Across more than three years of UK share-allotment filings, all-female founding teams won roughly 6–7% of equity deals but only 2.5–3.7% of the pounds. SyndicateRoom's analysis of Companies House SH01 filings investigates this gap.
The deal-share holds; the cash-share doesn't. All-female teams win ~6–7% of rounds (stable across every version of the data) but only ~2.5–3.7% of capital, a two-to-three-times gap between getting funded and getting funded well.
The gap is at the top, not the middle. At the median, an all-female round is ~£230k against ~£270k for all-male (0.85×); on average it's ~£1.2m against ~£2.4m. The chasm is in the right tail, not the typical cheque.
Not one £50m+ all-female raise in 3+ years. The empty top end is likely a mix of base rate (far fewer all-female startups feeding a power-law funnel) and sector mix (a hypothesis pending our sector cut), which means bigger or more cheques alone won't close it.
The standard account of the gender funding gap in UK venture is, by now, well-rehearsed. The 2019 Rose Review found that if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, the additional growth would hit £250bn (since revised upward for inflation to around £310bn). A decade of subsequent reporting has tracked how far we remain from this. The headline figure usually quoted is that all-female teams win something in the low single digits of UK equity capital, against the overwhelming majority going to all-male teams. Reporting to the Women and Equalities Committee in October 2025 concluded bluntly that on access to finance the situation "is getting worse not better".
That body of work is authoritative on the direction of travel, but most of it leans on deal aggregation built from announced rounds, which captures the rounds that generate a press release more reliably than the ones that don't. We wanted to see the picture from statutory filings instead, every allotment, announced or not, so we ran the question through our own Companies House analyser, the same tool behind our Q1 2026 market commentary. It parses SH01 share-allotment filings directly, which lets us draw the boundary of the market ourselves rather than inheriting someone else's.
A brief word on method, because the boundary we draw is doing some work. Our analyser reads SH01 filings (the statutory return a company files when it allots shares) and reconstructs each financing round from the share counts and prices. We tag founder gender at the company level, and we restrict the analysis to GBP-denominated rounds raised by UK-domiciled companies.
That last restriction is the consequential one. The largest UK "venture" rounds of the past two years have frequently been raised by UK subsidiaries of US-parented companies. AI and infrastructure mega-rounds whose capital is overwhelmingly male-led and which balloon the denominator. We exclude those, because the question we're asking is what the gap looks like in the part of the market that UK angels, EIS funds and SEIS investors actually touch, not in the headline aggregate. One consequence is that our female cash-share comes out a little higher and flatter than the aggregate figures, precisely because we've removed the fast-growing male-led rounds that drag the total's female share down over time.
One further definitional note, because it matters for the top-end finding. This analysis is of all-female founding teams. Expand the definition to female co-founded and you pull in companies that have done larger raises; the empty top end is a feature of the strict all-female cut specifically.
Here is the core of it. When you separate deals from pounds, you get two numbers that tell different stories.
The deal-share, the proportion of all financing rounds going to all-female teams, sits at 6.6% in 2023, 7.3% in 2024, 6.0% in 2025, and 6.2% in Q1 2026. What's notable is its stability. It barely moves across years, and it barely moves across every version of the data we built, corrected prices, different founder-tagging thresholds, the large end scrubbed by hand. When a number is that insensitive to methodological choices, you can lean on it. All-female teams are getting into the room at a rate of roughly one round in fifteen.
The cash-share, the proportion of pounds, is a different animal: 3.4% in 2023, 3.7% in 2024, 2.5% in 2025, and 3.5% in Q1 2026. Directionally it sits in the low single digits, and it is tail-sensitive in a way the deal-share is not: because all-female rounds are rarely large, a single sizeable raise can move the annual figure by a point or more.
What this comparison shows us is a consistent two-to-three-times gap between the share of deals and the share of cash. All-female teams win roughly 6–7% of the rounds but only 2.5–3.7% of the money.
If the cash-share is depressed by the absence of large rounds, we should see the same thing in average cheque sizes. And we do.
Across 2023–2025 combined, the average all-female round in our data is about £1.2m, against £2.4m for all-male rounds. Roughly half the size. That gap widens rather than narrows over the period.
The median tells the more interesting half of the story. At the median, an all-female round is about £230k against £270k for all-male — roughly 0.85×. That is closer than the mean, but I'd resist the temptation to wave it away as "nearly the same". A 15% shortfall at the typical round is a meaningful disadvantage compounding from the very first raise: a company that starts 15% behind, and then raises less often at the top end, falls progressively further back at each subsequent stage. The mean gap and the median gap are not in tension, they describe a distribution where all-female rounds are modestly smaller in the middle and almost absent at the top.
The single most striking fact in the data is what isn't in it: across more than three years of UK share-allotment filings, we cannot identify a genuine all-female-founded raise above £50m.
Across more than three years of UK share-allotment filings, we cannot identify a single all-female-founded raise above £50m.
It would be easy to read that purely as a funding-gap story and that all-female companies which deserve large rounds are simply denied them. Some of that is real. But it is very likely not the whole story, and the honest position is that at least two other forces are probably at work, neither of which we can yet fully separate with the data in hand.
The first is a base-rate effect. There are far fewer all-female-founded startups than all-male ones to begin with, and progression through the funding stages behaves like a power law: only a small fraction of seed-stage companies reach Series A, a smaller fraction again reach the rounds that clear £50m. Apply a steep filter like that to a small starting population and the top of the funnel doesn't just thin. At the extreme end it can empty entirely. Fewer companies entering at the bottom means, on the maths alone, close to zero at the very top, even before any per-company bias is added.
The second is sector mix. This is a hypothesis, since we haven't yet run the analysis that would confirm it, but it seems plausible. All-female teams may be concentrated in sectors that structurally raise smaller rounds, while the £50m+ tail is dominated by a handful of capital-hungry sectors. The same deep-tech and infrastructure categories that produce the mega-rounds and where all-female representation may be the thinnest. If that is what's happening, then a meaningful part of the average-raise gap is not about any individual company being under-funded relative to its peers, but about the distribution of companies across sectors. That is a very different problem with very different remedies, and it's one the base-rate story on its own would miss.
These two forces point in different directions, but not mutually exclusive ones. In practice they overlap, and the response to each reinforces the other. A base-rate problem argues for widening the pipeline: more all-female companies entering at the bottom so the power law has more to work with. A sector-mix effect argues for the same thing with more directed capital. Getting all-female teams into, and better funded within, the sectors where large rounds actually happen. And crucially, that isn't only about recruiting new founders into those sectors: there are already all-female teams building in them who may simply need more support and more capital to reach the rounds their male-founded peers get to. Backing the companies that exist and widening the pipeline that feeds them are two halves of the same answer.
On policy, the Women and Equalities Committee's central recommendation is to lift equity finance to female founders from around 2% to 10% by 2030, alongside a proposed Female Enterprise Investment Scheme with enhanced reliefs and the removal of the EIS seven-year age limit, which disadvantages founders whose growth curves are lengthened by caregiving breaks. Our data speaks to where the binding constraint sits. If all-female teams already win 6–7% of deals but only 2.5–3.7% of pounds, a policy that simply increases the number of small cheques will move a deal-share that is already close to representative, while leaving the cash-share roughly where it is. Whether these specific changes would close the cash gap is exactly the kind of thing that depends on which of the forces above is doing the work and that we'd want to test rather than assume.
On allocation, the honest summary is that this is a multi-part problem and the parts need different fixes. The median cheque gap looks like a within-company effect: comparable companies raising 15% less from the first round onward. The missing top end is some mix of base rate and plausibly the distribution of all-female companies across sectors. Capital aimed only at the first will not necessarily fix the second, and until we've cut the data by sector we should be honest that we're pointing at the problem rather than fully diagnosing it.
There are two extensions I'd like to run on this dataset, and the discussion above is really an argument for why they matter. The first is to decompose the cash-share by sector, which is the direct test of the hypothesis I've flagged: it would tell us how much of the average-raise gap is a company-level funding gap and how much is a sector-composition effect. The second is to track the all-female cohort longitudinally through the funding stages, to measure directly how much of the missing top end is base rate and how much is per-stage attrition — the power-law question, answered with our own data rather than asserted from it. A natural third piece then cuts the same cohort by performance, which is the question that ultimately decides whether any of this changes how capital should be allocated.
For investors who want exposure to the part of the market this piece is about, SyndicateRoom partners with Angel Academe on an EIS fund built specifically around female-founded businesses. It is the first EIS fund of its kind in the UK, co-investing alongside the Angel Academe network's track record into high potential female founders.
Source: SyndicateRoom analysis of Companies House SH01 share-allotment filings, 2023–Q1 2026, GBP-denominated rounds by UK-domiciled companies. Policy and context: Women and Equalities Committee, "Female Entrepreneurship" (Eighth Report of Session 2024–26, October 2025); Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship (2019).
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