Just 1.75% of the £18bn invested into UK equity in 2025 went to fully female-led teams. Down from 2% in 2023 and 2024. (Beauhurst)
The gender funding gap is structural. It won’t fix itself. Neither will training, mentoring or talking about it. For female founders to go further and faster, we need dedicated pools of capital, decent ticket sizes and a long-term commitment to investing in women.
Enter Angel Academe. For over 10 years we’ve been mobilising women and men as angel investors to back female founded tech and science startups. In 2025, we raised our own EIS Fund, the UK’s first for female founders. The fund targeted women and men who want to back a high-growth potential portfolio of startups while taking advantage of the generous EIS tax breaks.
Moving the dial for female founders
Our £200k-400k tickets (angels + Fund 1 combined) catalysed nearly £10m in co-investment from leading angels and VCs for our founders to supercharge the growth of their fin tech, sustainability, fem tech, med tech and enterprise startups.
We led the rounds for 4 of them, supported 6 successful Innovate UK investor partnership applications for non-dilutive match funding (100% success rate!), and attracted co-investment from BBI into 7 of them.
Meet the EIS Fund 1 portfolio:
Adora delivers evidence-based, personalised healthcare and specialist services to women as they start their perimenopause journey (B2B).
Aflo’s smart inhaler platform improves management, symptom control and patient monitoring for asthma and COPD patients (B2B).
FDA-cleared and live in all 50 US states, Béa Fertility offers clinical-grade at-home intracervical insemination kits that achieve a 39% pregnancy rate and bridge the gap between natural conception and IVF at a fraction of the cost.
Open banking covers bank accounts. DataWollet covers everything else - pensions, mortgages, payslips, insurance - with proprietary, logic-based AI that’s typically 100% accurate, cuts onboarding time by up to 80% and boosts conversion by 26%.
LabCycle is the world’s first company to create a closed-loop circular economy for single-use plastic waste from labs by recycling contaminated waste into 100% recycled lab consumables.
Preactiv’s prehabilitation platform helps hospitals optimise patients before major surgery or cancer treatment through personalised programmes costing about 90% less than traditional face-to-face services.
Provenance is the trusted data layer for agentic commerce. They power enriched product data attributes for 300+ brands and retailers including L’Oreal, Holland & Barrett, THG, Unilever, LVMH, Diageo and Ocado, positioning it as the trusted infrastructure layer for AI discovery and values-driven commerce.
Zonova is dedicated to eliminating hospital-acquired infections by embedding antimicrobial technology directly into medical devices to stop bacterial growth at the source.
On average, male-led AI teams raised £6.5m, while for women-led AI startups it was £900k.(Beauhurst)
Want to help us fix the dismal stats?
Angel Academe newsletters are lovingly hand-crafted (no AI involved, honestly!) by Sarah, Simon, Yee Mun and Michelle.
More about Angel Academe on our Website, LinkedIn and YouTube.
thank you for putting numbers on something that usually gets discussed in vibes. we read a lot of vc newsletters across the week and the female-founder coverage gap is real on our side too