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Research
The State of Asian Funding UK is the first study of how venture capital reaches Asian-heritage founders in Britain. Built on Beauhurst round data and a survey of founders in our community.
2026 edition
Produced with Joelson, Beauhurst and Tech Nation.
The headline numbers
Asian representation
11.3%
of founders in our dataset are of Asian heritage, against a 16.4% weighted benchmark.
up from 10.3% last year
Female founders
0.3%
of overall funding went to all-Asian-female founding teams.
up from 0.1% last year
Later-stage funding
11
of the 53 companies raising over £50m had an Asian co-founder. Two were all-Asian.
down from 12 last year
Overall funding
22.7%
of UK startup funding went to teams with at least one Asian founder.
up from 22.0% last year
Funding barriers
25%
of our sample cited “cultural biases and lack of diversity” as an investment barrier.
down from 33.3% last year
Regional focus
82.4%
of funding to Asian co-founded startups went to London-based companies.
up from 69.4% last year
Beauhurst data, April 2025 to March 2026: 1,405 rounds of £500k+ across 1,301 companies, excluding public companies and companies more than ten years old. Survey of 67 founders, Q2 2026. 2025 comparisons are restated figures.
59 of 2,759 founders, up from 1.7% last year. 4.5% of companies have at least one Asian female founder (59), up from 3.8%; 0.8% are all-Asian-female (10). Companies with an Asian female founder took £423m, 2.6% of all capital, up from £217m; 0.26% went to all-Asian-female founding teams.
| 2026 | 2.1% |
|---|---|
| 2025 | 1.7% |
| Benchmark | 8.2% |
Teams with at least one Asian founder took 16.3% of funding in £500k–£5m rounds, the lowest share of any band, against 25.3% one band up. Their share stays above a fifth through every later band.
| £500k to £5m | 16.3% |
|---|---|
| £5m to £20m | 25.3% |
| £20m to £50m | 21.9% |
| £50m+ | 23.4% |
83.8% of all-Asian funding went to London-based companies, and 82.4% of funding to companies with at least one Asian founder. But London is home to less than a third of Britain’s Asian-heritage population (~2.19m of ~6.99m).
| Region | Asian-heritage share of population | Share of the region’s funding to teams with at least one Asian founder | Share to all-Asian teams |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scotland | 4.6% | 1.2% | 0% |
| North East | 4.5% | 7.9% | 7.9% |
| Northern Ireland | 2.0% | 39.0% | 38.5% |
| North West | 10.1% | 7.5% | 2.7% |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | 10.6% | 3.0% | 2.6% |
| Wales | 3.7% | 5.5% | 0.4% |
| West Midlands | 15.8% | 49.9% | 3.6% |
| East Midlands | 9.7% | 10.2% | 0% |
| East of England | 8.0% | 22.4% | 1.6% |
| South West | 3.8% | 4.5% | 0% |
| South East | 8.7% | 13.8% | 1.4% |
| London | 24.9% | 26.9% | 4.3% |
Our $60m Series C in May 2026 made us a unicorn. It was led by Symbotic, a global leader in warehouse automation whose robots already run on our batteries, and a customer committing longer term is the strongest validation a deep tech company can get.
It wasn’t always this way. After the 2022 rate rises, investors lost interest in electrification, so we innovated with less. That discipline helped us win some of our sector’s biggest contracts. We also refused to be defined by our 5min recharging EV story and built around uptime and instant power for robotics and AI infrastructure.
I came from India on a scholarship to study engineering in the UK, and Nyobolt grew from a decade of Cambridge research. Britain has world-class science. The test is backing it through the hard years to scale.
Sai ShivareddyCEO and Co-Founder, NyoboltThree more founders are quoted in the report.
Widen who gets to allocate capital. Report who public programmes back, build emerging managers into how pension capital is deployed, and support the accelerators that open doors for founders without networks.
Reach the founders these schemes exist for. Measure who grants and loans actually reach, simplify the way in, and fund the readiness support that helps founders understand how the system works.
Non-dilutive capital reaches founders before investors will, and it is the part of the system our community tells us least about. Getting more of it to Asian-heritage founders needs government, delivery bodies and community organisations pulling in the same direction. We will keep making that case and keep publishing what we find.
Take capital to where founders live. All-Asian teams raised just £96m outside London this year. Publish what the regional funds back, weight outreach to the widest gaps, and put readiness support where founders are.
52 pages covering funding to Asian-heritage founders, Asian women founders, founder sentiment and our recommendations to government.
