Where UK tech and science money flows, and who it leaves behind.
The numbers below trace £88 billion across the four sources that fund UK research and innovation, into the sectors they back, and onward to the people who actually receive the cheques.
Funded Britain is a personal investigation by Serene Lim into how UK research and innovation funding actually moves, who it reaches, and what the headline numbers leave out. It is independent, not affiliated with any institution, and intended to be read as an argument from a single point of view rather than a neutral report.
Every year the UK reports a new headline number for the money flowing into research and innovation, and every year a fresh set of arguments follows about why the country is not doing better. The two are rarely connected, because the numbers stay abstract. £88 billion is a quantity, not an explanation.
This site exists to make that quantity legible. Where it comes from, what it touches, and who eventually receives the cheque. The headline disparity above — £2 of every £100 of UK venture funding reaching all-female founding teams — is one finding among many. Underneath it sit harder questions. Is the system correcting itself? How does the UK compare with its peers? Are the sectors attracting most capital reproducing the pattern or breaking it?
The current argument about UK and European tech rests largely on a confidence diagnosis: that ambitious people need to believe Europe can build serious companies and that activity will follow. This site asks whether confidence built on a system that distributes capital this unevenly might produce more uneven activity, only more loudly performed. The harder question is what gets measured, what is missed, and who remains invisible inside an £88 billion economy that is still mostly invisible to its own participants.
The Sankey traces capital from where it originates (left) through the sectors it enters (middle) to the demographic profile of the founders and recipient teams (right). Toggle the right-hand column to switch the lens.
Source figures in £ billions. Sectors simplified for legibility. Hover any flow to see the full value. Right-hand column: gender breakdown of VC recipient teams.
Each source is a category, not a single thing. The boxes below open up what the money actually consists of, where it lands, and what is and isn't tracked about who receives it.
Public money for research, allocated through agencies and departments. Mostly flows to universities and research councils, with a meaningful slice for defence research.
R&D performed by UK businesses, mostly funded out of their own balance sheets. Money the company spends on its own scientists, engineers, and labs, plus government and overseas top-ups.
Equity investment into UK startups and scaleups, deployed by VC funds, corporate investors, and financial institutions. The smallest of the four sources, but the only one where founder demographics are reliably tracked.
Charitable funding for research, dominated by medical research charities. Largely funds direct project costs in UK universities; collectively the largest funder of medical research in the UK.
A decade of attention, six government-backed initiatives, and one explicit voluntary code have not moved the share of UK venture capital going to all-female founding teams above 3% of value. The Black founder share peaked in 2021 and has fallen since.
Sources: British Business Bank Small Business Equity Tracker; Extend Ventures Diversity Beyond Gender (2020, 2023); Equidam UK Startup Funding 2025. Black founder figures are rolling averages where annual data is unavailable; 2009–2019 plotted as the period average.
The Investing in Women Code now has over 250 signatories. The British Business Bank backs the majority of UK VC firms. The needle, on value, has not moved.
On the most-cited diversity metric in venture capital — the share of total invested capital reaching all-female founding teams — no major Western VC ecosystem performs materially better than any other. The cross-country data is consistent enough that this finding holds across the major reporting bodies (BBB, PitchBook, Sifted) at the value level, even where deal-count metrics tell a more nuanced story. The honest finding is not that the UK trails its peers, but that no Western VC ecosystem is moving the number.
Sources: PitchBook All In: Female Founders in the European VC Ecosystem (2023, 2024); British Business Bank Small Business Equity Tracker; Sifted analysis. All figures are share of VC investment by value to all-female founding teams, latest available year (2023 or 2024 depending on jurisdiction). Deal-count shares (not shown) tell a different story; in the US deal counts to all-female teams reach 5.4%, but capital value remains close to 2%.
The European response to American tech dominance has been a series of confidence campaigns. The numbers underneath the confidence are essentially identical across the Western VC world.
In the first half of 2024 alone, UK AI startups attracted £1.8 billion of venture capital. The Alan Turing Institute's Rebalancing Innovation report tracked who received the AI cheques over the preceding decade. The pattern is consistent: AI is significantly worse than the all-sector UK VC average on every gender metric tracked.
The sector now attracting the largest share of UK risk capital is reproducing existing distributional patterns at a more concentrated scale. The decisions being made by VCs in 2024–26 will compound for a decade.
There is no single "right" benchmark. Three different baselines tell three different stories. We show all three.
Drawn directly from the underlying datasets, not selected to support a thesis.
UK tech and science funding, calendar year 2024 where available, financial year 2024-25 for government R&D. We include four sources of capital: government R&D spending, business-funded R&D, venture capital invested into UK startups and scaleups, and major UK science philanthropy.
Sectors are simplified into four buckets — Software & AI, Life Sciences & Health, Energy & Climate, Other Tech & Industrial — to keep the diagram legible. Allocations are based on ONS BERD sector breakdowns, BVCA / Dealroom sector data for VC, and UKRI portfolio breakdowns for government. Software & AI is the single largest sector across both VC and business R&D in 2024, with AI alone attracting an estimated £1.8bn of UK VC in H1 2024.
Founder demographic data is drawn from:
Demographic flows in the Sankey are applied only to the £9bn venture capital slice. Government and corporate R&D flow primarily to institutions and large corporates where founder demographics are not the relevant unit of analysis (the Anatomy section above explains who the actual recipients are).
The "what if" section compares actual VC allocation against three benchmarks, each with its own assumption:
None of these benchmarks is "the right one". They are presented together so readers can choose their own frame of reference.
The trends, peer comparison, and AI sections draw on:
Numbers are rounded to one decimal place for legibility. Year-over-year comparisons should rely on the linked primary sources, not on the figures shown here. Sectors are simplified into four buckets to keep the diagram legible. Demographic flows in the Sankey are applied only to the £9bn venture capital slice for the reasons set out above. The intention is to make the shape of the problem visible, with full transparency on inputs.
This site focuses on the value-share metric because it is the most consistently reported across jurisdictions and the most directly tied to where capital actually lands. Deal-count metrics, founder-pipeline metrics, and exit-value metrics tell related but distinct stories, and a fuller account would weigh each against the others.
The other significant omission is qualitative: this site has no founder interviews, no investor interviews, and no case studies of the teams that did break through despite the patterns shown here. That work is being done well by others. Extend Ventures' Diversity Beyond Gender reports pair quantitative analysis with the lived experience of underrepresented founders. Diversity VC's Equity Record combines pipeline data with qualitative survey work on investor culture. The Alan Turing Institute's Rebalancing Innovation series includes founder and investor interviews alongside the AI funding analysis cited above. The most useful version of this site sits alongside that work rather than competing with it.