Despite encouraging shifts, equity investment in the UK remains highly concentrated in London. The data reveals a significant imbalance that holds back national potential.

Regional Investment Imbalance (Data Source: British Business Bank, Small Business Equity Tracker 2025)

• London's Dominance: London accounted for 61% of UK equity investment and 47% of deals in 2024.

• Market Contraction: Total UK equity investment fell 2.5% to £10.8 billion, with deal numbers dropping 15.1% to 2,048, which while still ahead of European counterparts France and Germany, shows there’s still plenty of untapped opportunity.

• A Slow Shift: London’s share has declined from a high of 73% in 2020, signaling some regional progress, yet its dominance persists.

These figures imply the UK is not short on ambition, or opportunity, outside London. What is short is nearby capital and the connective tissue that turns ideas into scalable businesses: investors who are embedded in local ecosystems, linked not just by postcode but by network, reputation, and presence.

Across the UK, several regional ecosystems already demonstrate the transformative power of local capital. Cambridge and Oxford lead in deep tech and life sciences, translating world-class research into commercial success stories. Manchester has built a thriving digital and media scene, driven by collaboration between universities, creative industries, and regional funds. Edinburgh, meanwhile, continues to scale its fintech and AI ecosystems, supported by a strong academic base and active local investor networks. These examples prove that when capital meets local expertise, innovation compounds and spreads its benefits nationwide.

Presence and Pace: Localised investors send a clear signal: we see you, we trust you, we’re here to help. Proximity shortens feedback loops, warms introductions, and accelerates decision-making in ways that remote interactions cannot replicate.

Clusters Compound: Research universities, anchor corporates, and sector expertise, from advanced manufacturing to digital health, create dense networks of ideas. Locally rooted investors don’t just fund these clusters; they help commercialise innovations faster, ensuring ideas don’t stall waiting for distant capital.

Broader Participation: When capital flows to Bristol, Exeter or Swansea as easily as Bermondsey, the benefits of high-growth jobs, ownership, and productivity extend across the UK…not just London and the South East.

The success of regional hubs like Oxford’s spinout network, Cambridge’s deep-tech innovation cluster, and Scotland’s fintech ecosystem underscores how proximity to capital fuels tangible results. By embedding ourselves in these ecosystems, we can drive national economic resilience and ensure innovation benefits every corner of the UK.

At Love Ventures, we’ve considered ourselves to be pan-UK since day one, but recognise there’s more that we can and should be doing to get our eyes up from London.

Following a number of trips to scope out the ecosystem, we recently took the whole Love Ventures team along to spend a couple of days really getting to know the city’s tech scene and key players in the local market. This involved drop-in office hours meeting founders building everything from drone ports to AI for robotics integrations, a lunch for some key players in the Bristol investment landscape, a visit to the Natwest Accelerator, numerous coffees with fellow VCs and Angels, all capped off with our Padel mixer for fifty of Bristol's brightest founders, angels, professional services and startup operators (see our wrap-up post here).  

In Bristol, the energy is palpable. Our recent time there reinforced just how much untapped potential lies beyond London. This is the power of a strong local ecosystem, but it needs consistent, committed capital to reach its full potential.

Bristol’s Local Ecosystem (Data Source: SETsquared Bristol Impact Report 2024)

• Founder Funding: Companies incubated by SETsquared Bristol have raised over £740 million to date, with more than £33 million in 2024 alone.

• Economic Impact: The incubator supports over 80 startups annually and has contributed more than £600 million in GVA to the local economy since its founding.

The region’s success is built on a few key pillars:

• A Strong University-to-Industry Pipeline: The universities around Bristol and Bath continue to produce high-quality technical founders and spin-outs, giving the region a durable head start.

• Ecosystem Traction: Local players have already built a thriving local ecosystem through patience and persistence, demonstrating a proven model for success.

• Deep and Applied Tech Strength: From semiconductors and robotics to climate tech and creative sectors, Bristol blends legacy engineering with modern R&D, giving founders a tangible platform to scale.

What’s now required is consistent, committed capital from on-the-ground investors who show up not just for the term-sheet signing, but stay to build the ecosystem, the community, and the follow-through.

To help broaden participation and boost UK productivity, Love Ventures is making the following commitments:

• Be Present on the Ground: We’re not just stopping by. We’re embedding ourselves in regional hubs like Bristol, Manchester, and Glasgow. Through open office hours, founder breakfasts, workshops with local partners (and the occasional padel event!), we will be a visible, accessible partner for founders.

• Partner Regionally: We will partner with leading ecosystem players throughout the UK to reduce friction for founders raising their earliest institutional rounds.

• Bring London’s eyeballs along with us: Love Ventures alone does not have the depth of capital to support whole regional ecosystems. As such, we are committed to acting as a conduit between these hubs and our network of other VC funds and later-stage investors that do not have a local presence.

• Back Research-Adjacent Innovation: We will target opportunities in Fintech, Future of Work, Consumertech and beyond where UK universities and regional clusters create defensible competitive advantages.

• Mobilise Local EIS Capital: We will broaden our EIS LP base to include family offices, angel investors, and individuals across the UK to channel more domestic capital into early-stage funds and rounds.

• Share Our Playbooks: We will publish candid, practical guidance on first hires, pricing, and go-to-market strategies tailored to the realities of building outside London as part of the Love Ventures Platform.

• Measure Our Impact: We will track and publish the percentage of our new investments made outside London and the number of first cheques written beyond the M25, with a goal of improving both every year.

Driving productivity growth in the UK requires real, sustained commitment to supporting innovation outside London. Love Ventures is focused on providing the capital, resources, and long-term partnerships that enable regional founders to scale successfully. 

If you are building in Bristol, Bradford, or other regional hubs and are seeking an investor with a practical, engaged approach, we encourage you to connect with us. Our focus remains on backing high-potential founders where it matters most: on the ground, in the places shaping the UK’s future economic growth.