If you want to understand why UK tech investment outside London is such a problem, try raising money from a kitchen table in the North, the Midlands or the South West. I have bootstrapped businesses for over seventeen years, partly because the alternative meant a lot of train tickets and a lot of polite nodding in rooms that did not quite get what we were building.
The numbers tell the story. A huge share of UK venture funding lands in London and the surrounding area, and the rest of the country fights over what is left. That is not a healthy way to run an economy, and it is not a sensible way to find the next big British company.
Why Regional Founders Struggle to Raise Money
Investors are people, and people back what they know. If your investor lives in London, drinks in London and goes to events in London, then the founders they meet are mostly in London. The ones they back are mostly in London too. It is a loop and it feeds itself.
Regional founders end up spending time and money getting into that loop. Travel, accommodation, a second address on the pitch deck, sometimes a move altogether. For a bootstrapped business, that cost is real. Every day spent chasing a meeting in the capital is a day not spent finding customers.
I am not saying London investors are the villains here. Many of them are sharp and genuinely want to back good businesses. The problem is structural, and polite networking events will not fix it.
The Talent Follows the Money
Here is the bit that frustrates me most. Plenty of brilliant developers live outside London. Many of them would happily stay near family, buy a house they can actually afford and work on interesting problems locally.
But if the only well funded employers are in the capital, those developers drift south or go remote for a London firm. Either way, the local economy loses the skills, the spending and the next generation of founders. Then someone writes a report about a regional skills gap and the whole thing starts again.
Remote working has softened this a little. I work from a motorhome and my clients are scattered all over the country, so I am proof it can work. But a remote job is not the same as a local ecosystem with employers, meetups, suppliers and people who have done it before. You cannot rebuild that over Teams.
Where Government Policy Keeps Missing the Point
Successive governments love a regional growth announcement. There is always a new fund, a freeport, a tech hub or a catchy name for a corridor. Some of it does good, but much of it is short term and badly joined up.
Founders plan over ten years, not over a parliamentary term. If a scheme appears with a big launch and then quietly dies two budgets later, nobody builds a business around it. What people need is boring and consistent, which is exactly what politicians find hardest to deliver.
Tax is part of this too. Reliefs that should help early stage companies are often too fiddly for a small team to use without paying an adviser. I covered one example in my piece on SEIS and EIS for bootstrapped founders, and the pattern is the same each time. The system rewards people who already have the right contacts.
Broadband and Infrastructure Still Matter
It is hard to run a software business on a connection that drops every time it rains. I have written before about rural broadband and remote working policy, and it still amazes me that this is an issue in 2026. Infrastructure is not glamorous, but it decides where businesses can exist.
What Would Actually Help
I do not have a magic answer, but I do have a few practical ideas that would beat another pilot scheme.
First, make regional angel and seed investment genuinely attractive and simple. If the reliefs are easy to use without an accountant, more local people with spare cash will back local founders. Those early cheques matter far more than a big headline fund that nobody can access.
Second, back technical education where the talent already is. Colleges and universities outside London should have the funding and the industry links to turn out people who can build software, and employers should be encouraged to hire them locally. A decent apprenticeship route into tech would change a lot of lives.
Third, stop treating the capital as the only place that counts. Government contracts, public sector digital work and research funding can all be placed deliberately in other regions. That gives local firms a foothold and local talent a reason to stay.
What Founders Can Do in the Meantime
Waiting for Westminster is a poor strategy, so here is what I would do as a regional founder today.
Build revenue early and treat investment as optional. That is the whole premise of The 28 Day Startup, because paying customers give you options that a pitch deck never will. Find clients who care about the work rather than your postcode, and be loud about where you are based. Being outside London is a selling point for plenty of buyers, not an apology.
Build your own local network too. Even a small group of founders meeting regularly makes a difference, and it is how ecosystems really start. If you want a sounding board on the technology side, that is something I help with through my consulting work.
The Bottom Line
Britain has talent everywhere and capital in one place. Fixing that mismatch would do more for growth than most of the headline policies I have seen in recent years.
It will not happen by accident. It needs steady, unexciting commitment from people with the power to change things, and a bit less London centric thinking from the rest of us.
