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Even as someone who grew up in Bradford and went to a state school, I never particularly noticed class as an issue early in my life.

I didn’t particularly notice it when I started out as a tech journalist, either. People of all backgrounds wanted to talk to me because of my audience. But over time I started to notice how I was excluded from certain social groups because we simply couldn’t relate to each other on a fundamental level.

I know that if I was part of the Eton–Oxbridge set and had the accent to match, I’d have a certain air of confidence and inevitable success about me. Coupled with the network that background would have given me, I would automatically have had access to more opportunities than I have otherwise had.

Today, we look at this issue as we talk to Social Mobility Ventures, which exists to support founders and investors from a state school background. It’s a fascinating topic.

But first:

• You should check out the Royal Academy of Engineering’s State of UK Deep Tech 2025 report. It says deep tech ecosystem now ranks third worldwide for venture capital raised, attracting $43.7 billion since 2019, with deep tech accounting for nearly a third of all UK venture funding in 2025.

• Congratulations to Qlarifi, which we profiled back in March this year. The startup has been acquired by Socure. They’re the first startup featured on PreSeed Now’s three-and-a-half-year history to be acquired.

– Martin

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How Social Mobility Ventures wants to break UK pre-seed’s class barrier

Whisper it… there’s an underlying social class problem in British tech, and barely anyone ever mentions it.

Social Mobility Ventures exists to support founders and investors who don’t have the benefits of having gone to the right schools, or a wealthy circle of friends and family to put initial funding into their ventures.

The organisation recently published research that found (emphasis ours):

Another interesting point: according to the research, there are more founders in the UK overall from a state-educated background than a private school background.

To find out more, I spoke to Social Mobility Ventures founder David Houghton and marketing/comms lead Ryan Procter (who I used to work with back in my Tech North/ Tech City UK days).

This is not a full-time thing for either of them. Houghton is also principal at Antler while Procter leads marketing and comms at Nauta Capital. But it’s a project that is deeply rooted in personal experience for them both.

Houghton grew up on the border of Leeds and Bradford. He says entrepreneurship and venture capital weren’t on his radar at all until he watched the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley. It was this that drew him to London for a career in tech.

Procter grew up in Manchester, and like Houghton, went to a state school. As Northerners in London’s tech sector, both have experienced the deadly question people use to sort a new acquaintance in the social hierarchy: ‘what school did you go to?’

Like them, I grew up in the North of England, went to a state school and have carved out a career in the tech sector, so I was keen to get their perspective on the class divide in UK tech.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

MB = Martin SFP Bryant, DH = David Houghton, RP = Ryan Procter

MB: How did Social Mobility Ventures come about?

DH: I remember the first week on my first job in tech, going to a pub with new colleagues, and sitting down with a pint. They asked ‘what school did you go to?’ 

I sounded much more Northern at that point, and they were all very well-to-do. I said I went to my local state school, and then they were all Eton, Harrow, Marlborough College, Charterhouse. They were all talking about which private members’ clubs they go to, and which ski chalets.

It was completely different to where I grew up. We were lucky if we got a caravan holiday when we were younger.

I had a massive chip on my shoulder, and that prevailed for many years. And then I got involved in the DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] movement quite a bit, and I was really interested in that. This was when gender and ethnicity was really the focus for many firms. But what always stood out to me was that we weren’t talking about class at all.

It felt like we were missing what DEI really was all about to me, which is people from different backgrounds. So I joined Diversity VC to lead on a project to look at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background of investors in the UK.

We found that around 15-to-20% of VCs come from non-selective state schools, which is obviously mental if you think that 93% of the population does. We found that less than 0.1% of VCs are Black women from state schools in the UK. The intersections get really, really gross.

So that's really when Social Mobility Ventures started. We decided to do something about it.

We launched SMV at the start of this year. We've had close to, if not more than 1,000 people come to our events. And we've launched a partnership with [social mobility charity] The Sutton Trust to launch a nationwide initiative to improve socioeconomic inclusion in the tech sector.

At a workforce level, we truly see this as a systemic issue. Not just the entrepreneurship point and the investor point, but there's just not enough people who work in tech who come from state schools and low-income backgrounds.

9% of the tech workforce comes from a low-income background. If you compare that to the finance and legal world, finance is 29%, in legal it’s 26%. So tech is more elite than the finance and legal sectors, which is absolutely bonkers.

“Tech is more elite than the finance and legal sectors, which is absolutely bonkers.”

If you think that we're supposed to be this utopia where anyone can make it in the tech industry with just a computer and knowing how to code, that’s a fallacy. So we’re trying to solve this from a pipeline viewpoint. Tech workforce, entrepreneurship and investment, that's our goal.

MB: How was your new report put together, and what has it found?

DH: We started in April of this year and it's been a serious slog. We surveyed more than 4,000 founders from stealth right through to Series C, and we wanted to get a picture of who is starting companies in the UK, who has access to early capital, and who's breaking out; who are building the success stories in the UK?

We surveyed founders on their socioeconomic background. That involved going through LinkedIn and messaging founders, sending them surveys. Several hundred of them completed a longer survey, where we dug deeper into their socioeconomic background and their experiences.

We found that there's lots of interest in starting companies from individuals with state school backgrounds, but they drop off when it comes to raising that first funding round at pre-seed. But once they get into the funding and VC pipeline and VC trajectory, they're 30% more likely to reach Series C, and they make up 42% of the Series C cohort. The cohort size almost doubles from pre-seed to Series C.

MB: So founders from state schools tend to perform better if they can get past a roadblock at pre-seed. Why is that?

DH: Our hypothesis is that people who have come from less have more on the line. They are highly driven. They need to make this work, because they don't have a financial backdrop that they can fall back on.

There's a concept I really like that Sequoia coined, called ‘distance travelled’. They assess if a founder has had to go a much further distance to get to where they have than other people. And that's one of the leading indicators of founder success for them. And I guess that's how we think of it as well.

I spoke to a founder today who grew up in Bradford, in a single-parent household with four brothers and sisters. His mum was a cleaner. He’s an insanely driven guy. He grew up with nothing, and then he got into Oxford, and at 23 years old has raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

His starting point is much lower than someone who goes to St Paul's School in London and then goes to Cambridge and then starts a company. They're going from like an eight to a nine, whereas this guy from Bradford is going from a three to a nine. He's had to go through so much shit to get there, and that correlates directly to startup and company-building success, in my view.

RP: We find at Nauta, and all the firms I've worked with, that a key indicator of a founder's success is their ability to attract investors and customers.

If you've managed to do that, despite the barrier to entry and despite your lack of access, then you're going to be better set up and more resilient for the future. That is a hypothesis, but that seems to be what the data shows.

MB: So what needs to be done to help break this pre-seed class barrier?

RP: Of those founders that drop off at that stage, any one of them could be building a Lovable or a future giant in this country. So we're missing out on them simply because they haven't got the access to money.

Better investment at pre-seed, more focused on state-educated founders, is needed. We’ve made close to 1,000 introductions to investors for state-school founders. The appetite for investors to meet state school founders is really strong. If we can be a conduit between them, that's going to be a huge advantage.

The Investor Pathways Capital programme from the British Business Bank is focused specifically on emerging managers who are from diverse backgrounds. There's a good focus on women there, as well as people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. It's a start, but you can see that massively scaling up in the future.

DH: I’d like to see more LP pressure. The British Business Bank is the biggest LP in the UK. They mandate data collection for their GP investments. I think there needs to be data collection at the investor level and also at the founder level, which is mandated more by LPs.

We're trying to get people more comfortable with the idea of collecting socioeconomic data. One of the issues we've run into so far is that people seem absolutely fine with collecting gender and ethnicity data, but as soon as you ask them to ask someone about their parents’ occupations or how they grew up, it just becomes a big no-no for them. So we’re seeing what we can do to move the needle.

“People seem absolutely fine with collecting gender and ethnicity data, but as soon as you ask them to ask someone about their parents’ occupations or how they grew up, it just becomes a big no-no for them.”

RP: Some of the most prestigious private schools in the country are worn as a badge of honour, something to put front and centre on your CV, or your LinkedIn, or when you enter the room.

We want to flip that and make state school a badge of honour, make your upbringing a badge of honour if it's been difficult, because Sequoia, one of the biggest and most successful VCs in the world, is actually looking for that as a qualifying factor.

So we've got some initiatives we're thinking about in the next year on how to do that, and how to create more role models, both founders and investors, that show that there is a pathway for others.

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You can download the Social Mobility Ventures report here.

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