Entrepreneur Plus UK

UK founders closed fewer seed rounds in 2025 than in any year since the pandemic but the ones who did close raised more. Seed deal numbers fell 27% to 704 deals last year, while median deal size and median pre-money valuation both hit record highs, according to the British Business Bank's Small Business Equity Tracker 2026. Investors haven't left the market. They've simply become more selective, and a proper seed round checklist is what now separates founders who close quickly from founders who spend months explaining away a messy cap table. This isn't about how to pitch. It's the groundwork that needs to be sorted before the first outreach email goes out the things investors check quietly, long before they say yes or no out loud. Work through this seed round checklist properly and closing becomes close to a formality. Skip it, and you'll end up fixing gaps mid-diligence, which is the worst possible moment to discover them. Why seed diligence has gotten heavie...

Plum markets itself as a friendly AI robot quietly stashing away money on your behalf. It's a nice image, but it raises an obvious question: how does Plum make money if the entry-level version costs nothing at all? Strip away the AI framing and what's underneath looks a lot more familiar a subscription business with several different places it can charge you, depending on exactly which products you use. Plum itself names three income streams in its own profitability announcement: customer subscriptions, asset-based revenue on its investment products, and transaction revenue. That's the real answer to how does Plum make money not one clever mechanism, but several running in parallel, only some of which any individual customer will ever touch. Someone using nothing but a savings pocket on the free tier, for example, never pays an investment management fee at all. A Basic customer pays nothing upfront but faces the highest percentage fees on anything they invest; a Max custom...

  Nine centres, £1.6 billion in Innovate UK funding, and a network now being asked to prove it belongs in a rebuilt innovation system. Picture a founder somewhere outside Newcastle, three years into building a sensor for offshore wind turbines. She doesn't need a government scheme she needs a wind tunnel, or a rig that can simulate twenty years of saltwater corrosion in twenty weeks, or an engineer who's already solved the exact problem keeping her up at night. What is a Catapult to a founder like her? Probably nothing, until the day she discovers the UK already built exactly what she needs in a converted paper storage shed in Blyth, Northumberland and gave it a name straight out of a medieval siege. That's the first thing worth knowing: nobody sets out looking for a Catapult. Founders stumble into the idea sideways, usually after months of trying to solve a facilities problem on their own. So, what is a Catapult , in practical terms? A not-for-profit innovation centre...

  Curve's pitch was elegant: one card that stands in for all the others in your wallet. What it never advertised was that the maths underneath that convenience never quite balanced and that imbalance is exactly what led to the recently completed Curve Lloyds acquisition, after months of shareholder disagreement. So how does Curve make money, if the core idea tap once, route the payment wherever you like wasn't enough on its own? The short answer is that Curve built several revenue lines specifically to plug a structural gap in how its core payment mechanism works. The transaction that only pays half its own way Every Curve payment happens in two stages, and Curve only gets paid properly on the first one. When a customer taps their Curve card, Curve collects interchange income on what's known as the "Leg 1" transaction this is the standard fee card networks pay to card issuers, regulated in the UK and EU at roughly 0.20% for debit and 0.30% for credit transactio...