Monthly Archives: May 2021

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The Start-Up Series competition – over £1 million invested in latest winners

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Originally written by Nick Ismail on Small Business
In September 2020, Small Business and Worth Capital partnered to re-launch The Start-Up Series – the UK’s largest seed funding competition.
Since then, five new winners have received a combined total of over £800,000 of equity investment from The Start-Up Series Fund and private investors. Three former winners have also gone on to receive over £300,000 of follow-on funding from the same source after achieving their impressive growth targets. All investments were subject to further due diligence carried out by Fund Manager, Amersham Investment Management.
Following the latest investment round completed in early April, Hayley Etherington, Business Operations Director of Worth Capital, said: “As the Start-Up Series approaches its 5th birthday later this year, we take great pride in having meticulously selected and crowned 25 competition winners from thousands of applications across the UK. They’ve received over £5.3 million in SEIS & EIS equity investment — that’s real cash, creating real innovation and jobs, and building loved brands.
“We welcome these latest five ambitious start-up businesses to the Worth Capital family with great optimism. As always, we’ll be working hard alongside the talented founding teams over the coming months and years, helping them to avoid risks

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2020 named ‘Year of the Start-up’ with record 770,000 UK businesses created

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Originally written by Anna Jordan on Small Business
A massive 770,000 new businesses were created in 2020 – an all-time UK record.
Figures from Tyl by Natwest reveal the number of start-up businesses grew by 30 per cent compared to 2019. Aside from April, 50,000 new businesses were created every month in 2020.
In a year of mass closures across the high street, entrepreneurs turned to the digital market to set up shop. This made online and mail order the most popular sector of creation in 2020.
>See also: The essential guide to starting and growing an online business
There were 305,608 online and mail order businesses created in 2020 compared to 13,615 in 2019. Buying and selling property was the third most popular source of new businesses created, growing by 40 per cent compared to 2019. The number of takeaway shops created increased by 33 per cent in 2020 compared to 2019.
The pandemic hit the female workforce particularly hard, with job losses affecting women 1.8 times more than men. So, women had to find new sources of revenue, such as Etsy. A massive 81 per cent of sellers on the platform identify as women and 69 per cent consider their Etsy shop a business.

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