Executive summary
To be added
foreword
To be received
Mike and Sarah Vollman
Introduction
Female founders in Britain build some of the country’s most successful businesses. Yet they frequently start and scale them against a set of challenges that are invisible to those who have ready networks or easier access to capital. Female-led businesses still receive a fraction of UK venture capital, and many structures remain built for founders who only have the business to think about.
This report is based on three roundtables and a series of interviews with founders building businesses across a variety of industries, and at every stage of funding. We asked founders to describe what gets in their way and where guidance would have made a difference.
Change has been partial. Policy has moved, but without founders’ specific circumstances in view, leaving many self-employed and early stage business owners less able to access support. Where founders themselves disagree on policy alternatives, we have set out both sides rather than resolving the disagreement for them.
From these roundtables and interviews, the following five themes emerged. Access to capital and the funding gap; childcare; networks and mentorship; finance procurement; and international expansion.
Key findings
Our latest analysis reveals that 54 of the UK’s 100 fastest-growing companies have a foreign-born founder or co-founder. This matches last year’s figure, equalling the highest proportion we have recorded since we first started carrying out this research in 2019. The combined pre-money valuation of these companies is £15.84 billion, representing 70% of the combined valuation of the UK’s 100 fastest growing companies.
Among the 225 founders and co-founders behind this year’s companies, 98 (or 44%) were born overseas, up from 42% last year. These statistics underscore the significant contribution that immigrants make to the UK’s entrepreneurial landscape. Of the 54 immigrant-founded or co-founded companies, 25 were established entirely by foreign-born founders, while the other 29 were joint efforts between British-born and immigrant co-founders, emphasising how immigrant founders often come to the country and complement, rather than crowd out, British-born entrepreneurs.
It is surprisingly difficult to calculate immigrants as a proportion of the total population, at least in a timely fashion. Nevertheless, Migration Observatory analysis of the latest census and Annual Population Survey data shows that the foreign-born population of the United Kingdom stood at around 16% in 2023. In the years since, net immigration will have pushed this figure higher, as it far outweighs what is referred to as 'natural population change' – the difference between non-immigrant births and deaths. More recent estimates suggest the immigrant population of just England and Wales could be closer to 18%.
The foreign-born founders in this year’s sample hail from 35 unique countries across six continents – a rise in the spread from last year’s 29. The United States was the most common birthplace, with nine founders born there. That was followed by Italy with eight, Germany and India with seven, Russia with six, Belarus, Greece, Romania and Spain with five, Australia with four, Belgium, Denmark and New Zealand with three, Canada, Chile, China, France, Israel and South Africa with two, and one each from Austria, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Finland, Iceland, Iraq, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia and Turkey. No single country accounts for more than a tenth of the foreign-born cohort – a notably more dispersed picture than last year, when France alone accounted for 12.
Once again, this data is proof that foreign-born founders make an integral and outsized contribution to Britain's entrepreneurial scene – starting and growing innovative companies which advance the economy. Our findings only serve to emphasise the importance of crafting an immigration system, and overall environment, that is navigable for and attractive to high-skilled immigrants. As we will turn to in the next section, there are a number of ways in which the Government can thread the needle of retaining control of the immigration system while still enabling international talent to easily move to Britain and begin building incredible companies here rather than elsewhere.
01) Capital access, bias and the funding gap
When asked what the biggest obstacle to growth is, female founders often cite the same statistic: female-founded businesses receive only 2% of UK venture capital. However, through the roundtables we convened and the interviews we conducted, another, equally challenging, obstacle emerged: getting someone to listen to the pitch in the first place. Long before a deck gets picked apart on its numbers, it has to survive a much earlier filter — whether the investor already knows the founder, or knows someone who does.
1.1. Warm introductions are a gatekeeper
Early stage funding is still heavily reliant on personal networks, with warm introductions going a long way with investors. The UK Business Angels Association has told Parliament that investors are frequently a source of warm referrals — meaning the same small pool of contacts tends to recycle deal flow among people who already know each other. They favour founders who have already accumulated the right contacts. The problem with this is that plenty of founders haven’t had time to build up that kind of network, or moved to the UK too recently to have one.
Case study: Ahana Banerjee — Founder, Clear
With a physics degree from Imperial College London and a run of software-engineering internships behind her, Ahana Banerjee looked like someone who wouldn’t struggle to raise money. Yet when she began looking for funding, her credentials did little to help open doors.
Out of 200 applications she sent out, she received only one response that wasn’t a rejection: Y Combinator (YC). Ahana is upfront about the fact that YC didn’t suddenly make her a better founder, and that its value was partly reputational. After gaining credibility by association, investors who had ignored her for two years suddenly wanted to take the call, simply because someone else had gone first. Since then, she has built Clear — a skin-health platform — which is now used by over 70,000 people.
After closing her first round, Ahana went back through her Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and tagged roughly 300 investor meetings by gender to better understand her fundraising numbers. Male investors made up the large majority of those meetings, reflecting the market as a whole. But when she traced where the money she had raised had come from, “over 90% of the dollars [...] raised were led by female investment decisions”. Had she known this before approaching investors, she says she would have approached fundraising differently.
1.2. Capital needed to scale
Another similar bottleneck exists further along. Even when founders can prove customers want their product and that it can generate revenue, they still struggle to find investors who understand the economics of their business or are prepared to move at the speed required for the business to flourish.
Case study: Tara Chandra — Co-founder, Here We Flo
Tara Chandra co-founded Here We Flo, an organic period-care brand now generating around £15 million a year. Their products are now stocked in Boots, Tesco and Whole Foods, among others. The business had already overcome the early-stage funding gap described above, but Chandra had a second gap waiting further along.
British consumer-sector funds are typically generalist rather than sector specific. The handful of specialist funds that do exist often had revenue thresholds beyond where Here We Flo was in its early days and even high-growth scaling years. As Chandra puts it, “funding high growth one £10k EIS cheque at a time is extremely challenging”, while competing for the same pool of institutional capital as consumer businesses like pub chains and fashion brands was prohibitive to both growth and sector expertise development. No UK working-capital lender was willing to back an unprofitable-on-paper but fast-growing business, so Chandra had to issue costly equity just to finance the inventory, until the company finally managed to obtain a line of credit. There was no relief bridging the gap either. R&D tax relief, the obvious scheme, does not extend to most consumer businesses.
1.3. Bias shapes who gets funded
Founders described changing both branding and pitches to fit a mould they believed VCs would be more responsive to — often at odds with what their business really was.
One founder in our roundtables, who started a PR agency working with female founders and many of the UK’s leading venture capital firms, explained how this can play out in practice: a breastfeeding startup was advised to change its name after roughly twenty investors, all of them male, declined to open the pitch deck. This had nothing to do with the viability of the investment, but with the word "booby" in the name made it clear what the business did. This led the founder to contemplate whether rebranding something core to the product was a sacrifice worth gaining meetings for.
A related pattern came up independently across two roundtables: female founders, on average, tend to build what one participant called "needs-based" businesses, funded from revenue rather than the opportunity-led fast-growth model most venture capital is built to back. One founder gave an example of having invented a juice-fasting business years before the wellness trend caught on. She pitched it to a potential investor who, mid-meeting, called his wife to ask whether they made juice at home — she said yes, so he turned the pitch down. The investor didn’t view juice as an investable category because he had no frame of reference for judging a business built around an everyday need rather than a novel, scalable opportunity.
Unable to raise money, founders building this kind of business are left to fund it themselves. One founder described the resulting trade-off as "the bootstrapping bargain" — bootstrapping from profit because early institutional capital simply isn’t available to them. The cost isn't just slower growth. The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) qualifying investment must be raised within three years of a company’s trading date — a clock that starts with revenue, not with fundraising. Bootstrap for a few years and the window can close before you ever approach an investor, costing access to one of the most generous early-stage tax reliefs in Europe. The rule assumes a fast, investor-backed from day one growth curve.
Policy landscape: closing the funding gap
In response to the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, many financial institutions signed the Investing in Women Code and committed to supporting equality in access to finance and improving the outlook for female entrepreneurs. The Code deserves credit as the UK had no systematic picture of the gender gap in funding for entrepreneurs prior to it. Since then, it has grown from 12 founding signatories to over 330, including most major retail banks.
The Code’s 2026 annual report found that 32% of VC investment from signatories in 2025 was directed to teams with at least one female founder, up from 27% the year before, while the figure was 15% across the UK market. All-female founding teams fared better among signatories too, receiving 6% of signatory investment value, three times the 2% they received across the market as a whole in 2025. It is worth applauding the continued expansion of the Code and the gap it is opening up against the wider market, but a voluntary code moving faster than the market it sits inside is still a market moving slowly, and some are questioning whether the effectiveness of a voluntary initiative can substitute for policy that applies to everyone.
Debbie Wosskow OBE, Co-chair of the Invest in Women Taskforce, suggested recipients of British Business Bank funding could be required to commit to the Investing in Women Code. The Women and Equalities Committee recommended a Female Enterprise Investment Scheme offering SEIS-level relief on investments up to £2 million in female-led businesses, and a requirement for VC firms to report their gender funding gap to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The Government rejected the former on subsidy control grounds and because differential rates for particular groups would be complex to design, and the latter as a disproportionate administrative burden while the FCA is streamlining data requests to VC firms.
When SEIS was introduced in 2012, relief was limited to companies that had been trading for fewer than two years. This was extended to three years in 2023, alongside an increase in the company investment limit from £150,000 to £250,000 and in the gross assets test from £200,000 to £350,000. The Women and Equalities Committee proposed removing entirely the seven-year age limit on the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), a suggestion the Government rejected on the grounds that doing so risked displacing investment towards “larger, more mature companies”. However, a company four years into trading, with under £350,000 in gross assets and fewer than 25 employees, is hardly a larger, more mature company. By measuring maturity in trading years rather than in size, EIS penalises founders who reach the same stage more slowly, having funded growth through revenue rather than early investment.
02) Childcare
For many female founders, the working day was never built around them in the first place. Those juggling children alongside growing a business say the work day rarely ends at 5pm. This requires careful planning and management to overcome, but that often sits outside the scope of a business cost.
2.1. Childcare isn’t a business cost
The tax system doesn't recognise care costs as business expenditure, and statutory leave frames paternity as time taken to support a partner rather than as something that sustains a business.
Case study: Jade Bentwood — Founder, TALO
Jade Bentwood built TALO after finding her own return from maternity leave professionally isolating. She’d spent years supporting other women through major life transitions, but nothing prepared her for how disconnected she would feel from her own business once she was off it — "I felt quite isolated, quite detached from the business I’d grown and built", she says. She built TALO, a peer-to-peer mentoring platform for women navigating career transitions with others who had walked a similar path.
Jade's policy argument centres on fathers: those who take meaningful time out, she argues, come back as sharper and more strategic leaders as they better understand first-hand what their female co-founders and colleagues navigate day to day. The problem is that current policy gives men no personal reason to take that time in the first place. This is because paternity leave is currently drawn as a portion of the mother’s shared parental leave allocation, which keeps it positioned as an act of support rather than a right in itself. "We need to reframe it so men see the value in that for themselves, rather than feeling they’re just helping out their partner", Jade says, proposing fathers receive their own individual, non-transferable paternity leave rather than a share borrowed from hers.
2.2. What counts as a business cost, and what doesn’t
Founders in two of our roundtables described networking events running from 7.30pm until 10pm, attended largely by the same people, those with no childcare responsibilities. The structural exclusion is highlighted in these events where informal deal-making takes place, whether it be over drinks at a pub, or a round at the golf course. One founder in our first roundtable pointed out a telling asymmetry in how company expenses work: a client round of golf is a business cost, and yet childcare that makes meetings possible in the first place isn’t treated in the same way.
Case study: Maria Kardakova — Founder, iCook
Maria Kardakova built iCook, an AI nutrition platform now used by 250,000 people across 176 countries, after a lockdown spent managing two children and a husband recovering from cancer. She’s blunt about the difference between her and the "30-year-old guys with no families" — last-minute pitch invitations, and evening events that run past dinner, leave her scrambling for external caretaking options that founders without kids don’t have to worry about. What makes it even harder is that it is exactly these people who she competes with for the same rooms. She’s sceptical of the gestures that are typically offered, arguing that measures such as lactation rooms solve a problem she doesn’t really have while ignoring the one she does. "We don’t need female-friendliness. We’re fine with just having the same opportunities". She points instead to kids’ rooms at conferences, a free companion or nanny ticket, and Sweden’s model of shared, well-funded childcare as the kind of change that would work.
Box 1. Sweden’s childcare model
Since 1975, Sweden has guaranteed every child a subsidised place in förskola (preschool) from age 1. Parent fees are capped by law as a percentage of household income — a maximum of 3% for the first child, 2% for the second, 1% for the third, with a fourth child free — meaning families pay a fraction of the actual care cost. Parent fees cover only around 7-17% of the total, with the rest funded publicly. Sweden also runs a "Gender Equality Bonus", a direct financial incentive rewarding parents who split parental leave equally between them.
2.3. Existing childcare policy wasn’t designed with founders in mind
Existing childcare support is designed around employment, not founding a company. This leaves self-employed and early-stage founders structurally unable to qualify.
Case study: Amber Vodegel — Founder, 28X
Amber Vodegel bootstrapped Pregnancy+ from launch through to its acquisition by Philips. Under her leadership, the app continued to scale after the acquisition, ultimately reaching more than 150 million users worldwide. She is now building 28X, a free women’s health platform. Her policy ask is narrower: exempting care costs from benefit-in-kind tax, but only for companies that meet a clear, tiered revenue growth bar. This is a way of directing the relief at businesses that are already bringing money into the country, rather than opening it up without limit. "There must be something we can do, especially for women, around childcare", she says, framing it less as a concession to founders and more as a return on the growth they’re already generating.
Policy landscape: childcare and parental leave
Funded childcare begins only at nine months, so the first stretch is carried by maternity leave and pay. Statutory maternity pay requires earnings of at least £129 a week, and dividends do not count towards this threshold. A sole-director company cannot claim the Employment Allowance, which pushes many to take their salary at £5,000 before Employers’ National Insurance comes in, making their salary equivalent to £96 a week and falling below the £129 a week threshold. Founders in this position fall back on maternity allowance at 90% of a £5,000 salary, roughly £87 a week for 39 weeks.
From September 2025, working parents in England have been entitled to 30 hours of government-funded childcare a week, for 38 weeks a year, from the age of nine months. Parents in a “startup period”, such as being newly self-employed, are also entitled to the free childcare without having to meet the income floor for 12 months.
However, the scheme is still designed around regular monthly income and this works against founders. Applicants have to estimate their expected earnings for the upcoming quarter and reconfirm every three months. Self-employed applicants are permitted to average their income across the full year, but it only works when they have a full year of trading history to average against. Separately, where either parent’s adjusted net income exceeds £100,000, they lose the entitlement to free childcare outright. This hits founders especially hard, since a single large dividend can take them over the line in a year even when their average earnings are unremarkable.
The idea of making childcare a deductible business expense also has been raised by the Women and Equalities Committee — when it recommended that the Government examine the merits of the idea, “if only for an initial period”. That said, any such exemption is likely to meet the same objection from the Government on differential tax treatment grounds, and to rule it out as not ”wholly and exclusively” for business purposes. Workplace nurseries are fully exempt from income tax and national insurance as a benefit in kind, only where the employer is wholly or partly responsible for financing and managing the provision of the care, and where it is available to all employees. It is not realistic for a startup to finance and manage a childcare facility — and even if it can do so, it is still disproportionately placing the responsibility of childcare on female founders.
The Women and Equalities Committee also echoed Jade’s argument that men should share the responsibility of childcare. It called for reform of the shared parental leave scheme by improving paternity leave and pay, arguing it could “directly benefit female entrepreneurs”. The Committee has separately recommended raising paternity pay to match maternity pay's rate for the first six weeks. The Government has since launched a review of parental leave and pay in July 2025, which is expected to conclude in 2027.
04) Finance and Procurement
Another barrier faced by female founders is one that is baked into the mechanism of the Government itself. It covers how tax credit claims are assessed, and which businesses a public contract reaches. These hurdles concern process rather than perception, and recurred across our roundtables often enough to warrant a section of their own.
4.1. R&D tax credit difficulties
Across two of our roundtables, female founders described R&D tax credits and rising employment costs as a difficult combination to manage. Since 2023, HMRC has significantly tightened the R&D claims process to crack down on fraudulent and erroneous claims: all claims must now include a mandatory Additional Information Form detailing each project’s technical uncertainty and progress, and the proportion of claims selected for a compliance enquiry has risen from around 1% to as high as 17-20% in recent years.
At the same time, Employers’ National Insurance rose from 13.8% to 15% in April 2025, alongside a lower threshold at which it starts being charged — both changes increasing the cost of hiring technical staff and growing R&D-heavy business needs. This is a common problem for small businesses, but lands especially hard on female founders who are already stretched thin on time and capital.
4.2. Grant assessment tilted towards academic backgrounds
Grant assessors that are drawn largely from academic and research backgrounds default to rewarding long feasibility studies. They treat founders who say a problem can be solved quickly with suspicion rather than confidence. This isn’t a problem unique to female founders as it’s a structural feature of how these panels are staffed. But it lands hard on founders building the kind of fast, needs-based businesses this report has already described as more common among the women we spoke to.
Amber, whose founder journey we introduced in the Childcare section, has now been on both sides of the grant process. First, she bootstrapped Pregnancy+ through to its acquisition by Philips, without grant funding or external investment. Under her leadership, the app subsequently continued to scale, ultimately reaching more than 150 million users worldwide. Later, she navigated UK-style panels while building 28X. She discovered that the people judging these applications were almost always drawn from research backgrounds, where a career depends on finishing one study only to secure funding for the next. This background shapes their perspective on entrepreneurial attitudes, and the kinds of businesses they tend to support. A founder who says a problem can be solved quickly reads as naive to this demographic. “They hate it when you say it’s easy,” she says.
When it comes to proposing a change, Amber’s suggestion focuses on the structure of these panels: put an entrepreneur on every assessment board to supplement the researcher and the policy specialist, so the vote reflects more than one way of judging risk.
A related complaint surfaced independently in our second roundtable, where female founders pointed to the same assessment criteria that rewarded institutional and academic credentials over commercial traction. Often the traction is the stronger evidence of viability, and yet it counts for less in the eyes of assessors than a research qualification does.
4.3. Procurement bypasses early-stage and SME suppliers
Public procurement rarely reaches early-stage or SME suppliers, and where the government does buy software or services in this space, contracts have gone to overseas providers even when a UK-founded alternative exists.
Jade’s argument, returning from Childcare, is that public sector contracts can transform an early-stage business by giving it stable revenue, reducing the pressure to raise external funding before a company is ready to scale. She says that shifting more government procurement towards SMEs ”would help smaller businesses,” which would in turn lift female-founded businesses without needing a gender-specific mechanism.
Amber furthers this point, citing NHS software procurement for AI GP-scribe software tools that let doctors focus on the patient rather than typing throughout the consultation. Her point is that when the Government procures technology, the question should be who owns it and where the resulting profits end up. Amber’s proposed fix is implementing a minimum proportion of government spend directed toward UK-based suppliers to increase the incentive for UK entrepreneurship. She argues that framing the requirement as a single narrow quota would invite backlash, and so it should be designed as a small set of qualifying pillars — UK-based, or female-founded, or both — so a supplier only needs to meet one to qualify.
This tackles a question that our second roundtable raised regarding the potential for government contracts carrying a minimum proportion for diverse female founders specifically, though it’s worth weighing against the opposite critique. It has been argued that UK procurement suffers from "everythingism" — the tendency to load every contract with competing secondary objectives (net zero, social value, regional growth, diversity) until the primary goal of getting good value for money becomes impossible to deliver well. In mid-2026, the Government itself moved to strip back net zero and diversity requirements from procurement rules specifically to simplify the process and refocus it on job creation. Amber’s own proposal is arguably designed with this tension in mind — her "qualifying pillars" model asks a supplier to meet just one flexible condition rather than piling on multiple mandatory ones, which is a different proposition to the kind of multi-objective procurement rules that "everythingism" critiques.
Policy landscape: navigating government bureaucracy
Navigation of government bureaucracy came up repeatedly in our interviews and roundtables, and most of the criticisms are not gender specific. From the R&D tax credits to government procurement deterring SMEs, grant assessment to Employers’ NI, many barriers our founders named are most often faced by small businesses, and women-led businesses are disproportionately small. The Longitudinal Small Business Survey 2024 found that only 11% of medium-sized businesses were women-led, compared with 14% of small businesses and 13% of micro-businesses — a gap the survey described as a consistent trend across the years.
The Government may not have placed an entrepreneur on every assessment panel, but it did commit to gender-equitable assessment panels, with an aim for 50% women assessors embedded in assessor onboarding in Innovate UK's Pledge for Progress in April 2025. Innovate UK has also introduced a new system to match assessors to applications, which classifies assessors holistically — taking into consideration technical, sector and application-area knowledge. Innovate UK has also launched an assessor recruitment drive since September 2025, a modest but concrete step toward meeting that 50% target.
Some countries take a more direct approach to support female founders through public procurement. In the US, the federal government runs a formal set-aside programme aiming for 5% of contracts to go to women-owned small businesses specifically. The Women and Equalities Committee cited this example and formally recommended that the UK Government set a 10% target for awarding to female-led businesses. The Government declined this recommendation in its January 2026 response, choosing instead to rely on the Procurement Act 2023’s general duty on contracting authorities to have regard to barriers facing SMEs, and on the SME spend targets that departments have set under the National Procurement Policy Statement, arguing these will ”benefit SME female-led businesses”" without a female-specific mechanism. This mirrors the pattern seen across the other four themes: rather than adopting the Committee's headline structural asks, such as a Female Enterprise Investment Scheme, mandatory FCA reporting, or a dedicated Female Entrepreneurship Strategy, the Government has consistently opted to expand voluntary or industry-led routes instead, most visibly through the Invest in Women Taskforce's £635 million funding pool, of which over £115 million had been deployed by 15 July 2026, and the British Business Bank’s £400 million Investor Pathways Capital programme.
Box 3. Canada’s approach to procurement and women-owned businesses
Since 2011, the Canadian federal government has run a formal certification system for women-owned businesses through WBE Canada, a non-profit that verifies a company is at least 51% owned, managed and controlled by women. Certification gives businesses a dedicated portal of government and corporate procurement opportunities, alongside training on how to bid for large contracts. In 2018, the federal government committed to raising women-owned and led businesses’ share of federal procurement from 10% to 15% by 2023. Progress has been made, but it remains incomplete — under 5% of corporate and government contracts are awarded to women-owned businesses, and WBE Canada has said “more is needed” to hit the Government’s target.
The UK government spends around £385 billion a year through public procurement and has spent the last decade directing it towards competing objectives ranging from social value to environmental standards, and more recently, small suppliers. Respondents to the 2025 procurement consultation said that these complex conditions favour big corporations with dedicated bid teams and disadvantage the SMEs the policy is meant to help. The Government, in response, pointed to support for SMEs without committing to a female-specific target.
The Procurement Act 2023 came into force in February 2025, creating a duty on contracting authorities to have regard to the barriers facing SMEs. Meanwhile, the National Procurement Policy Statement requires every department and agency to set three-year direct SME spend targets from April 2025. The most ambitious was 40%, set by the now abolished Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). While government spending on SMEs reached a six-year high of 21% of total spending in 2025, it still fell short of the targets by 8.4% — DSIT only achieved 12% on SMEs.
Even with the steer from ministers, the onerous procurement process is still deterring spending on SMEs, and in this process making it harder for female founders to navigate. The new government recognised this and will only apply social value requirements to contracts above £1 million, exempting the smaller tenders where most SMEs compete. The measurement of social value will also be limited to job creation, skills and local opportunity.
05) International market expansion
For female founders who’ve built something that works in the UK, the US market is often the obvious next step. For several female founders, this was also the point where they hit complications that challenged their expansion, typically because of the differences between the scale and structure of the US market that caught female founders out. Government support has also been historically skewed towards larger, more established exporters, leaving SMEs to find their own resources.
5.1. The US retail system adds layers of cost and complexity the UK doesn’t have
Tara’s experience with Here We Flo, introduced in Capital access, bias and the funding gap, captures the differences between the US and UK approach, and how the US doesn’t scale up in the same way.
In Britain, she built traction by walking into independent Hackney retailers and emailing buyers directly. This differed from the US system, which added many intermediaries: brokers, distributors and wholesalers, each of which added an additional cost between her product and the shelf. The cost of entry follows a similar pattern, requiring a dedicated account manager to manage the relationship, and an added cost of compliance checks to avoid the fines-and-fees culture of large retailers. She says that the amount of funds needed for an entire three-year plan in the UK would only launch a brand to a single retailer in the US, citing costs of around $25,000 just to make sure stores are stocking and displaying correctly.
After realising that a full national rollout mass market retailer required a far greater operational and financial commitment, Tara built up Here We Flo's US business in natural and independent retailers, where they had strong consumer fit, for a few years before considering expanding further, a trade-off that allowed her to keep her team managing remotely from the UK.
5.2. UK export and trade support exists, but isn’t signposted well enough to reach female founders
UK export and trade support exists, but isn’t signposted well enough to reach female founders. Founders described the problem less as an absence of support, and more as not knowing where to find the right door.
Even when support exists, it is "not signposted well enough," as one participant puts it. This was a complaint brought up most often in our third roundtable, criticising how UK government export and trade support hadn’t made navigating expansion to the US any easier. The same founder described turning to a US firm’s pro bono network to find guidance on UK tariff support — help that should have come from home, and which she noted was only available to her because of the firm’s pro bono criteria, not something every founder can count on.
That complaint sits on top of the scrutiny of UK Export Finance in its support historically being skewed towards a small number of large-scale deals leaving SMEs underserved relative to their numbers.
5.3. Founders disagree on whether a UK-branded landing pad in the US would help
Whether there should be a dedicated UK landing pad in the US was a point of contention among female founders. Some argued that a local mentor network would facilitate launch, while others warned that national cohorts tend to insulate founders from the market.
One participant in our third roundtable argued that a UK-specific launchpad — co-working space and a list of local mentors — would give female founders a starting point before they could build on their own. Another pushed back, pointing to an experience with the national cohort in Silicon Valley. This acted as a Spanish landing pad that made it so newly introduced businesses weren’t forced to integrate with the wider ecosystem, and instead clustered into networks of their own country. Her proposed alternative was embedding new firms directly into a US accelerator instead of building a parallel UK-only structure, to avoid this problem.
Policy landscape: supporting international growth
Many of the obstacles raised by female founders concern the barriers of entering the international market, which existing policies were not designed to tackle. For example, UK Export Finance (UKEF) provides businesses with export insurance, working capital guarantees and buyer credit. However, it doesn’t shoulder the risk and cost facing founders looking at international expansion.
A 2021 cross-party inquiry found that much of UKEF’s support goes to a relatively small number of large-scale manufacturing, energy and infrastructure deals which leaves SMEs underserved relative to their numbers. A more recent analysis of UKEF’s £14.5 billion portfolio found that direct financing to SMEs made up under 5% of the total by value, even though small and medium-sized firms made up the majority of its individual customers. UKEF has responded, committing to support 1,000 SMEs a year by the end of the decade alongside new working-capital products and an automatic credit-limit escalator for smaller exporters, but the scale of change so far remains modest. UKEF could publish annual progress against its 1,000-SME-a-year target by value as well as by number of customers, in order to track whether smaller exporters are gaining a meaningfully larger share of UKEF’s actual lending, not just a larger share of its customer count.
There has been more targeted movement specifically for female founders. In December 2024, UKEF agreed a two-way referral partnership with Female Founder Finance, and in January 2026 it launched the Female Founder Export Accelerator with Lifted Ventures. The four-month accelerator involves workshops and mentoring female founders who plan to export their products in two years.
Instead of building a standalone UK landing pad, Innovate UK’s Global Incubator Programme takes small cohorts of up to eight UK SMEs and embeds them for four to six months inside an existing foreign incubator, with Innovate UK covering flights and accommodation for one senior representative per company. The Urban Future Lab at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering has hosted UK cohorts since 2020. However, the scale is limited to 6-8 companies per cohort in a narrow band of sectors, specifically climate tech and ocean tech. Nevertheless, it serves as a proof of concept for the embedded model.
Our own 2024 report, Towards A More Special Relationship, found that a well-developed ecosystem already exists for VC-backed startups expanding into the US, but that ordinary businesses outside that world are left to navigate the process alone. The report also found that insurance costs can double the moment a UK business anticipates US revenue, and that the exploratory phase of expansion is poorly served by visa routes designed for founders who have already committed to a US presence rather than those still testing the market.
Conclusion
None of the five barriers outlined in this report exist in isolation. A founder who can’t get a warm introduction is also the founder least likely to have a peer network to fall back on. A founder who can’t expense childcare is the one most often absent from the after-hour events where deals get made. A grant panel that penalises speed is often staffed by the same institutional thinking that shapes how public procurement gets allocated. Female founders are disproportionately affected by these compounding obstacles.
Founders not framing any of this as a grievance is what struck us most. They were pointing out how the system wasn’t designed with them in mind, and describing the ingenuity and resourcefulness it took to build successful businesses regardless.
What made this report possible to write with any precision was that female founders described what would have helped them. That specificity let us hold existing policy up against a clear standard and point to where it falls short, and where a modest, workable change inside the current framework would close the gap.
The UK has made progress, but the evidence gathered here suggests that progress should be measured by whether female founders can actually navigate the system more easily, rather than by the number of initiatives introduced. The experiences in this report provide a practical basis for making that shift.