Capital is flowing but only for the best storytellers

Is it a tough time to get investors? While geopolitical storm clouds and uncertainty weigh heavy over the Middle East, there are signs that capital is still flowing… and in some cases, accelerating.

The British Business Bank recently revealed that a fund aimed at helping pension schemes increase allocations to UK venture capital raised £200m. Meanwhile, this week the Treasury confirmed new changes aimed at unlocking £100m extra investment every year into innovative British companies.

Earlier in the year, five major banks committed to a lending package totalling £11bn to support the growth of SMEs across the country. Add to this NatWest’s Future of UK Innovation report, which found that UK start-ups raised £17.5bn in VC investment in 2025. This symbolised a 35 per cent year-on-year increase and the first annual growth in four years.

This paints a slightly clearer picture. Capital isn’t disappearing, it’s just becoming more selective. So, back to my first question: Is it a tough time to get investors?

Harry Stebbings, the host of The Twenty Minute VC podcast, says no. Outside of his podcast day-to-day, he knows the VC world intimately, having set up his own firm, 20VC, in 2020. It raised $400m in October 2024 and has investments in the likes of global fintech Airwallex, disruptor Fuse Energy and mobile gaming unicorn Tripledot Studios.

Stebbings points to one common mistake he sees: “People just suck at telling stories.”

“Fundraising is a game of telling a story. It’s a game of telling a story and making it compelling for an investor to see the upside,” he said to Sir Richard Harpin on this week’s episode of the Business Leader podcast. “People often just don't know how to package their product… Life is a game of packaging. Most leaders just are not very good at marketing and that's why they're not very good at fundraising.”

Stebbings breaks successful fundraisers into two camps: “Jerry Maguire” or “Walt Disney.”

• Walt Disney: “Tell me a great story”, make me see the future
• Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money”, prove this is already working

The best founders, of course, know when to be both. If storytelling is the differentiator, what does good actually look like?

Andy Raskin, a Silicon Valley-based messaging and positioning expert, broke down the pitch deck of monetisation platform Zuora, one he called the greatest sales deck he had ever seen, giving an insight into what good storytelling looks like.

He argued that the best business stories follow a simple structure: define a big change in the world, show why it matters, position your company as the solution and make the stakes clear.

This approach can be paired with a theme inspired by Donald Miller. The author of Building a StoryBrand says that you need to anchor your story in a single, memorable idea. He emphasises that customers and investors don’t engage with complexity; they engage with clarity.

“If you confuse, you lose,” he writes. Your story should be reducible to one sentence: what problem you solve, for whom, and why you’re different. If your leadership team can’t articulate that consistently, investors won’t be able to repeat it… and that’s a problem.

You may not have the hype of a start-up or the scale of a corporate giant, but you do have something powerful: real traction, real customers and real stories.

The challenge is not whether capital is available but rather whether you can make investors believe. In the end, fundraising isn’t just about showing potential. It’s about making someone else see it as clearly as you do.

Further reading

Some book recommendations that we have on how to craft the story of your business are Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify your message so customers will listen by Donald Miller, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck by Chip and Dan Heath and the ever-reliable Business Storytelling For Dummies by Karen Dietz and Lori Silverman.

Business Leader Expert Catherine Baker’s latest piece perfectly explains how to mentally prepare and frame a pitch. It’s anchored in the world of sport – from Team Europe’s 2025 Ryder Cup preparation to Ben Ainslie’s behaviours that helped him win gold at four consecutive Olympic Games.

Guess the company

• Telecoms company Orange lists on the London Stock Exchange
• The UK's oldest merchant bank Barings Bank collapses
• Ebay and Amazon are founded
• British Gas chief executive Cedric Brown receives a 75 per cent pay rise, leading to widespread discussions about executive pay

You'll find the answer at the bottom of this page

What happened this week?

1. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has warned that losses from private credit are likely to be larger than markets anticipate, as concerns continue to grow about the stability of the opaque industry. Dimon said that lending standards in private credit had been “modestly weakening pretty much across the board” as financial institutions sought out greater returns. “I do believe that when we have a credit cycle, which will happen one day, losses on all leveraged lending in general will be higher than expected, relative to the environment,” he said in his annual letter to shareholders.
2. Rachel Reeves’s business rates tax raid will cost Britain’s fragile manufacturing sector £1bn and put 25,000 jobs at risk, Make UK has warned.
   Factories across the country will pay £939m more in business rates this year after tax changes took effect at the start of April, according to research by the trade group. It also warned that this will increase pressure on the sector at a time when it already faces “existential threats” from surging energy and employment costs.
3. Britain’s financial services sector rebounded in the first three months of this year, powered by the fastest single-quarter recovery since 1996. According to the CBI’s industry-wide survey, sentiment among financial firms improved for the first time in nearly two years. Bosses had reported a “rapid” fall in business activity at the industry body’s previous survey as an uncertain policy outlook weighed on firms’ profitability and investment intentions. Its weighted balance for business volumes dropped to -36 per cent in the final quarter, but rebounded to a score of +65 per cent over the start of 2026.
4. Climate change has been overtaken by human health as the number one priority for institutional investors that badge themselves as “sustainable” or “ESG”, amid a backlash against the terminology of purposeful investing. A poll of 200 fund managers found they were starting to focus less on global warming and fossil fuels and more on other areas of concern, including health, artificial intelligence ethics and corruption.
5. Adam Back has denied that he is the founder of Bitcoin after the New York Times published a lengthy investigation suggesting that the British computer scientist was the cryptocurrency’s mysterious creator. Back was a pioneer of early digital asset research in the 1990s and developed Hashcash, a proof-of-work system that later influenced Bitcoin.

Weekend reading

🔍 Sam Altman may control our future - can he be trusted?

Investigative reporter Ronan Farrow has written an explosive piece on one of the biggest figures in the world of AI. It's the result of an 18-month deep dive, where Farrow spoke to over a hundred people with intimate knowledge of how Altman conducts business. It looks at Altman's firing and rehiring in 2023, a look into the questions over his integrity that have followed him throughout his career and more.

💪 What AI can’t do: The new job of leadership

AI can solve complicated problems but leadership is about complex ones. Harvard Business Review has spoken to Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks about why the future of leadership isn’t problem-solving, it’s understanding people, creating meaning and helping teams navigate what machines can’t.

And finally

Ahh, the company away day. The team building, morale galvanising and inspiration nurturing event that can be the highlight of the business year for employees. But when fully remote tech company Plex took its 120 employees to the sunny tropical paradise that is Honduras, it had the potential to be all that and more. How wrong they were.

The Wall Street Journal published an account of the $500,000 Survivor themed weeklong trip that turned into a nightmare. It's a story that includes an overzealous SEAL trainer almost killing them, meals of raw chicken and tarantulas and a porcupine crashing through a ceiling.

The answer to our question is 1995.