Why access to capital in the UK for early-stage founders needs to change The UK's venture capital system is limiting the entrepreneurial potential of diverse founders—here's why it needs to change.

The UK is the third largest tech ecosystem in the world. However, there is untapped entrepreneurial potential up and down the country that we are missing because of an investment landscape that still makes it too hard to become a tech founder. There are two barriers to entrepreneurship in the UK that too often prove insurmountable, and both involve access to capital. The first is having the financial security to take the risk of becoming a founder, swapping regular paychecks for startup life. The second is knowing the right people, and having the connections and social networks that mean you can get in front of the right investors.

I am one of the very few tech founders who has built a unicorn company in Europe who had a state education. I was fortunate enough to go to university and secure a job in banking which opened lots of doors for me. But I had to work hard to get the capital and connections I needed to succeed - and for many aspiring founders, those doors remain closed. We have become immune to the numbers on this issue. 2% of VC funding goes to women every year, and the number is even lower for black and ethnic minority founders.

Less research has been done into the socio-economic background of founders, but our analysis suggests that 40% of Europe's unicorn founders went to the same 20 elite universities. 7% of the British population study at private secondary schools, but that figure jumps to 45% of all tech CEOs. When we spoke to the founders in our portfolio, the uncertainty about whether they would be able to pay themselves was the single biggest concern that kept them awake at night. Every year, new studies are published which show the same problems. Venture capitalists lament the lack of investment into diverse founders, then continue backing white men. Nothing changes because this is a systemic problem and diverse founders struggle because the odds are stacked against them. This is a complex issue with an infinite number of nuances, but these are two simple problems that could be addressed:

Friends and family round: Entrepreneurs are taught that the best way to get the funding they need to get their company off the ground is by asking for the backing of friends and family. If you consider that the average person in the UK has £17k in savings, how many people can realistically turn to friends and family and ask for them to give them £100k+ to help start a company? The clue's in the name - the friends and family round is a luxury that immediately promotes the most financially comfortable founders.

Access to VC investors: The world of venture capital is still a closed shop. Investors get inundated with pitches from aspiring startups, but the filter they apply to determine who gets a meeting and who doesn't is all too often based on personal introductions and connections. The result? A founder community dominated by private schools and a handful of elite universities. So what needs to change? To encourage more diverse founders and unlock more innovation in the UK, we need to create a more meritocratic system and remove barriers to entrepreneurship.

At Antler, we believe that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. We are trying to remove these barriers to entrepreneurship for a new generation of founders not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it makes good business sense. Venture capital is about backing outliers - the individuals who have the right combination of ambition, innovation and creativity to build a billion-dollar tech company. You don't find outliers by ignoring huge swathes of the population and going to the same small, homogenous group of people again and again and again.

So making an application process for investment that is entirely meritocratic and offering everyone the same investment terms isn't a DEI initiative, it's a way of investing in the best founders regardless of their background. And when I think about some of the best founders we backed last year, they aren't white British consultants or bankers who went to the same universities. They are international founders, technical experts with incredible coding skills or domain specialists who have spent decades trying to solve industry problems.

Because this isn't just about unlocking the potential of diverse and underrepresented founders. It's about unlocking the potential of people with real expertise in specialised industries. It is far better for the economy, for productivity and for employment if these experts are building and growing their own startups rather than spending their careers working for a global corporation or consultancy. If the UK tech ecosystem comes together and demands change, we can finally change the numbers on backing diverse founders, and build better startups who generate bigger returns at the same time. We need everyone - investors and policymakers - to come together and find new ways to give founders access to financial security and access to the allocators of capital.