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.