In partnership with

Helping underrepresented founders–from backgrounds different to the stereotypical VC-backed founder–get ahead is a theme that comes up in lots of conversations I have.

And in today’s ‘slightly different because it’s summer’ edition of PreSeed Now, we meet someone who’s doing something about it, with big ambitions to do even more in the future.

But first, this isn’t a paid ad, but it is a recommendation of a useful read:

• Raise like a Pro is David Levine's free weekly newsletter based the playbook he uses every single day to raise money for founders in deals with investors all over the world.

• Built on real deals closed, terms negotiated, and proven strategies, it cuts through the generic advice to give founders the exact processes, tools, and tactics needed to raise faster, secure better valuations, and protect their time and interests.

• From email templates that get replies to meeting scripts that win term sheets, deal-closing workflows, and investor negotiation tips, it’s designed to help founders avoid common fundraising traps while freeing them to focus on building their business.

• Subscribe here

– Martin

Training Generative AI? It starts with the right data.

Your AI is only as good as the data you feed it. If you're building or fine-tuning generative models, Shutterstock offers enterprise-grade training data across images, video, 3D, audio, and templates—all rights-cleared and enriched with 20+ years of human-reviewed metadata.

With 600M+ assets and scalable licensing, our datasets help leading AI teams accelerate development, simplify procurement, and boost model performance—safely and efficiently.

Book a 30-minute discovery call to explore how our multimodal catalog supports smarter model training. Qualified decision-makers will receive a $100 Amazon gift card.

Book a call

_{For complete terms and conditions, see the offer page.}

This investor has big ambitions to support underrepresented startup founders

The path to a successful startup isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s no secret that certain kinds of founders tend to have an easier ride than others.

But what’s the best way to help founders who have great potential, but due to their background and network maybe don’t have the solid footing they need to get going in the right way?

That’s where Venture Forward, a new programme funded by Innovate UK, comes in.

GC Angels is one of the organisations that has landed a contract to operate the programme, in their case in the North of England, although others are operating it elsewhere.

I spoke to Ranvir Singh, investment manager at GC Angels, to find out:

• What they have planned

• Who counts as a ‘underrepresented’ founder

• Whether it will be enough to tip the balance for founders who need a push forward

• GC Angels’ greater ambitions to support underrepresented founders in the future

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

MB = Martin SFP Bryant, RS = Ranvir Singh

MB: First, introduce me to GC Angels, what do you do?

RS: GC Angels is a publicly-funded investment vehicle. We are part of the Growth Company. We are very early-stage equity investors in Greater Manchester-based businesses.

At the moment, we do early-stage tickets from £50,000 to £150,000 and follow-on tickets from £150,000 to £250,000. We do it on a co-investment basis, using public funds to catalyse private funding into businesses in Greater Manchester.

But we also have a double bottom line. It's not just all about ROI, we're not just looking to invest in the next unicorn. What we are looking to do is invest in businesses that have a socio-economic benefit for Greater Manchester.

It could be an eco-centric business, but it could equally be the founding team from a diverse background. There are a lot of boxes to tick, very much like the underrepresented founders programme, and that's why I think we're a good fit for that.

MB: What is Venture Forward? Who's it for? What does it offer?

RS: Venture Forward is a nationally delivered investment readiness accelerator. It's funded by Innovate UK, and we are part of a consortium that won the bid to run it.

Mountside Ventures led the consortium. And there are five consortium partners: Mountside Ventures in London, GC Angels in the North, Foundervine in the Midlands. Then there is FirstImpact in Scotland, and also a floating delivery partner called Stronger Stories, that focuses on how to deliver pitches, tell a story, and build a narrative, and they will work with each of the delivery providers.

As GC Angels in the North, we will deliver two cohorts squarely aimed at underrepresented founders.

With our particular programme, because we are an FCA-regulated investor, we have the ability to make this something a lot bigger, better, and potentially stronger.

We’re investors ourselves in the early stage space. So if you're teaching people how to get investor attention, how to secure investment, it's one thing to talk to a delivery partner who tells you what investors are looking for, while not being an investor. I think it's a very different concept when the investors themselves are telling you what they and other investors look for, and they know what other investors look for. It's not just a cookie-cutter approach. We know because we co-invest with them and talk to them all the time.

I think there's that where there's a clear USP for our delivery methodology. We're the only delivery partner in this consortium who is able to offer investment off the back of it, as opposed to introducing people to investors. We'll do that too, because we know investors. We have a huge network, but out of the cohort that we bring in, we will invest £100,000 into the top five businesses that we feel have shown themselves to be the best over the cohort.

Our first cohort will run from October to December over a period of eight weeks. However, only six of those weeks will be what are termed as teaching weeks. Each teaching week will require founders to attend one in-person day in central Manchester.

And then we will do another half or full day extra, which will be virtual, with optional courses. They will be more focused on sector specialties. We'll do virtuals on healthtech, AI, life sciences, deep tech. Not everyone in this cohort is going to fall into those areas, so we don't want to make those overly onerous for people to turn up to, but the six whole-day sessions will be the ones that are focused on the generalities that apply across the board to everyone.

We're not just going to talk about pitch decks, because that's not really the be-all and end-all. There's so much more that founders should know about how valuations work in practice. Founders are often taught how to value their own company, which is fine, but if you come with a valuation through a technical model that leads you to value your own business at £4 million for a first raise, the fact is, you're going to get no’s because your valuation’s too high.

But why is your valuation too high? It goes more to the investor thesis, and that's where a lot of founders fall down, especially those I meet. They don't understand what the investor thesis is. And that is just one point we will be able to teach founders about: how they will value your business.

MB: How do you define underrepresented, because there are lots of ways to define it?

RS: As per the remit from Innovate UK, underrepresented founders can – purely as examples – fall into categories such as female founders, ethnic minorities, neurodivergent people, disabled founders, or people from poor socio-economic backgrounds.

It can also include areas such as single parents or founders with caring responsibilities, anyone who has fallen into a category where they feel subjectively that they've been unable to receive education or access to equity funding. And that's really the pain area that's trying to be solved here.

The way practically that we're looking at it is that if you're a founder who actively wants to raise finance within the next 12 months, and you have, for whatever reason, encountered barriers, then we will look at your application, and that's really the messaging we want to get across.

However, we are very aware that we want to make it as open to everyone to apply as possible, because we have to be able to balance out being able to focus on founders from backgrounds that are particularly disadvantaged, statistically, like disabled founders, ethnic minorities, or women. But we have to be able to also include those founders who maybe aren't women, aren't ethnic minorities, and aren't disabled, but still have had problems accessing finance.

So this is the balancing act. The willingness is there for this to be a completely inclusive application process, so that's the way that we'll go about it.

The one way that we are already starting to do that in practice is that anyone who applies will get an interview, so nobody's going to get a flat rejection from this process. And I think that's one of the key things that can be defined as a source of frustration for people who are applying for finance, or applying to VCs, or applying for accelerators, when you get that first response of ‘sorry, you just didn't make it’.

I mean, that in itself is just a kick in the teeth, and no-one gets anything out of that process. No-one speaks to them, no-one gives them a reason.

We want to be different. And if we want to make it inclusive, we have to start that inclusivity process from stage one. If someone is not going to make it, we want to at least give them the respect to be told the reasons why they’re not going to make it, in our opinion. Then at least they've got something to work with.

And being part of the Growth Company, we can very easily signpost those people to support areas like access to finance. They can receive further support, which they may not have been able to access or may not have been aware of before.

MB: There is obviously a clear need for something like this. But do you think beyond this that there's still more work to be done?

I can imagine people coming off this programme, feeling very informed and ready to take their startup forward. But there's clearly a level of prejudice among some investors around what kind of person is or isn’t a founder they are willing to back, which can often be masked as ‘pattern matching’.

So what are your thoughts about the broader problem here, and how that can be addressed beyond your programme?

RS: You're absolutely right that people like Innovate UK are focusing on underrepresented founders because they're underrepresented, and that has a source. And the source is that we have an industry that has historically been dominated by middle class, Ivy League, white males, and that is a systemic issue that remains to this day. Things have improved, but probably not as quickly as some people would want.

Can one accelerator over two cohorts redress 20, 30, 40 years of structural imbalance? No, it can't. But we also are looking further than the accelerator programmes themselves. With the British Business Bank’s (BBB) announcement of their Investor Pathways Capital programme, you can see that Innovate UK and BBB are aiming in the same direction.

So we see this programme with Innovate UK as a proof of concept, where we can do short-term good, and allocate half a million pounds to underrepresented founders, but we can use it as a case study for our application to BBB. We will apply for those funds because historically, our portfolio at GC Angels is over 50% female and over one-third ethnic-minority-led. We've already got a track record in this area, but we are Greater Manchester focused.

This programme will be open to all Northern-based founders. And if we can show BBB that we can run this productively and successfully, then that opens up the scale for them to give us £15-20 million in terms of funding, and then you have possibly one of the larger, if not largest, Northern-based, exclusively pre-seed funds.

That's where you truly start to chip away at the inherent structural barriers. And that's just a first fund; it can go further than that from there.

People who come out of this programme are still going to have to go through these structural imbalances and inequalities, but BBB are looking to address it, And we can be at the forefront of it. So we see this as a stage one.

Not even a £20 million fund will solve all the problems of the North, let alone the world. Forgive the pun, because that's the name of the program, but there's a ‘Pathway’ for us to go from a Greater Manchester-centric early-stage investor to a Northern-based accelerator, to a Northern-based pre-seed fund, all being completely focused on addressing economic and cultural and societal imbalances in founders.

MB: So GC Angels has broader ambitions beyond the Greater Manchester region?

RS: Absolutely, we always have.

All local authorities want to look after the deliverability of their local catchment area, which is just the way government funding has worked.

This BBB programme allows those barriers to come down, because the funding doesn't have to be made from the local authority point of view. It's coming direct from BBB, but it's aimed at the North, for whoever wants to deliver to a specific kind of underrepresented category, and so we definitely have desires to fulfil that.

_____

The deadline for entries to GC Angels’ first Venture Forward cohort is 31 August 2025.

Forwarded this email? Not already a subscriber? Fix that now and get future issues straight to your inbox 👇