While the spotlight is often on the funding gap facing female founders, one industry veteran is urging a shift in focus. Sam Smith, the former chief executive of Finncap (now Cavendish Financial), argues that the more crucial challenge lies in helping women-led businesses scale after they launch.
Over 24 years advising growth firms, Smith noted a stark trend: a surprisingly small number of women were building companies large enough to reach the next stage of significant growth. She said: “When I look back over those 24 years, I could probably count on my hand the number of women founders I advised running sizable companies”.
That led Smith to launch The Superscalers, a non-profit initiative designed to identify and support women building companies with revenue above £50 million. That threshold, she believes, marks a turning point in both influence and visibility.
“From my own experience, I reckon it was around 50 million where you start to get a significant voice and you get taken seriously”, she said. When the Superscalers first began mapping the data in 2024, it found just 80 women in the UK had built businesses to that scale. A year later, the number had risen to 144.
“What we’re seeing now is the result of women starting businesses 10 or 15 years ago and now reaching those next stages”, she said. In 2019, fewer than 200 female-founded companies in the UK had reached £10 million in revenue.
However, last year that figure had risen to around 1,300, a positive sign that more women-led companies are entering the scale-up phase, in which expansion accelerates.
“When you get to £20 million turnover, it’s only one more doubling to get to £40 million or £50 million”, Smith said. “There are hundreds of women building companies at that level who are capable of getting there quite quickly”.
However, female founders continue to receive only a small share of venture funding globally. Smith notes that while part of the issue is a lack of capital, it is also due to how traditional funding structures fit the way many women build companies.
“VC (Venture Capital) funding isn’t appropriate for most female founders because of the way they scale and the time it takes”, she said. “Many want to build sustainable businesses and maintain their culture and teams, rather than scale quickly towards a fast exit”.
That often means female founders have to rely more heavily on bootstrapping (using personal funds or money generated by the business) or patient capital before raising larger rounds.
Smith says alternative sources of growth funding like angel investors (wealthy investors who provide capital in exchange for equity usually about 10 per cent to 25 per cent) and long-term capital, could play a larger role. Yet, she argues the biggest barrier still comes down to belief and access to networks.
“I reckon it took me more than 20 years to feel like I deserved to be in those rooms”, she said. “When you come from a state school background and don’t have that network around you, you just don’t know the playbook. You see other people running big businesses and assume you’re not it”.
Co-founder of Women Who Scale, Amy Knight, said: “We need to go beyond awareness towards meaningful action, to unlock greater participation and investment outcomes for women”.
The Rose Review (an independent 2019 report commissioned by the UK government to investigate barriers faced by female entrepreneurs) estimated that matching men’s and women’s rates of business creation and scaling could add £250 billion to the UK economy. Adjusted for inflation, that figure now stands closer to £310 billion. Smith’s ambition is to see at least 500 female-funded businesses reach the £50 million threshold.
At that point, you’ve got a critical mass of women with real economic power and influence”, she said. “And once you get that scale of community, you start changing the system from the ground up”.
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