Angel investing in the UK has become bigger, more professional and more consequential than ever. The number of active angel investors in the country has risen 54% since 2022, with female angels playing a crucial part in driving more capital towards women-led businesses. The number of companies backed by women angel investors increased 58.9% between 2022 and 2025.
SCALE, the events and community platform for growth-stage founders, is committed to creating opportunities to connect underrepresented entrepreneurs with angel investors, and is a marketing partner for the UKBAA Awards. Women Who Scale, the branch of the SCALE platform created to inform and inspire women on both sides of the cap table, will bring female founders and women angels together at SCALE Manchester on 25 November.
Angel investing is shifting from occasional bets to serious, portfolio-led practice
The UK’s angel community is growing rapidly and angels are sticking with founders for longer. Since 2022, the number of active angel investors in the country has risen from around 36,800 to 56,800, while the number of angels making five or more investments has nearly doubled.
Through the Enterprise Investment Scheme, angels deployed £1.575bn in the 2024–25 tax year. The £53m directly invested by angel investment groups helped unlock £348m in total funding rounds, meaning every pound they put in drew in roughly six pounds more from other investors. Collectively, angel groups supported more than 8,000 founders and helped create over 8,100 jobs across the UK.
Angels bring belief to founders when they need it most
Opening the awards, UKBAA Managing Director Roderick Beer told the room that angels are “the first believers” in a founder’s journey.
“Angels are the people whose backing changes lives and helps create jobs that didn’t exist.”
Roderick pointed to the growing footprint of angel groups in every region of the UK and recognised the courage it takes for founders to put themselves forward for early-stage investment.
Angels arrive long before headlines or hype
Mark Berry, Senior Investment Director at British Business Bank, spoke about how the real value in a company is created early – at exactly the stage where angels make such a meaningful difference. “Healthy ecosystems aren’t built on unicorns,” he said.
“Like a good beer, great companies aren’t brewed overnight. The founders quietly solving unglamorous problems, rather than the ones making the front pages, are often what makes a strong angel portfolio”.
Mark also pointed to the importance of a healthy secondary market, which allows angels to release capital and recycle it into backing the next generation of founders.
Angel investing is about allocating capital to people before product
The UK still lags well behind the US when it comes to experienced founder-investor networks feeding capital and expertise back into the ecosystem. Mark said;
“As companies increasingly take longer to reach Series A, angels are having to make harder calls about whether to keep backing a founder with further cheques, or move on.”
This is exactly where the SEIS and EIS schemes come in, with Christiana Stewart-Lockhart, Director General of the EIS Association, among the judges for this year’s UKBAA awards. The scheme offers investors tax relief on qualifying early-stage investments, reducing their downside risk and giving them the confidence to back founders earlier, and for longer, making it easier for them to write follow-on cheques as companies scale.
Mark explained how the scheme gives investors the confidence to write second, third and fourth cheques and stay with a founder they believe in, long enough for them to “build something great”.
Female founders and investors are strengthening the ecosystem
Hazel Biggs, Lead Knowledge Transfer Manager – National Security and Defence, at Innovate UK Business Connect, spoke on diversity in angel investing. She noted that women remain significantly underrepresented as both founders and investors, but that female investors are almost twice as likely to back female founders, a dynamic that builds “stronger, more resilient companies and a healthier ecosystem”.
In the decade to 2025, female angels participated in more than £4 billion of equity investment deals, and backed 6,595 companies, according to research by Beauhurst, with UKBAA and the Invest In Women Taskforce.
Jenny Tooth OBE, CEO of the UKBAA and a hugely respected figure in the UK angel community, echoed Hazel’s point: women may still make up only 14% of UK angels, but female investors continue to do “remarkable, boundary-pushing work” across every region of the country.
Jenny underlined the importance of seed-stage investors in bridging founders through to their next round, thanking the wider angel community for bringing not just capital but genuine hands-on support and expertise to the founders they back.
Denise Quaid, co-founder of AwakenAngels, said;
“The UK Business Angels Association Awards celebrate the people who back innovation every day, investors who take early risks, and the organisations working to strengthen our entrepreneurial ecosystem.
This [Investment in Diversity Champion] award isn’t just about me; it belongs to the incredible AwakenAngels team and the community we have built together. Every day, we work to open more doors for women founders and bring more women into angel investing, because we know talent is everywhere, but access to capital is still not equal.
There is still a long way to go, but this recognition gives us even more determination to keep challenging the status quo and creating opportunities for the next generation of founders.”
Jordan Dargue and Helen Oldham, Co-founders of Lifted Ventures, were recognised as ‘One To Watch’ in the Investment in Diversity Champion category.
Jordan said;
“This recognition means so much because it reflects the importance of creating a more inclusive investment ecosystem where diverse founders and investors have the opportunity to thrive. Thank you to everyone who has supported and championed this mission, this award inspires us to keep pushing for meaningful change.”
Helen added;
“It was great to celebrate the importance of regional and gender representation at the UKBAA awards. We were delighted to celebrate being recognised for our work with our brilliant community of women and male angels, and our investee founders. Our mission to continue to grow the amount of capital available for regional female founders continues.”
Angels are an essential anchor for early-stage founders, drawing in institutional money and keeping the pipeline of UK innovation alive.
As the UK looks to grow more globally competitive scaleups, the 2026 UKBAA Awards evening was a reminder that the story starts long before Series A. It begins with angels prepared to back a founder before anyone else will. It’s early-stage conviction, not headline funding rounds, that determines which founders make it to scale. Judging by the calibre of investors in the room, our future scaleups are in good hands.
