tendency in the UK to ask why someone like her did not simply stay in medicine.

The point is that she has not stepped away from healthcare; she has found a different way to contribute to it. She is solving a real problem, building something the NHS did not have, creating technology that can support patients and clinicians, and developing intellectual property that could ultimately be exported and licensed into other health systems.

We should be much more comfortable celebrating people who use their expertise to build companies, create jobs and solve public service problems at scale.

This series is run in partnership with the Jessica Vollman Foundation, a non-profit founded to honour the legacy of the late CEO, founder and advocate for women in entrepreneurship: Jessica Vollman.

In Plain Sight

Grace Almendras-Castillo built a healthtech company in Toronto, raised most of its money from US investors and sold it to an American buyer. She could have stayed in Canada, where she had 30 years of relationships. Instead, she moved to the UK, where she knew one person, and started again.

The UK’s 5.5 million small businesses drew her in, and so did its finance sector, which she rates alongside New York and Singapore for rigour. Gifftid, the AI platform she’s since built, exists to help overlooked businesses get in front of investors, banks and corporates who could fund them.

Getting there, however, took work. Grace spent her first months in London entering rooms where nobody knew her name, letting the relationships build before she asked for anything.

It’s how she built her first company too — flying to Silicon Valley, New York, Boston and Chicago several times a month, convinced a founder had to be there in person to be taken seriously.

We spoke about what it takes to build in a market you weren’t born into.

• Building Self Care Catalysts and selling it, and raising most of its money in the US.

• Why she chose the UK to start again in her 50s.

• Why she thinks founders have to be physically present in the market they want to grow in.

• Why she thinks the funding gap for women is a problem of evidence more than bias.

• Her advice to founders raising capital, and how to tell when you’re pitching the wrong kind of investor.

• Judge small businesses on more than their accounts. A company’s accounts show whether it can pay its debts, and little else. So the things a founder does to keep the business alive — mortgaging the house, going years without a proper salary — show up only as evidence that they are a bad bet. Grace argues a bank could learn more from how a company operates than from its balance sheet. Financial institutions are not expected to change their current risk assessment models, but to curate more intelligence not typically included in traditional underwriting.

• Open up data in the sectors that don’t have it. Financial platforms building a finance product in the UK can plug into open banking and other public intelligence. Grace had no equivalent in healthcare, where the data belonged to patients, every use required consent and nobody in the industry would share.

• Be there yourself early on. You can hire a team who knows the market, Grace says, but at the start the founder has to turn up in person.

• VCs aren’t the only route to capital. Angels, super angels, revenue-based financing, debt and grants are all legitimate paths, but people don’t always think — or know — about them early on. Choosing the wrong type of investor for your stage, Grace argues, is a common misalignment.

• Match the investor to what you’re building. Investors have different theses, and Grace argues founders often read a bad match as a rejection. If you’re not offering deep tech or AI, Silicon Valley VCs aren’t interested.

• The people who back you early are rarely convinced by your pitch deck. They invest because they trust you — your integrity, your track record of delivering despite constraints — and that kind of trust, Grace explains, is hard to convey on a slide.

You built Self Care Catalysts in Toronto and sold it to Alira Health in 2022. How did that lead to Gifftid?

The thesis of Gifftid came from decades of work. I started in the corporate world, at some of the largest pharmaceutical companies, then became an entrepreneur with Self Care Catalysts. That gave me several vantage points. Inside a large company, I’d worked with small suppliers, decided where to invest our capital and set up joint ventures.

Afterwards I wanted to work on behalf of small businesses. Large corporations have capital, infrastructure and people. They also depend on small suppliers who have none of that, and who struggle to win a contract long enough to plan or borrow against.

What was the shift from corporate life to running your own company like?

Self Care Catalysts was a turning point. Coming from a cushy job, I had to learn how to run a small business — put my own capital in first, then raise more, then build teams.

I started with my own, my family’s small capital, then friends, then people who’d never met me and backed me anyway because they could see I was trying to solve something in healthcare. The hardest part was doing it on limited funds and hiring people yourself, with nobody to help you screen them.

You do everything when you’re a start-up — building the team, building the product, selling, commercialising — and you’re always raising.

What got me through was my team. It matters enormously to have people behind you who back what you do with capital or commercial contracts, and they do it because of your integrity and your ability to deliver despite the constraints. None of that shows up in a pitch deck.

How did being on the other side of that — a small business being judged by investors — shape Gifftid?

I’m Canadian and I lived in Toronto, but I raised most of my money in the US. I had some Canadian investors too, but I commercialised the company in the US and it was acquired there. It was the natural market for it.

My commitment to small businesses isn’t about a big market on paper. It comes from having been one, and from working with so many that deserve more capital and capacity — because they can use it.

Founders are the first to take risks. So when a bank turns you down and calls you high-risk — well, yes, but taking risks is the whole job. It runs from mortgaging your assets to going years without the salary you deserve.

Those risks don’t show up on a balance sheet — financial statements only read your ability to pay. So much about a small business is illegible to funders.

So I built Gifftid out of that conviction. First I found people who believed in it — some were classmates from Oxford’s Saïd Business School. They didn’t share my experience, but they had conviction and said, “let’s work with you on this.” Others were investors from my last company, or friends who backed me without quite knowing what I was building.

One day a major investor texted me: “Grace, can we invest in your company?” She was asking permission, without knowing what it was. She’s my biggest angel investor today.

None of that shows up in a pitch deck — and a deck is easy to assemble now, especially with AI. An investor or bank could learn far more about a company from other signals. That’s what we do. We gather public intelligence and operational signals that never reach a balance sheet, and turn them into real-time evidence for small businesses.

Why did you choose to build Gifftid in the UK specifically?

Moving here was a risk. I’m in my 50s, and I left Toronto — home for 30 years, where I had all my relationships — for a country where I knew just one person well: my former chief of staff.

I moved because the UK is willing to change how it deploys capital. First, it’s one of the most rigorous and respected financial centres in the world, alongside New York and Singapore. Second, it has 5.5 million small businesses — where else? — and a whole ecosystem around them.

One lesson from before is that you have to be present where you want to grow — build relationships, get out and learn. So I listened. I walked into rooms where I knew nobody, and I was lucky to always be invited. Sometimes I’d wonder why I was there; usually it was simply to listen and learn. That’s what the UK has given me.

Your first company took years to find its market. Is building faster now?

I tend to enter markets that don’t exist yet and help create them. Digital health wasn’t established when I started. I was one of its early builders. More than 200,000 patients were using our technology, until we pivoted to serving the pharmaceutical companies who became our customers.

It was slow partly because the market didn’t exist, and partly because I was challenging the system. In healthcare, patients used to be recipients of care, left out of treatment decisions. The power sat with doctors, hospitals and big companies. Only now is that shifting.

That’s why the company was called Self Care Catalysts. The whole idea was to give patients their own data and let them make decisions with it. It took a long time.

Healthcare is also harder because the data belongs to the patient. Using it means getting consent, and back then the ecosystem wouldn’t share. Compare that with open banking here, which is well established across the UK and EU — a completely different environment for new ideas.

Raising money in the US, though, is fast. I closed my first external round after speaking on an innovation stage in Washington, DC, about the technology we’d built. The technology took enormous time and money then. I could build it in a much shorter time now.

Here the environment is ready for new thinking, and the infrastructure for generating data is far better. Back then I was building my own very basic natural language processing. What used to be slow for lack of data is fast now — and it helps that I know what I’m doing this time.

What would you say to a founder expanding into the US who can’t be there?

You have to hire a US team — people who know the culture, already have the relationships and understand the business you’re entering. But if you’re really early, the founder has to be there.

Building my first venture, I was on a plane to Silicon Valley, New York, Boston or Chicago several times a month. It was easy, though, because I was based in Toronto.

One thing about the US is that once people believe in you, they say “I like you, I’ll introduce you” — and they do it straight away. You get picked up and brought around fast.

In the UK, I identified advisers who might be aligned with what we’re doing and reached out cold. They came on board, hugely committed, and have been introducing us across the ecosystem. That’s why I believe in finding people who believe in you. You don’t have to ask them to work hard, they just do.

Are there programmes on the US side worth UK founders knowing about?

Springboard Enterprises is an all-women accelerator that started before accelerators were even in vogue. They do everything to introduce you — booking meetings, putting you on stage, working for the founders. They brought us to Washington, DC, the White House and Silicon Valley. That was years ago, so I can’t speak for how it works now, and there are far more programmes today than there were a decade ago.

Here, I’ve deliberately not joined an accelerator programme because I already had so much experience, and I’d rather spend my time building and finding my own supporters. Whether that’s the right thing or not, I don’t know. But I’m happy with the progress we’re making.

Grace Almendras-Castillo (Source: Grace Almendras-Castillo)

Who are the invisible entrepreneurs, in practice?

We’ve identified and named thousands of what we call the modern SME — smaller companies solving problems for society, whether in climate, energy, healthcare or food and agriculture.

Those are businesses traditionally seen as fringe or niche, but when we look at their forward-looking signals, they’re the ones with high commercial potential. The limitation is that they’re not given capital.

Immigrant entrepreneurs are the hardest to fund. With no starting point, you’re constrained on every side — capital for the company, building a new life, even the cost of attending events. But they’ve already moved to another country. They’ve been through enough hardship that the difficulty of building a business is easier to absorb.

Does the same logic apply to women?

The logic applies, but I’m probably one of the few who’ll say it differently. It’s not that investors don’t want to back women. It’s that there isn’t yet a long track record of returns to point to. Women only started founding companies in real numbers a few decades ago, so the track record investors look backwards for barely exists. That’s the gap.

Women tend to be very capital-efficient — we can do a lot with little — but those signals aren’t captured anywhere. There’s nowhere for them to be recorded. That’s what we’re building — the infrastructure to make those signals visible.

Women and foreign-born founders building companies that tackle climate, energy, healthcare or food — those are the modern SMEs. We’re the first to name them as such.

What’s your advice for female founders on proving themselves to investors when the track record and evidence they’re being asked for might not exist yet?

It’s always a combination. First is economics, because when you’re talking to an investor, they need to make their money back with good returns. Investors have different lenses and different investment theses.

If you’re pitching to Silicon Valley VCs and you’re not offering deep tech, AI or something that returns at least 50x or 100x, don’t bother. Find the investor whose thesis aligns with who you are and what you’re doing.

Second, VCs aren’t the only route. I didn’t raise from them — I raised from angels and super angels, then borrowed against revenue once I had it. When I hear, “why does only 2 per cent of VC funding go to female founders?”, I’d say a lot of it is misalignment. You’re chasing a type of capital that doesn’t see you the way it needs to make its returns.

Third, be yourself. I never changed who I am, but I learned and got better. Still, respect that you’re there to ask for money and have to prove you’ll return it on good terms. If VC money isn’t the fit, look elsewhere — debt, grants, blended or revenue-based financing, or your own money first.

It’s not just about the money, either. You have to think about the nature of the capital you’re seeking and whether you can work with that funder at all. It matters most with PE and VC, because they have their own thesis, and you have to be ready to absorb that. Even after a first or second meeting, you won’t fully know who they are.

As a first-time founder I learned this the hard way. I thought doing good for society was enough, but you also have to show them when you’ll land your first million in revenue — that’s what earns a VC’s respect. If you haven’t got commercial revenue yet, don’t chase VC money. Spend the time building instead.

The number one thing: learn how to build and run your business, then pitch it.

What’s one thing you’ve read, listened to or come across recently that you’d recommend to readers?

This is going to be self-promotion, but I wrote a book called Boundless: Every Day. In Spite Of. It’s about how I made my decisions to get to where I am, and I’ve built an executive programme to go with it.

This series is run in partnership with the Jessica Vollman Foundation, a non-profit founded to honour the legacy of the late CEO, founder and advocate for women in entrepreneurship: Jessica Vollman.

Zero Sum

On Wednesday, the Government published its analysis of the zero hours measures in the Employment Rights Act 2025. The direct cost to employers, it estimates, will fall somewhere between £350 million and £2.9 billion a year, with an indicative central figure of £1.1 billion. Back in January, the Government’s analysis of the entire Act put the direct cost to business at around £1 billion a year. Just the zero hours measures are now expected to cost businesses more than the whole Act was supposed to.

Most entrepreneurs don’t use zero hours contracts. It is worth their attention anyway, because the uncertainty on display here is the same uncertainty they are hiring under.

Entrepreneurs are no doubt too busy building their businesses to pay it much heed, so as a reminder, the Act received Royal Assent in December with most of its substance deferred. Its provisions arrive in instalments — some immediately, then February, April, August and October of this year, then across 2027, with the detail emerging from a run of consultations still under way.

On 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for an ordinary unfair dismissal claim falls from two years to six months and the statutory caps on unfair dismissal compensation disappear entirely. The six-month rule applies to anyone who already has six months’ service on that date, which means anyone hired from around the end of June this year is included. Offers being made this month are offers into a regime that is not yet in force and whose surrounding detail is still being drafted.

There is a debate to be had about what these protections are worth to employees. There is no debate about this: they are not a free lunch.

When the Bill was announced, some argued it would cost the economy little and might even lift productivity. The Government still makes a version of that case, and its own new analysis shows how hard a case it is to make: the measures will raise administrative costs, reduce flexibility and make it harder for employers to respond to swings in demand. The analysis identifies 16- to 24-year-olds among the groups most affected, while arguing they also stand to gain most.

Which brings me back to something I wrote here in February, drawing on Pieter Garicano’s Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla, which made the case that Europe’s labour laws go a long way to explaining its innovation gap with the US. Where dismissal is expensive, firms stop creating the jobs they might later have to discontinue, and the jobs most likely to be discontinued are the experimental ones.

A German restructuring runs to 31 months of salary per worker against seven in the US. The Danes, by contrast, let employers dismiss almost at will and catch workers with unemployment insurance covering up to 90% of prior income; the Austrians use portable severance accounts, funded by employers, that follow the worker between jobs. Both pair flexibility with a safety net, and both are among Europe’s more innovative economies.

Britain doesn’t have to choose between a safety net and a dynamic economy, I wrote then, but right now we’re getting the worst of both worlds. Six months on, with the expected costs rising, that looks truer than it did.

Three Big Ideas #67

🏦 Mann Virdee, Head of Science and Technology

Britain had a regional banking system and then, after a century of mergers and acquisitions, didn’t. Almost exactly 190 years ago, Midland Bank was founded in Birmingham. As it grew, it acquired other local banks, such as the Union Bank of Birmingham in 1883, and moved its head office to London in 1891. By the 1930s, Midland was, by some measures, the largest deposit bank in the world. It’s now part of HSBC. Many other regional banks followed the same path. The Manchester and Liverpool District Bank, for example, was acquired by National Provincial Bank, which later became NatWest.

While Germany still has its Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe (a network of local, publicly owned savings banks), we have branch networks whose credit decisions are often taken far away from the borrower.

That’s the broad context for two independent research papers on the geography of finance, which have just been published by the Financial Conduct Authority.

One of these papers found no evidence of a positive correlation between the overall size of a region’s financial sector and how much its smaller firms can borrow. That is, deeper capital markets don’t necessarily flow through to founders.

Instead, the authors argue, what matters is the composition rather than the scale. Their research found that lending to SMEs correlates consistently with regional growth. Broader financial expansion helps only up to a point, beyond which the relationship turns negative.

This means that geography, which digitalisation was supposed to have rendered unimportant, persists. It’s proximity that still shapes both small-business lending and whether larger firms make it onto the London Stock Exchange, because trust and tacit knowledge don’t travel well. Investors also price risk more steeply with distance from London than their counterparts do with distance from Paris or Frankfurt. Both papers find that the benefits of a financial centre don’t spill over much beyond its immediate hinterland.

These are associations rather than proven causes, and the FCA cautions that these findings should be treated as indicative and considered alongside other evidence. But at a time when Manchesterism is top of the agenda, it’s worth exploring whether the ability of a founder in Warrington or Wakefield to raise capital depends less on the depth of British capital markets than on where the decision to lend gets taken.

🧪 Philip Salter, Founder

Every disease is a policy failure. That’s the thesis of Saloni Dattani’s essay for Works in Progress. Her case is that we treat disease as part of the natural order, something to be endured, when most of it is really a problem we could solve — if we funded, organised and incentivised the work properly.

As she argues: “Medical innovation is one of the most valuable things that happens in a modern economy. Economists estimate that gains in life expectancy in the United States from 1970 to 2000 were worth about $95 trillion to Americans, with roughly half of that coming from reductions in heart disease mortality.”

However, we are leaving some of the greatest value on earth uncreated, not for want of ideas, but for want of a buyer. To put it bluntly, the market won’t serve patients too few or too poor to make a market. The malaria vaccine is a case in point: the science was largely there in the 1990s, but it sat for decades while half a million children died each year.

One answer is to incentivise the private sector. An advance market commitment (AMC) does this by design: donors promise up front to buy a proven product at a set price, stimulating the demand and certainty a firm needs to invest, then letting private firms do the capital-intensive work of trials, regulation and manufacturing. The pneumococcal AMC launched in 2009 is estimated to have saved more than 700,000 young lives.

Another part of the problem is testing, and here Britain has a genuine asset. Saloni writes about how the RECOVERY trial ran through the NHS during the pandemic and tested a dozen treatments against a shared control group at a fraction of the usual cost. It found a cheap generic steroid that saved hundreds of thousands of lives in months. A single national health system can run a trial across the whole country at a speed almost no one else can match — if we treat it as an engine of innovation and not merely a provider of care.

Everything above — and a lot more — is in Saloni’s essay, which is worth reading in full. On the one hand, it’s a heartbreaking realisation that the costs of bad policy are a matter of life and death on an epic scale. On the other, it’s a call to arms that shows how far innovation has taken us, but, more importantly, how far it will take us — and how quickly — if we get the funding and incentives right.

📈 Sophya Mashkoor, Researcher

Entrepreneurship is suddenly looking a lot more attractive to British adults. According to a survey by QuickBooks, 66% of UK adults are considering starting a business or side hustle, an increase from 52% the year before. More interestingly, the share who actually intend to start one in the next 12 months has doubled to 30%. Almost half of adults surveyed say they earned money from a side hustle in the past year, and 45% of those people hope to turn it into a full-time business — though slightly more, 49%, are content to keep it as side income.

Is this a sudden surge in entrepreneurial zeal? Not quite. Respondents put starting a small business or side hustle top for potential returns next year on 26%, ahead of cash and savings (21%) and the stock market (11%). Only 13% think it is the riskiest of the options they were shown, below both crypto (32%) and shares (20%). Higher return and lower risk than equities is less a claim about entrepreneurship than it is a verdict on the alternatives.

The survey shows that earning more money is the single thing Brits say would most improve their satisfaction with life, outranking better health, relationships or more free time. Of those considering starting a business or side hustle, just over two-thirds would begin it alongside existing work.

Which of the following would make you more satisfied with your life than you are today? (Source: Entrepreneurship in 2026)

You’d expect a lack of ambition to be the biggest obstacle, but Britain may have more entrepreneurial ambition than it is given credit for. What stops people is a lack of money. Asked to name their single biggest obstacle, 30% said a lack of savings or startup capital, ahead of 26% who said fear of failure. Six in ten say they would be more likely to start a business if financial guidance were easier to access. Asked what would most help them feel ready to fund a business, 32% chose a small grant, against 12% for a clearer funding plan.

In The Entrepreneurs Network’s own recent survey of UK founders, Cool Britannia, a similar pattern emerged. According to respondents, the strongest signal that a country is serious about entrepreneurship was tax levels and breaks on 68%, followed by access to capital on 60%. As it turns out, aspiring founders and established ones are asking for the same thing — easier access to finance.

Skin in the Game

In 2019, a landmark review commissioned by the Treasury found that if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, it could add £250 billion to the UK economy. The review made headline news — it had a catchy number, political backing and a list of recommendations that were meant to change the picture.

Seven years on, that picture looks much the same. Female-led startups still receive a fraction of UK venture capital, and the warm introduction culture that locks founders out before they’ve had a chance to prove anything still shapes who gets funded.

What happens when you have the skills, the experience and the idea — but none of the network? Ahana Banerjee had all three, but she didn’t know the right people to help her get started.

Despite being an Imperial physics graduate with a strong record of software engineering internships, she submitted 200 funding applications and only received one reply that wasn’t a rejection. That reply was Y Combinator, which, for her, changed everything. Because in the fundraising world, credibility is — albeit unfairly — built on who has already bet on you. From there, she built Clear, a skin-health platform that helps people track their skin, understand what affects it and make more evidence-based decisions. It is now used by more than 70,000 people.

There is, however, a second number in Ahana’s story, and it comes later. At the end of her first proper funding round, she went back through her CRM, added a gender column to 300 investor meetings and did the maths.

What she found changed how she thinks about everything that came before.

• Growing up between the UK, India and Singapore, and how that shaped her sense of purpose.

• The confidence it took to get through hundreds of applications and rejections, and what Y Combinator gave her that the UK funding ecosystem couldn’t.

• Why she ignored the VC growth playbook and spent five years on product fundamentals instead.

• How her first funding round changed her perspective on what it means to be a female founder.

• Why the UK’s warm-introduction culture shuts out the founders most likely to build something worth backing.

• Consider tax incentives for backing female founders. Ahana frames this as one of the few levers that could be strong enough to force change. Without a clear financial reason for investors to back female founders, voluntary change has been too slow. The data shows female-founded businesses are not a poor investment, but the problem is access to the capital needed to prove it.

• Address the UK’s reliance on warm introductions. Early-stage funding here runs almost entirely on existing networks, which structurally excludes founders without wealthy families or established connections, regardless of talent. More early-stage programmes willing to bet on individuals and demonstrated traction, rather than existing relationships or five-year exit plans, would change who gets to build companies in the UK.

• Know where your odds are highest. Across 300 investor meetings, more than 90% of what Ahana raised came from female-led decisions. She didn’t know this until she went back through her CRM after the round closed, but knowing it earlier would have changed her entire approach to fundraising.

• Don’t let someone else’s playbook dictate how you build. Most VC advice assumes a category with a clear leader and a known distribution strategy. Ahana had neither. She credits Clear’s survival to ignoring the standard advice to spend aggressively on growth and focusing on product fundamentals instead.

• Persistence outweighs a lot. Ahana submitted 200 applications and got 199 rejections or no response at all. What kept her going wasn’t the certainty she’d succeed, but the possibility of a high-potential reward — so she refused to read too much into the silence. The one yes was the only one that mattered.

You studied physics at Imperial, then built Clear, a skin-health platform that went through Y Combinator and now has more than 70,000 users. How do you trace a line from one to the other?

I was actually very much set on academia and pursuing a career in physics when I started university. Before that, I’d had some rather formative experiences as a teenager. I spent most of my childhood in the UK until the age of 14, and then my family and I moved to India.

I am of Indian origin, but I wasn’t very culturally Indian at that point, and India is a country of very stark extremes. My life there was experiencing the utmost privilege — I went to an international school, most of my teachers and classmates were from the US, and my peers’ parents were ambassadors, CEOs of very big companies. I had come from a regular state school in the UK, and yet I was living in a country where I was experiencing privilege as I had never seen before, and also seeing poverty and suffering as I had never seen before.

And there was that added layer of being of Indian origin, not very connected with my culture — just this feeling of, what did I do to deserve this life? Why are there these girls who look like me, my age, begging?

It had a huge impact on me. I became aware of all the privileges I’d had, and I’ve always felt that my greatest privilege has been my education. I wanted to use that education to do something broadly positive in this world. At the time, I thought that would be through scientific research and academia, which is why I spent all my high-school years just studying.

When I was 16, we moved from India to Singapore for those last two years of school. I got into Imperial and was delighted, because my life plan was on track. But it was pretty much as soon as I got there that I had a bit of an identity crisis. The more I learned about the realities of a career in academia — the timelines involved before you see the impact of your work, the job insecurity — I realised this isn’t what I want. But I still felt this huge responsibility: what do I do with this education and these skills?

So what did you do with that — the sense that academia wasn’t the right path, without yet knowing what was?

I just started applying for internships. I was lucky to be in London, where there are lots of different companies and sectors. The first was in software engineering at a big investment bank — I’d never had any interest in financial services, didn’t really know what it meant to be a banker, but I was curious. By the time I got to my third year, I had quite a few internships under my belt across software engineering and banking.

Then a guy messaged me on LinkedIn and said he wanted to build a company — matching students looking for graduate jobs with employers — and needed someone who could code, had events-planning experience and was connected with HR people at big firms. I ticked all three. At this point, I had no idea what entrepreneurship was, never even remotely considered it as a career, but it sounded like fun, so I said yes.

That was my first foray into entrepreneurship, and a huge turning point. I realised that as someone with both a technical skill set and a generalist skill set, this was how I could maximise my impact. But it was a family-funded business — funded by the very rich father of the guy who’d reached out. Because of that, it set up some slightly weird team dynamics, and I knew I didn’t want to start my career with this specific company.

The question then was: how does someone like me access funding? I had the confidence that I had the skills to build a business. The thing I didn’t have was capital, and I didn’t come from a family who could support it. So my actual plan was: take the graduate job that pays the most, save up and use that to fund my own business one day.

I ended up with two finance job offers going into my fourth year — one in private equity, one in investment banking. Then Covid hit. My extracurriculars stopped, the part-time job fell away and I suddenly had way more free time. I thought: if I one day want to start a company, why not start now?

Where did you start?

I started with the thing I knew nothing about, and that was the investor side. I submitted about 200 applications that summer with a pitch deck and got 199 rejections or ghosts. The one that didn’t was YC. They became investors in Clear when it was still at the idea stage, while I was still studying full-time. The condition was that I commit full-time, which meant dropping out of my master’s programme, and I made that decision at the start of 2021.

Off the back of YC, we did our first pre-seed round, which was about $900,000. Because that first fundraise was such a traumatic experience, I made sure that if I ever raised again, it would come from a position of strength, not need. I kept the team very lean — just me, then a CTO a year later. I still write code five years in, and it’s just the two of us full-time.

We’ve spent the first five years really focused on product fundamentals, tech and retention, de-risked a lot of that, proven organic growth and turned on monetisation at the end of last year on both the consumer and B2B side.

What kept you going through 200 funding applications?

This is either a personality trait or a flaw, depending on how you look at it, but I’m a huge believer in focusing on what’s within your control and not caring too much about the outcome.

When I was applying for internships, I did about 100 applications per week. I was already so accustomed to dealing with rejection that it just didn’t bother me. I’m very good at delayed gratification. I do things where, in the moment, I’m wondering if it’s doing anything, but until I get the one result I need, I just keep going.

And at the time, I still knew so little about the world of investment that I felt: I’ve already made the pitch deck, it’s just a matter of answering the same questions in a new form. It’s relatively little effort per additional application, with a potentially large reward.

What did getting into Y Combinator change for you?

I’m going to sound overly dramatic, but it was life-changing, and not because my skills improved overnight. The thing that changed was the credibility.

I’d been to a top university, done a serious degree, interned at prestigious investment banks, and yet I couldn’t get a meeting with any UK investor. I wasn’t in the networks. I didn’t know where to go. Even with VC investors, the whole industry is so reliant on warm introductions. If you have a genuine cold start, it’s very, very difficult.

There’s also this constant advice to start with friends and family. But when you’re a university student, unless you come from a wealthy family, you’re not getting funding from friends and family.

When it comes to raising investment — even just getting the meetings — I can say with a high level of confidence that the only reason I’ve raised any capital since is because YC was the first investor.

YC has a reputation for pushing hard on speed and growth. Did that ever create tension with how you wanted to build Clear?

There is something to be said for that. US investors do expect more speed, and because most of my investors fall into that category, with a more traditional VC mindset, that doesn’t completely align with what I think is best for my company.

I have always believed that with what we’re building, there is no market leader in our vertical. I want to build a billion-dollar business in this category, but it has not been done before. So, in terms of what that looks like from an actual product perspective and what strategies work for distribution, we don’t know. There’s not an exact playbook we can follow.

Therefore, in the early days, had I just haemorrhaged that initial funding round into marketing, which is what a lot of VC investors would expect, I can tell you very clearly there would be no Clear today. The business would have died a long time ago. So I purposefully didn’t do that.

Maybe the consequence I’ve paid is the narrative of — it’s been five years, why has the business not grown to a gazillion users? But the answer is that I wanted to invest in product development and tech to de-risk the fundamentals, to build a business that is profitable if it needs to be. And now we can take money and put it into growth, and this is the time to do it.

You raised the gap between university and the funding ecosystem — the idea that early-stage capital is so reliant on angel networks that young founders, almost by definition, can’t access it. What would help fix this?

This is a very utopian goal, but investors should not be so reliant on warm intros. I get it, I understand that they receive more than they can possibly deal with. I also receive more emails than I can possibly deal with, but I deal with them.

Only leaning into your immediate community is what causes the bias in the first instance and is what objectively makes it harder for founders like me to get in. And you see it in the numbers because there are also fewer investors who look like me.

I’m really against this warm introduction culture because it’s what makes it so easy for some to fundraise and so difficult for others, and there’s very little correlation with how good a builder you are.

Were there barriers you faced as a young female founder that you didn’t expect going in?

My opinion on what it meant to be a female founder drastically shifted after that first funding round.

Going in, I was absolutely the kind of person who took the view that it doesn’t matter what your race, gender or age is, it’s about what you can do. Up until that stage, I actually thought being a young brown woman was a net advantage. I can chat about skincare far easier than your average 40-year-old white male software engineer, but I’m as good at writing code, so net, I’m the right founder to build this business.

I have a tangible advantage. I’ve always felt there was a huge amount of founder-market fit, and I think investors who do invest recognise that I have the correct skill set, background and understanding of the industry to build the company that I’m building.

The first funding round totally shifted my perspective. I had my standard CRM to manage all the meetings I was having with investors. That first funding round — I’ve glossed over this — was about 300 meetings in a very short time frame. It was awful.

When I say it was traumatic, it was just meeting the worst people, saying all kinds of things I had never had said to me before, which is where the gender element comes into it. I had, up until that point in my life, prided myself on my academic capabilities. That was a large part of my identity. And then there was this notion that I was stupid. There were investors who did not believe that I was the one who had written the code for what I was building.

There are also some specific examples that have stayed with me. I knew a guy who was a few years younger than me who had dropped out of high school to build his company. He looked like he was high all the time, spoke really slowly and didn’t ever answer a question directly. But investors loved the persona. This worked so well for him as a genius dropout. If we’re being real, he did not prove anything. Nothing about him said genius except for his cool dude persona. I’m not a cool dude. I get it. But if we look at actual credibility, I had a lot more than he did coming into this. Yet the whole narrative around the fact that I’d dropped out was perceived very, very differently.

I’d been told I don’t look like someone with a physics degree. I was genuinely having to send screenshots of my code commits, basically do live coding interviews with investors, to prove that I was the one who had in fact built my own company, despite having several software engineering internships under my belt, despite having a physics degree from Imperial.

The thing that validated the bias point was the CTO I hired a year after starting the business. He also has an Imperial physics degree. We have the same qualification. He is a white man. No one has ever asked him if he can code. No one has ever challenged the notion that he is a software engineer. I have had it challenged multiple times.

How did that experience change how you approached fundraising?

I got to the end of that round and thought — is it just me, or are a lot of my investors women? I went through my CRM and added a gender column. Of the roughly 300 meetings I did, about 75% were with male investors and 25% with female investors, which is roughly expected.

But of my actual investors, over 80% were women. And in terms of dollars invested, accounting for the size of each investment, over 90% of the dollars I’ve raised were led by female investment decisions. From a sample size of 300, that’s a striking pattern in my own fundraising data, and it isn’t trivial. Had I known that before I started fundraising, I would have strategised very, very differently. I am strategising differently this time.

Female investors rarely asked me to justify the size of the skincare market. With male investors, it came up repeatedly — often in ways that revealed how unfamiliar they were with the category.

Fundamentally, after that first funding round, my opinion totally changed. I discovered that it is, in fact, considerably harder to raise funding as a woman, and it doesn’t matter how talented you are.

This was before I’d seen any of the 2% statistics, before I’d read the Harvard Business School study about promotion versus prevention questions in investor pitches. I knew none of that going in. It was only after I looked at my own numbers that I came to the conclusion that there are indeed systemic barriers for women trying to raise capital. I actually think it does women a disservice not to acknowledge them.

There are founders who continue to say it doesn’t matter — if I could do it, anyone could do it. That’s just not true.

If you could change one thing about the environment for high-potential female founders in the UK — on the policy side — what would have the biggest impact?

Explore whether targeted tax incentives could broaden who receives early-stage capital. I’m offering this as a provocative policy avenue rather than a fully formed proposal, but so far voluntary commitments alone have produced limited change.

Female founders have such difficulty accessing capital in the first place. If we just had more capital to prove what we’re capable of, demonstrate those returns and put more case studies in front of people, that could start to challenge these systemic biases.

I don’t think any of the people I spoke to who asked if I really had a physics degree, or if I could really code, are genuinely racist, sexist or ageist people. They’re just pattern matching. But when people said this to me, I said to their face: so tell me, what does a physicist look like? It just makes them uncomfortable. It makes them think.

And it makes me feel like if there were more examples of women with technical backgrounds, female founders building businesses — just for people to subconsciously re-evaluate what they think a founder looks like — that could help.

What’s one thing you’ve read, listened to or come across recently that you’d recommend to readers?

Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. The core idea that’s stuck with me: successful people don’t fail less — they just learn from failure faster. As a founder, that’s reframed how I think about growth.

The goal isn’t to have the perfect plan; it’s to run the right experiments, read the signal quickly and be honest enough to kill what isn’t working. I wrote a bit more about how I’m applying this at Clear here.

This series is run in partnership with the Jessica Vollman Foundation, a non-profit founded to honour the legacy of the late CEO, founder and advocate for women in entrepreneurship: Jessica Vollman.

Britannia’s Rules

We’re often asked what entrepreneurs in our network think about the country. The truth is, it’s been hard to give a precise answer. Until now. This week we released two papers, drawing on our most recent Entrepreneurs Survey with Public First, with Cool Britannia revealing entrepreneurs’ views on the country, and London’s Calling drilling down into the views of those building in the capital.

Though they’re both breezy reads — a few scrolls and you’re done — they’re so dense with data that it would be impossible to do them justice here. But I’ll try my best. As I argue in City AM:

“Despite most believing it a good place to start a business, 70 per cent of founders said the UK presents itself ineffectively. So what shapes that judgement? According to some of Britain’s most ambitious entrepreneurs, in third place come cultural factors like language and lifestyle; in second, the pull of investor networks; but top of the list sits the cold truth for any government — founders judge a country first on its tax rates.”

“Presented with a range of options, founders would sell the UK on two things above all: its Enterprise Investment Schemes, which offer a tax break for investors, and its position as Europe’s largest venture capital market (cited by 49 and 42 per cent respectively). The prosaic is pivotal.”

Asked what they would warn about, 60% of entrepreneurs in our network converged on taxation and regulation.

Turning our attention to the capital, we found that London’s draw is real but its cost is corrosive. What pulls founders in are the ecosystem and the network effects it engenders — and quality of life matters too. London’s founders also recognise the bump the city gives them in fundraising, credibility and partnerships.

But 55% of London founders have considered moving their company out of the capital in the past year, with more than a quarter giving it serious consideration or actively planning a move. They are looking across the pond at cities like San Francisco and New York, with Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris trailing well behind.

In short, founders rate the UK and London highly on fundamentals — talent, ecosystem, capital access, quality of life — but feel let down by cost, tax, regulation and the way the country sells itself. The good news is that these are largely things government can change.

We launched the Entrepreneurs Survey with Public First because our network is large (and growing fast) — and because the insights of the entrepreneurs reading this weren’t being heard. To that end, if you’re a founder who wants to be heard, join us here. If you want to sponsor the survey, drop me an email. And if you’re a policymaker with a burning question, let me know — we may be able to put it in the next wave.

Means Testing

Jonathan Ortmans, President of the Global Entrepreneurship Network and one of our Advisers, wrote an ambitious essay in June that I’ve only just caught up on, looking at what AI does to the case for entrepreneurship education.

His starting point is that the deal on offer for most of human history — follow the process and the process will look after you — is being withdrawn, because the process was always underwritten by the scarcity of cognitive competence. When expertise is abundant, what stays scarce is the willingness to act on it. He takes the frame from Sam Kriss, who argues in Harper’s that the defining division of the coming decades will run not between levels of education, but between those with agency and those without.

Which raises the question: where does agency come from? Jonathan presents a swathe of studies, but to take just one, Saras Sarasvathy of the University of Virginia sat twenty-seven expert entrepreneurs down with real venture problems and had them think aloud. Rather than fixing a goal and assembling the means to reach it, they started from the means already to hand — their skills, their contacts, whatever was lying about — and let the ends emerge. Effectuation, she calls it, and its significance is that it describes a logic rather than a temperament. Logics can be taught.

Jonathan argues that a logic like this could be designed into an education system, but isn’t — we built ours to sort and certify, which rewards the opposite. He is clear that nobody has a blueprint for reversing that at the scale of a school system, so he asks for a process rather than a plan. Read it, then take him up on it.

Founders Keepers

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST) has asked us to remind you that The King’s Awards for Enterprise have a new Young Founder category this year. It’s the first new strand in a while. The bar is reasonable: you need to be aged 18 to 30 on 6 May 2027, with a minimum annual turnover of £250,000 or £500,000 raised in external funding such as investment, loans or grants. Awards work best if the right people know they exist. If you know an eligible founder, encourage them to apply before applications close on 8 September.

Separately, DBIST is keen for more nominations for its Pro-Worker AI Adoption Prize. The framing borrows from Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and Simon Johnson’s pro-worker AI argument — that whether AI raises wages or hollows out work is a question of how firms choose to deploy it, not a property of the technology — and Johnson himself chairs the judging panel. Any UK business, charity or public body with at least ten UK-based employees can be nominated — by itself, by its workers, by a union or by an investor. Nominations close on 30 September.

In Essence

Our latest Adviser is Dr Nimrita Bassi, founder and CEO of Marketing Essentials Lab. She holds a PhD in Online Customer Experience from the University of Exeter and combines academic research with practical work supporting companies. In her own words:

“Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of any economy, and The Entrepreneurs Network plays a crucial role in not only helping shape policy but also nurturing a powerful community where founders can come together, share ideas and be supported. I have been following the work The Entrepreneurs Network has been doing to make the UK a truly great place to start and grow a business, and I could not be more delighted to support them in their mission.”

Hard Wiring

While Andy Burnham’s call for Fifa President Gianni Infantino to lose his job (not content with one deposition in July) will grab the headlines, the more consequential news this week was yesterday’s announcement that mayors will be apportioned a share of income tax. More detail emerged today in a statement from the Cabinet entitled Rewiring the State.

From 2028, central grants to mayors will be replaced with a share of local income tax, so regions that grow their tax base keep the increased receipts. Alongside this, councils and strategic authorities will retain more business rates, with areas without mayors keeping some too. Strategic authorities also get powers to introduce an Overnight Visitor Levy. Details of both retained shares are due this autumn. The business rates share will be set out alongside the Budget, together with a fiscal devolution roadmap; the income tax arrangements will be confirmed at the Spending Review.

Business rates retention begins in April 2027, when mayors also gain the power to introduce an Overnight Visitor Levy; new mayors will be elected in Cumbria and in Cheshire and Warrington in May 2027; income tax retention starts in April 2028, with a further wave of mayoral elections in spring 2028. A September meeting with all mayors, permanent secretaries and the Cabinet Secretary will review progress.

Every area in England is to have a strategic authority, or will be establishing one, by the end of 2027, with full coverage by the end of 2028. Mayors won’t be imposed, but mayoral areas get greater powers. Four further areas have been conferred established mayoral strategic authority status: Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, East Midlands, West of England, and York and North Yorkshire.

There will be a broad transfer of functions to mayors, to be completed this Parliament under a “devolve by default” principle under which secretaries of state must justify keeping any function centrally. Mayors will gain control of the 16–19 skills budget and new technical and vocational pathways, along with devolved employment support, including for the long-term unemployed. On transport, they get faster bus franchising, integrated ticketing, a deeper Great British Railways partnership on commuter rail, and the approval threshold for transport schemes raised to £500 million. Housing powers come through a devolved Social and Affordable Homes Programme and stronger development corporations. They will also take a larger share of later-stage innovation funding, along with greater local control over cultural and sporting investment, which could include funding currently held by Arts Council England and Sport England. Police, fire and Integrated Care Board boundaries will be aligned to strategic authorities by the end of the Parliament, with new deputy mayor roles for key public services.

This is ambitious stuff. As we’ve argued previously, devolution comes in two forms. The first transfers funds, on the assumption that decisions made closer to the ground will be better ones. The second lets places keep the proceeds of growth, and bear the cost when it doesn’t come. It is only this latter model that alters the incentives at play.

However, allowing places to keep what growth generates necessarily allows them to pull apart from one another, which may run up against the Government’s tagline of “good growth in every postcode”. We will have to wait to see whether places will really bear the downside.

For entrepreneurs, the practical upshot is that more of the state you deal with will be run from your own region. That cuts both ways: a founder selling into several regions will have several sets of rules to learn, and not every strategic authority will start with the commissioning capacity to make good use of what it’s been handed.

But the direction is right, and procurement is the clearest case. Tussell and the British Chambers of Commerce found England’s public sector spent a record £45.2 billion with SMEs last year, with local government considerably better at buying from smaller firms than central government.

The point isn’t that mayors will spend your money better — though being closer to the action should help — but that for the first time they have more reason to care whether you make any.

Portal Combat

If I were writing a history of the downfall of former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Government, I would open with his first Budget, in October 2024. It soured business sentiment in a stroke. Despite subsequent Budgets being much better — a turn that correlated with the appointment of Alex Depledge as the first-ever Entrepreneurship Adviser — the damage was already done.

The date of the next Budget has just been released: Wednesday, 28 October. We will, of course, be feeding in our research and the insights many of you have shared through our survey work with Public First. But you may want to share your views too. A portal has just been opened where you can make a written submission to HM Treasury, commenting on government policy and suggesting ideas for the Budget. It closes on Wednesday, 9 September.

Fen Club

We’re supporting Liberti Club’s Dinner and Debate on scaling science and tech firms, at Downing College, Cambridge, on 23 September. Our Adviser Alex Evans, who directs Liberti Club, has assembled panellists from across finance, marketing and fractional leadership to debate what’s unlocking growth for the sector right now — access to capital, talent and the partner ecosystems and fractional hires that let scale-ups punch above their headcount. If you’re building or advising in the sector, register your interest here.

It’s not the only reason to be in Cambridge this autumn: our Adviser Geeta Sidhu-Robb is hosting the first Bootstrappers’ Breakfast there on 14 September, a free morning for female founders building their first £1 million, at The Glasshouse. Geeta built Seven Rungs to back women scaling without external investment, and this session puts founders in front of others who’ve done it — including VET.CT’s Victoria Johnson and Francesca Hodgson of King’s SPARK. Register here.

Three Big Ideas #66

🥼 Mann Virdee, Head of Science and Technology

Graphene was first isolated in 2004 in a lab at the University of Manchester, work that won Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the Nobel Prize in Physics. But within a decade, more than 7,500 graphene patents had been filed worldwide — only about 50 of them from the UK. By contrast, more than 2,200 were from China and over 1,100 were from South Korea, with Samsung alone holding hundreds. The Chancellor at the time, George Osborne, insisted that technology invented in the UK should also be developed here. It’s a problem that keeps repeating.

It’s that kind of failure that sits at the heart of a new report, Science: A New Golden Age, published last week by President Trump’s science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios. It’s the boldest attempt to reimagine the US research ecosystem since Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier.

One of the core arguments in the report is that discovery without domestic manufacturing can leave countries paying for the research while others capture the returns. Or, as I wrote for this series last year:

“process knowledge is being lost by offshoring supply chains, which in turn harms countries’ entrepreneurial ecosystems. The process of building, iterating, innovating, and improving manufacturing gets lost, and it’s just as important as the ‘Eureka’ moment in the lab.”

Britain could view the report as a mirror of what has happened in our own science and tech ecosystem.

Another key part of the report is its selection of the funding-mechanism experiments that Britain’s own metascience community has championed for years. That includes golden tickets (letting one reviewer back one idea that a review panel has rejected), fast grants decided in 48 hours, and portfolio-based allocation run like a venture fund. The report calls for empowered metascience units with the authority to run randomised trials on grantmaking, and – interestingly – holds up the UK’s own Metascience Unit, established in 2024, as a model to emulate.

Alongside this, there are proposals for increased direct-to-individual funding that sidelines universities, pressure to reduce research overheads, an AI-first mandate, and a proposed rule giving political appointees more sway over grants. But it’s a tough environment for such proposals; A New Golden Age arrives at a time when the trust between scientists and government has frayed, amid grant terminations, funding cuts, and reductions in agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

🔧 Ian Ng, Researcher

“Can AI build a train?” asked Andy Burnham in his latest push for technical careers. Since ChatGPT took off in 2022, plenty of research has looked at AI’s impact on the labour market, and the common assumption has been that skilled trades are more immune to it than desk jobs. However, Google’s latest research complicates the picture.

Google’s first AI & Economy ATLAS report looks into how users interact with its AI tools and finds that AI use is not limited to desk-based jobs. It also assists workers in physical and manual occupations on adjacent tasks, acting as a “hands-on collaborator” for diagnostics, troubleshooting and real-time learning, with multimodal AI use over two times higher than the overall usage rate among automotive service technicians and mechanics.

The report compares AI usage shares to employment shares across major occupation groups. As you’d expect, AI adoption is the most over-represented (relative to employment share) in “computer and mathematical” and “business and financial operations”. While a correlation can be drawn between higher manual task shares and less AI usage, some high-manual occupations still stand out where AI usage was observed — in tasks complementary to manual work. For example, 44% of industrial machinery mechanics’ tasks are manual, but AI use is still observed in non-routine cognitive tasks such as analysing test results and machine error messages. That’s the key distinction — the routine, hands-on part of manual work is largely untouched by AI so far, but the non-routine analytical part of the same job isn’t.

It’s not the doom and gloom of AI replacing human beings either. Britain faces a well-documented labour shortage in key sectors crucial to the net-zero transition, in particular among automotive technicians and mechanics. Automotive technicians and mechanics are in mostly manual jobs, and the report observed AI being used for testing vehicle components and inspecting parts for wear. It happens to be one of the sectors where Britain faces difficulty in filling vacancies, as the lack of EV-qualified technicians is stalling Britain’s transition to EVs. The training pipeline is not keeping pace with the technology, and instead of replacing technicians, AI could actually assist technicians with diagnostic work. Another occupational group where high AI usage was observed is electrical and electronics repairers, recently included in the Migration Advisory Committee’s Temporary Shortage List.

Burnham is right that Britain undervalued technical routes. But the fix shouldn’t rest on the idea that trades are somehow immune to AI — they’re not, even if the disruption looks nothing like the white-collar version. AI was not built to plug Britain’s skills gap, but we could use some AI to plug that gap and help train the next generation of technicians.

🎢 Philip Salter, Founder

There’s no getting away from it: being an entrepreneur is a risky business. Fewer than four in ten new UK businesses make it to their fifth birthday.

But we know that society benefits from this risk-taking. Entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful engines of productivity and progress. Throughout history, entrepreneurial ventures have transformed societies, lifting people from subsistence to prosperity.

Nordhaus estimated that innovators capture only about 2.2% of the social surplus their innovations create. The rest flows to everyone else. But we aren’t the best in the world at building a society around this fact. As Richard Browning, founder of Gravity Industries, argues:

“Culturally, we are far more risk-averse than places like California, often pricing ambition out of existence before it even starts. To compete globally, we must shift from an insular mindset to a more outward-looking, non-ministerial view of global opportunity.”

If Browning is right that we price ambition out too early, it’s worth asking how early. Writing today, Elle Smith argues that risk aversion starts in childhood — and that a freer upbringing might be what produces the risk-takers an economy needs. So what does the evidence suggest?

Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein have found that it is the combination of high cognitive ability and a streak of teenage rule-breaking — skipping school, minor mischief, a taste for risk — that predicts who becomes an entrepreneur and who earns more for it. A Swedish cohort tracked for nearly four decades replicated the pattern, though only for modest rule-breaking rather than serious crime.

The strongest signal of all is having an entrepreneurial parent, which makes a child around 60% more likely to follow suit; and because the effect shows up even among adopted children raised apart from their biological parents, the evidence points to role-modelling, not genes alone.

What we can’t yet say is that giving children more freedom makes them entrepreneurs. The logic is inviting: free and risky play builds resilience, self-regulation and self-efficacy, while over-protective parenting seems to erode them. Self-efficacy is one of the best-evidenced ingredients of entrepreneurial intention we have. But no one has yet traced a free-range childhood through to who actually starts a business — the direct evidence isn’t there yet.

I don’t want to rest too heavily on anecdata, but in a recent chat with a large group of some of the most impressive people I know, nearly all of them said they’d had a great deal of freedom growing up. It’s a small sample and correlation isn’t causation and all that, but it deserves more thinking about.

Dissecting DSIT

Andy Burnham has delivered two big surprises so far: his choice of Chancellor and the scrapping of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

In hindsight, John Healey shouldn’t have been such an outside bet, having served as PPS to Gordon Brown at the Treasury (1999–2001), successively Adult Skills Minister, Treasury Minister, Local Government Minister and Housing Minister (2001–2010) and Defence Secretary (2024–2026).

The bigger shock was, of course, carving DSIT up between the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST) and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. There’s no sugarcoating it — pretty much everyone is interpreting it as a blow to Britain’s capacity to deliver tech policy. As subscribers to our Policy Updates will have read earlier in the week, tech leaders and lobby groups were blindsided by its abolition.

The good news is that Kanishka Narayan will now attend Cabinet as AI Minister, jointly working in the Cabinet Office and DBIST. A friend of The Entrepreneurs Network, Kanishka is a leading thinker and doer in government — and one who has the respect of the tech ecosystem. As he wrote on X:

“AI is likely the most significant technology in human history. Its impact will dwarf other things. The best case for it is compelling beyond our dreams: a reindustrialised Britain, stronger national security, public services transformed for the better. The risks, too, are real: it is right that the British public shares those worries, for jobs, for the pace of change. The central fact is that it is happening. Nations have a narrow window to decide whether they shape AI or get shaped by it. Britain is in that window right now. While that window is still open, I will act with pace, I will act with ambition, and I will focus relentlessly on securing British influence in shaping AI.”

And it’s great to see the launch of the new AI Taskforce today, chaired by Lord Vallance, which aims to transform public services. Encouragingly, it’s framed as being based on the Vaccines Taskforce which, the press release claims (correctly), “showed that an empowered unit, with clear accountability to the Prime Minister, can drive extraordinary outcomes and deliver real benefits for people across the country.”

It’s also pleasing to see Jonathan Reynolds back at the helm of the beefed-up business department. In his speech as Business Secretary at the launch of our Backing Breakthrough Businesses report — led by our Patron Steve Rigby, with most of its recommendations now adopted — Jonny made the critical point that while his constituents don’t tell him they’re specifically worried about growth being below the post-war trend, they are worried that their children won’t have the kind of opportunities that they had.

As the new Government will know only too well — in fact, one would hope that this is the central motive for ditching Starmer — one of the most-replicated and well-known findings in economics and political science is that voters return governments after periods of economic prosperity.

Of course, that’s not entirely in any Prime Minister’s control — global events can do plenty of damage. But even so, I agree with Matt Clifford that the UK could be one of the richest countries in the world.

Tech alone won’t get Britain there. But Britain won’t get there without it.

Wow!

We’re delighted to be supporting MHR and The Telegraph Media Group with their inaugural World of Work 2026 — a free, one-day gathering on how people, finance and AI/tech leadership are reshaping the way we work. Rory Sutherland and Tim Campbell MBE keynote, alongside a Telegraph Future of Work panel, Gerard Lyons on the economic outlook (global risks and UK realities), Lucy Adams on building high-performing teams and leading through change, and hands-on sessions on putting AI to work across people and finance functions.

It runs on Wednesday 23 September, with sessions followed by evening networking, at Tobacco Dock in Wapping. It’s aimed at business decision-makers, so do pass it on to your HR or people lead, your finance lead, or anyone else who’d get value from it. Find out more here.

We share free opportunities like this with our Members. Join for free here, or let me know if you have anything you would like us to share with thousands of founders.

Alma Matters

Amy Morgan, one of our Advisers, flagged this: applications are open for Barclays' inaugural Demo Day – Best of Universities, bringing 45 university spinouts before around 200 investors — VCs, angels and family offices — at Barclays’ London HQ on 3 November. Selected ventures get investor access, bespoke 1:1 mentoring and national visibility. Three stages run: life sciences (Parkwalk’s Anne Dobrée), physical sciences and advanced manufacturing (Innovate UK’s Tom Adeyoola), and deep tech (Conception X’s Riam Kanso). For spinouts actively raising — applications close 14 August. TTOs and investors, do share with your portfolios and alumni. Apply here to present.

Sinclair Research

We’re delighted to welcome Matthew Sinclair, Senior Director at CCIA UK, as an Adviser to The Entrepreneurs Network. Matthew leads CCIA’s UK office and its engagement with policymakers across competition, intellectual property, privacy and safety. An economist with fifteen years in public policy, he’s advised the UK government, EU institutions and major media and technology companies on digital regulation, and has served as a senior economic adviser to government. On why he’s joined us, Matthew says: “It is much too easy for policymakers to neglect the impact of their decisions on entrepreneurs.” Welcome, Matthew.

Compete Overhaul

Britain’s competition policy framework is changing. Earlier this year, the Government made a series of proposals for altering how the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) operates. A public consultation on those proposals closed last month, and you can read our submission to it here. The King’s Speech announced the Competition Reform Bill, which will take these reforms forward.

While we were pulling together our initial response, we soon realised that awareness of the proposals was sorely lacking. When we got in touch with founders, investors and other key players in Britain’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, a worrying number replied to us saying this was the first they’d heard of the mooted changes. As such, we hope this article can go some way to redressing that.

Why policymakers are acting

In November 2024, the CMA set out its ‘4Ps’ approach, which would put improving the pace, predictability, proportionality and process at the heart of its work. Not long after, the Government issued its ‘Strategic Steer’ to the CMA, wherein it reiterated that “regulators have a key role to play in upholding and promoting the reputation of the UK as a centre for certain, proportionate and transparent regulation.”

To a large extent, the proposed changes can be understood against this backdrop. For both the CMA and the Government to make good on their intentions, the creation of new powers has evidently been deemed necessary.

It is also worth considering the changing business and technological landscape. Nobody can now ignore the dramatic impact artificial intelligence and algorithms are having on the economy — whether reinforcing the position of established firms, or allowing agile startups to scale rapidly. When technology is changing as radically as it currently is, it is only logical that the remit of regulators should be reviewed too.

What’s changing

The Government’s consultation spans a wide range of reforms, but four broad shifts stand out.

More discretion for the CMA

Decision-making within the CMA may become more centralised and discretionary. The Government consulted on abolishing the current panel system for Phase 2 investigations — wherein Phase 2 mergers are scrutinised by independent panel members operating separately from the CMA Board and from the staff who conducted the initial Phase 1 review. The consultation also proposed extending the timeframe for remedies to be agreed before moving on to Phase 2 investigation. The Bill did not give specifics on this but indicated that it will give businesses and the CMA more time at the early stages to engage and agree solutions. It further proposed replacing panel-led inquiry groups with committees drawn from the CMA Board itself.

The justification for this change is that it would increase accountability at board level, streamline processes and improve consistency. But there are fears that it may reduce the degree of outside expertise and independent challenge within the system, making it harder for businesses to anticipate how decisions will be made. To mitigate this, we believe merging parties should be granted the right to appeal adverse decisions on their merits and the right to access the CMA’s file on them. The Competition Reform Bill states that it will give the CMA Board “a role in decisions on mergers and market investigations” but does not confirm whether the panel system will be abolished.

Merging of the two-step system

The consultation proposed replacing the existing two-step market study and market investigation system with a more flexible, single-step review tool.

Currently, the CMA assesses whether there is an “adverse effect on consumers” in a market study and “adverse effect on competition” for market investigation. The consultation proposed merging the two into a single “adverse effect on consumers” test, which would allow the CMA to act in cases where the competition link is disputed but consumer harm is material. While adopting the lower threshold (for market study), the single tool could carry market-investigation remedial powers.

The Government committed to concluding most reviews within 18-24 months in the Competition Reform Bill, but did not clarify whether the replacement of the system would be the mechanism. In our response to the consultation, we pointed out that the 24-month baseline could increase uncertainty for businesses and recommended a shorter and more flexible timeframe combined with disciplined use of extensions.

Regular review of remedies

The consultation proposed a requirement for the CMA to consider sunset clauses on remedies and to review future remedies at least once every ten years. (Remedies are the corrective measures the CMA imposes after a market or merger investigation finds a competition problem.)

We think sunset clauses could ensure remedies remain proportionate and responsive to changing market conditions. For dynamic markets, such as AI or digital platforms, regular and proportional review of remedies is needed to ensure they don’t erect barriers for new entrants. We welcome the fact that the Competition Reform Bill commits to regularly reviewing all remedies placed on businesses and to concurrent regulators taking responsibility for ongoing remedies.

Algorithms in scope

The Government has proposed giving the CMA stronger powers to investigate how algorithmic systems operate in practice. As more startups build products around algorithms, scrutiny may increasingly extend into the design and deployment of core technologies.

Taken together, these reforms would see Britain’s overall competition regime adopt a more discretionary approach, and one that opens the door to more intervention. While we believe many of the proposed changes are well intentioned, we fear that they would render Britain a less attractive place in which to start, grow and invest in businesses.

How startups could be impacted

Why exits matter for founders

It is an all-too-common myth that successful entrepreneurs make their riches by bootstrapping a business and painstakingly seeing it through to being a profitable, money-making machine. Of course, some founders manage to do exactly that, and we applaud those who do. But for many more, the endgame is a little less romantic — to establish a promising startup with a deliberate intention to be acquired. That’s how most entrepreneurs and their early-stage investors make their returns. This is a feature, not a bug, and is the driver of innovation and economic growth that all startup hubs rely on.

This is why merger regimes matter. Even small shifts in how deals are assessed can have outsized effects upstream. If acquisitions become less predictable or harder to execute, investment invariably falls, as the likelihood of making a return declines. As such, capital becomes more difficult for companies to access, and the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem stutters.

The current consultation proposals would, we believe, increase uncertainty. The share-of-supply criteria and the material-influence criteria in the consultation proposals remain too broad to deliver real predictability and need to be addressed when the Bill is tabled. Separately, the Bill should clarify whether it adopts the proposed “adverse effect on consumers” test, which would broaden the scope for intervention and reduce predictability. Greater discretion for the CMA, combined with broader and more flexible intervention tools, would make it harder to anticipate which deals will be approved and on what basis.

It’s worth pointing out that a regime does not need to be blocking deals left, right and centre to change behaviour. What investors care about is predictability — and if they don’t think it’s there, they won’t be so ready and willing to back businesses. Over time, that can be enough to dampen acquisition activity and, with it, the dynamism of the startup ecosystem.

Operating under uncertainty

A country’s merger regime influences more than simply whether or not investors will cut cheques for startups. When regulators can consider a broad range of variables to establish jurisdiction over a merger, founders must be constantly aware of how they act. This can dictate decision-making on a day-to-day basis — determining, for example, whether or not they strike certain partnerships with other businesses, how they price their goods and services, if they’ll expand into new markets, and so on. Opportunities for growth may go unseized as a result.

Several of the proposed reforms risk increasing that burden on entrepreneurs. Broader legal tests would make it harder for businesses to anticipate when intervention is likely.

This is particularly acute in emerging sectors, where business models are novel and precedent is limited. A startup developing a new platform or AI-driven service may find it difficult to assess whether its conduct could later be subject to scrutiny.

From conduct to code

The consultation proposed an expansion of the CMA’s powers to investigate algorithms, which would mark a fundamental shift in competition policy, but was not included in the summary of the Competition Reform Bill.

Algorithms can shape market outcomes in powerful ways, and their importance will likely only increase over time. But it also raises difficult questions about the boundary between competition policy and conventional product regulation.

Traditionally, competition policy has focused exclusively on market structure and firm behaviour — including mergers, pricing and exclusionary conduct. Proposals to scrutinise algorithms in more detail, however, represent something altogether different.

For startups, the implications are significant. Many early-stage companies will rely on algorithmic systems as their core innovation. If those systems become subject to intensive scrutiny, the compliance burden may rise sharply. More importantly, the scope for experimentation may narrow, particularly in areas like AI where iteration and rapid deployment are central to progress.

There is a risk that, in attempting to regulate outcomes, policymakers inadvertently shape how products are designed in the first place. Beyond that, there is the more prosaic issue of compliance. Investigations could become a significant imposition on startups whose business depends on algorithms, further eroding Britain’s attractiveness as a place in which to operate such a business.

Getting the balance right

There is a credible case for updating Britain’s competition regime. Digital markets do present new challenges, and enforcement tools need to evolve accordingly. But reform should always be guided by an understanding of how business really works.

Predictability should be prioritised over discretion. Entrepreneurs and investors need to be able to reasonably anticipate how rules will be applied, particularly in fast-moving sectors.

Intervention should remain tightly focused on competition. Expanding the remit of competition policy to pursue broader social or economic goals risks diluting its effectiveness and increasing uncertainty.

And in areas like AI and algorithms, proportionality is essential. Scrutiny of any given technology must not come at the expense of experimentation at such a nascent stage, or end up placing an undue burden on businesses subject to investigations.

What next?

With a change of Prime Minister and reshuffling of ministers, the current legislative programme has been put on hold. Depending on the new legislative priorities of the incoming administration, it could shift its tone on competition or further tweak the Competition Reform Bill.

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Burnham’s First Cabinet

Andy Burnham’s first moves as Prime Minister are leading the headlines today. He promised a 10-year plan to transform Britain with a “new political model and new economic model” focused on reindustrialisation and a rollback of privatisation.

Burnham appointed John Healey as Chancellor and folded the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) into the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST) and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The Business Department will be absorbing the science and innovation briefs, while digital regulation and online safety briefs return to DCMS. While the tech sector has expressed concerns over the scrapping of DSIT, former Business Secretary and former Chair of the Science Select Committee Greg Clark said the reorganisation can break down silos and make the department more joined-up and effective.

Junior ministers have yet to be confirmed, but Tech Secretary Liz Kendall and Science Minister Lord Vallance have left the Government. Lord Vallance — formerly the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and himself a scientist — earned praise from the science and research community for his thorough grasp of the brief. As Science Minister, Vallance secured the largest ever R&D settlement — with DSIT’s Spending Review 2025 settlement officially billed by the department as a “record” allocation, rising from £13.9 billion in 2025-26 to £15.2 billion by 2029-30. His departure and the scrapping of DSIT lead to uncertainty over funding for R&D and scientific research (Paywall – Times Higher Education) in the next round of the spending review.

Burnham has reportedly been exploring (Paywall – Financial Times) a spending review this autumn. Both DBIST and DCMS face competing priorities with unprotected budgets (their budgets are not ringfenced like Health and Social Care’s), and the loss of a departmental Cabinet minister compounds the uncertainty over future R&D funding.

With Liz Kendall and Lord Vallance leaving the Government, AI Minister Kanishka Narayan is the only survivor from the now defunct DSIT. Narayan is well regarded across the tech sector. Matt Clifford has praised his grasp of the urgency behind the AI opportunity, while Ian Hogarth has said he is “hard-working, smart and cares”. Formerly Parliamentary Under-Secretary for AI and Online Safety, Narayan’s promotion to Minister of State for AI means he will get to focus solely on AI. He will be spanning the Cabinet Office and the expanded Business Department. Narayan will also oversee a new AI Taskforce to “drive the Government’s overall strategy on AI”, which reports to Downing Street and the Cabinet Office.

For the first time, the AI Minister will also be given a seat at the Cabinet table as a Minister of State even if he’s not heading up a department. Prime Ministers signal their priorities by inviting non-Cabinet ministers to attend the Cabinet. Keir Starmer had the International Development Minister attending the Cabinet as a consolation for not reinstating the Development Department, while Rishi Sunak had the Immigration Minister and Security Minister attending the Cabinet.

Jonathan Reynolds is back in his previous position as Business Secretary, but now with the Business Department absorbing the innovation and technology portfolio from DSIT. When Labour was first elected, Reynolds spoke at our launch for the Backing Breakthrough Businesses report in the House of Lords, where he acknowledged economic growth below the post-war trend and the need to break out of this pattern. He has built strong relationships with businesses during his previous tenure as Business Secretary and inherited goodwill from that tenure — with him returning to his old position, there is hope for some stability.

Whether the machinery of a merged department can match the profile DSIT held under a standalone Secretary of State remains to be seen, but Reynolds’s return at least gives the sector a minister the entrepreneurial community has already worked with, and some reason to expect continuity in how the brief is handled.

New Order

When Labour swept in two summers ago, most entrepreneurs in our network — at least those without a strong political affiliation pulling the other way — were relatively optimistic about the new Government. After the churn and disruption of Brexit and Covid, founders just wanted some stability. However, the October 2024 Budget decisively soured that for many of them.

ICAEW’s Business Confidence Monitor collapsed to 0.2 in Q4 2024 from 14.4 the previous quarter, as the share of firms citing the tax burden as a growing challenge hit a record 41% — the first time tax had ever topped the survey’s concerns. The IoD’s Directors’ Economic Confidence Index fell to –65 in November 2024, close to its Covid-era record low of –69, with 83% expecting higher employer NI bills and investment intentions dropping to –27.

It doesn’t stop there. BDO’s Optimism Index posted its steepest monthly fall since August 2021. The BCC’s Quarterly Economic Survey sank to its weakest since the 2022 mini-budget, with tax worries jumping to 63% from 48%. And the CIPD’s survey of more than 2,000 employers found employment intentions falling sharply, with almost a third planning to cut headcount or hire fewer and a quarter scaling back or cancelling investment — all explicitly linked to the Budget’s NIC and minimum wage rises.

Given all this, Andy Burnham takes the keys to Number 10 without the same reservoir of goodwill. As our latest Entrepreneurs Survey with Public First makes uncomfortably plain, the relationship between founders and Westminster has curdled. Asked which party they trust most to understand them, Britain’s entrepreneurs hand victory to “none of the above” (32%), ahead of the Conservatives (30%) and streets ahead of Labour, on under 7%. Nearly four in five (79%) say the Government simply does not understand what they do.

I really didn’t want to write about tax again this week, but am duty bound. If I could give one piece of advice to Burnham for getting Britain’s businesses back on side, it would be to convince them that his Government’s tax policies will be tolerable. This isn’t purely about rates, but the uncertainty that engulfs the system.

Our survey finds that more than four in five founders (82%) take a dim view of the level of taxation, and when we asked what sends the strongest message that a country is serious about entrepreneurship, they put tax levels and breaks top (68%) — ahead of access to capital (60%) and simpler regulation (49%). Entrepreneurs don’t just experience tax as a cost; they read it as a message about whether Britain wants them and whether the country is heading in the right direction. Well before the Budget, Burnham and his new Chancellor need to put an end to speculation about equalising capital gains with income tax and bolting on an exit tax.

Of course, entrepreneurs won’t stop innovating. Almost two-thirds (63%) are optimistic about their own business over the coming year, even as almost three-quarters (73%) are pessimistic about the economy they’ll be building in. The founders in our survey are, despite everything, still hiring — 43% plan to grow headcount — and still investing, with a third (34%) increasing R&D spend. They back themselves, but Burnham needs to give them a reason to back Britain.

As I argued here at the very start of the year:

“Despite the challenges, the UK remains one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business. Across multiple independent rankings, produced by different institutions using different methodologies, the UK sits comfortably in the global top tier. We aren’t at the frontier on every single metric — but we’re very close on many.”

Most of the headlines are focusing on what Starmer failed to achieve, but to end I want to suggest that some policy changes that move the dial don’t ever make the front pages. These don’t outweigh the big issues of tax and employment costs, but they can compound over time.

Take the Fingleton Review of nuclear regulation: the Government commissioned it, accepted the principle of all its recommendations, and pledged to extend the same reset to infrastructure more widely. The positive impact of its implementation was never going to be realised in one Parliament, but in time the tough choices made by Starmer should result in cheaper, cleaner energy for Britain’s entrepreneurs.

The same logic runs through other policy areas: the Regulatory Innovation Office was created to unblock the regulators governing engineering biology, space, drones and other autonomous technology; the AI Opportunities Action Plan’s 50 recommendations were adopted in full; and an Innovator Passport, tucked inside the NHS’s ten-year plan, lets a technology proven in one trust spread to the rest.

If the new Government is going to win back entrepreneurs, it needs to offer a clear path on tax. But Burnham can also build on these small successes and set in train some of his own. It’s time for Burnham’s new order.

On Purpose

The Cabinet Office is seeking members for its new Impact Economy Advisory Council — a quarterly forum advising government on how it works with impact investors, philanthropists and purpose-driven businesses, from B Corps to social enterprises. Please share with anyone relevant in your network.

Procure Meant

We’re delighted to welcome Gus Tugendhat as an Adviser. Gus is the founder and MD of Tussell, which he started in 2015 to bring transparency to the UK’s £300 billion public procurement market. He and his team have bootstrapped Tussell into the trusted, market-leading brand in its sector, built on proprietary datasets not available elsewhere.

Procurement is one of the biggest and least legible ways government shapes the market for entrepreneurs, and Tussell’s research helps make it visible. Their latest SME Procurement Tracker, produced with the British Chambers of Commerce, found that England’s public sector spent a record £45.2 billion with SMEs in 2025 — 21% of direct procurement, a six-year high — though central government and the NHS lag well behind local government. You can sign up for Tussell’s updates to follow the data yourself.