The £50m ceiling: three years of UK filings show no all-female-founded raise has broken through
All-female founding teams in the UK are backed at a stable rate of roughly one deal in fifteen, but receive two to three times less capital than that deal-share would suggest, according to new analysis from EIS investment platform SyndicateRoom.
The analysis, based on more than three years of Companies House SH01 share-allotment filings – every recorded allotment, not just the rounds that generated a press release – finds that all-female teams won 6.6% of UK equity deals in 2023, 7.3% in 2024, 6.0% in 2025 and 6.2% in Q1 2026. Over the same period, their share of the capital raised was consistently lower: 3.4%, 3.7%, 2.5% and 3.5% respectively.
The most striking finding is what the data does not contain: across the full three-year-plus dataset, SyndicateRoom could not identify a single all-female-founded raise above £50m.
“The deal-share holds; the cash-share doesn’t,” said Graham Schwikkard, CEO of SyndicateRoom. “All-female teams are getting funded at a rate that’s barely moved in three years. What’s not holding is the size of the cheque once they do — and that gap is concentrated at the very top of the market, not in the typical round.”
Key findings
All-female rounds average £1.2m against £2.4m for all-male rounds – roughly half the size, and a gap that has widened rather than narrowed since 2023.
At the median, the gap is narrower but still real: an all-female round is roughly £230k against £270k for all-male, or about 0.85 times the size.
No all-female-founded raise above £50m appears anywhere in the dataset across 2023 to Q1 2026.
SyndicateRoom’s analyser restricts the dataset to GBP-denominated rounds by UK-domiciled companies, deliberately excluding the large UK subsidiary raises of US-parented AI and infrastructure businesses that have driven much of the headline growth in UK “venture” totals in recent years. The firm says this gives a clearer read on the part of the market that UK angels, EIS funds and SEIS investors actually operate in.
SyndicateRoom points to two likely, non-exclusive explanations for the empty top end: a base-rate effect, where a smaller starting population of all-female companies produces close to zero survivors at the extreme end of a power-law funnel; and a sector-mix effect, where all-female teams may be under-represented in the capital-intensive sectors – deep tech and infrastructure among them – that produce most £50m+ rounds. SyndicateRoom has not yet run the sector-level analysis needed to confirm the second hypothesis and says this remains a priority for further research.
The findings land as the Women and Equalities Committee’s October 2025 report to Parliament recommends lifting equity finance to female founders from around 2% to 10% by 2030, alongside a proposed Female Enterprise Investment Scheme and the removal of the EIS seven-year age limit. SyndicateRoom’s data suggests that policy aimed only at increasing deal volume may leave the cash-share largely unchanged, since the deal-share is already close to the Committee’s target range.
SyndicateRoom partners with award-winning angel investor network Angel Academe on an EIS fund built specifically around female-founded businesses – the first EIS fund of its kind in the UK, co-investing alongside Angel Academe’s network into high-potential female founders. Investors interested in allocating to the fund this tax year can contact SyndicateRoom directly.
Sarah Turner, co-founder and CEO of Angel Academe, said: “At Angel Academe, we’ve been focused on closing the gender gap in seed investment in precisely the strategically significant sectors where all-male teams are currently benefiting from mega-rounds. This analysis supports our belief that if we don’t fill the pipe with adequately funded female-founded companies at early stage, we’ll continue to see a dearth of £50m+ raises from women.”
Methodology
SyndicateRoom’s analysis is drawn from its proprietary Companies House analyser, which parses SH01 share-allotment filings to reconstruct financing rounds from share counts and prices, and tags founder gender at the company level. The dataset covers GBP-denominated rounds raised by UK-domiciled companies between 2023 and Q1 2026. Figures were tested for stability across corrected pricing, alternative founder-tagging thresholds, and manual review of large-end outliers.