Sonde Market Data / UK sub-£50m private market
£2.19bn across 2,834 companies.
The early read, 20 days after quarter-end. Like for like, capital is level with a year ago and more companies are raising, but almost all of the extra ones raised under £100k. At the top, twelve companies raised £50m or more, the most in any third quarter since 2021, and eight of them in announced venture rounds.
Published 20 days after quarter-end, when a quarter typically has about four-fifths of its capital on file. "At day 20" is the same quarter a year earlier as it stood 20 days after it ended, so the comparison is like for like. The whole series is revised since the Q2 edition. See methodology.
The quarter / 01
Twenty days in, Q3 is
tracking level with last year.
The last bar is still filing. Twenty days after they ended, the ten quarters before it had between 76.4% and 92.1% of their capital on file; on that range Q3 2026 finishes between £2.4bn and £2.9bn, around Q3 2025's £2.53bn, and a little higher once the filings we are still reading are counted.
The year / 02
Three years level at £10.1–10.5bn.
2026 is tracking above them.
The forecast rests on the first half, because Q3 is still filing. H1's share of the year has moved between 52.0% (2022) and 44.9% (2025): the four-year average lands 2026 near £10.7bn, last year's H2-heavy pattern near £11.8bn. Both ends sit above 2025's £10.5bn and below 2022's £12.5bn.
2026 has already passed the 8,978 events of the first nine months of 2025. Rounds of £100k and up are level with a year ago; the extra events are almost all smaller, which is why the average raise has slipped.
Stages / 03
Where in the stack
the money went.
The money stays at the top while the count grows at the bottom: the quarter added companies almost entirely below £100k. A further £37m went to 1,125 pre-seed and bootstrapped companies.
Sectors / 04
Software cools. AI and deep tech
take more of the capital.
Companies applying AI raised 2.4 times what pure-play AI raised, across four times the companies.
Like for like the AI theme is up 28% on a year ago, from £331m at the same point in Q3 2025, and at £425m it is larger than any named sector. Pure-play AI is up 60% on the same point last year, from £113m.
The top end / 05
Twelve mega-deals.
Eight real rounds.
Twelve companies raised £50m or more in Q3, totalling £1.96bn, and £1.71bn of it is confirmed UK venture capital in eight announced rounds: AI compute, quantum computing, defence and drones, robotics and AI-led biology.
Two more filings that read as £50m+ rounds are not in these figures. We read both forms: one put the allotment's total nominal value in the per-share price box, the other priced a dollar round in a sterling share class. This is why the headline series is sub-£50m: the top end moves on a handful of filings, and it is the segment below it that UK angels, EIS and SEIS funds actually deploy into.
Announced / 06
Thirteen announced raises.
Eight are still filing.
What announcements catch. They come first, and they see past the border. Eight of these rounds are only partly on file so far, Open Cosmos's and Scan.com's furthest behind, and Metaview's $60m was raised through a parent company outside the UK, so no UK filing will ever show it.
What filings add. Every allotment of every size, announced or not, with the exact amount and the price per share, and a round arriving tranche by tranche: the gap between announced and filed above is the part still to come.
UK equity rounds first announced between 1 July and 30 September 2026, found by our news reader and checked against each company's own announcement. Amounts as announced; where a round mixed equity and debt, the equity part. Rounds announced earlier but allotted in Q3, such as Oxford Quantum Circuits' June Series C, appear in the filings instead.
Regions / 07
Where the capital lands.
Outside London and the South East, the North West led the quarter with £212m across 200 companies.
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Methodology / 08
How we count.
The dataset
Sonde parses every SH01, the statutory return of allotment of shares, lodged with Companies House by UK private companies. Each filing is the legal record of new shares issued. We structure the filings, strip out those that are not genuine private fundraising, and aggregate by company within each calendar quarter, so a company filing multiple SH01s in a quarter counts once.
Where a filing has been formally corrected via a later RP04, we use the corrected values and exclude the superseded original.
Definitions
Mega-deals are companies raising £50m or more within a quarter, reported separately because a handful of outsized entries would otherwise swing the totals. Sectors are assigned by our classification of each company's activity; early-stage companies without a confident classification are reported as unclassified rather than guessed. Regions follow the company's registered office.
The headline series is sub-£50m: the segment UK angels, EIS and SEIS funds deploy into.
What we exclude
Early, and occasionally revised
We publish three weeks after quarter-end, ahead of most coverage. The price of being early is revision: an SH01 is due a month after the allotment, so this quarter is still filing and will rise, and we are still reading some of the filings already in. Every comparison with an earlier quarter on this page is like for like, that quarter as it stood the same number of days after it ended.
This edition revises the whole series up. Since the Q2 edition we have read about 39,000 filings from companies in sectors our pipeline used to skip (property, construction, hospitality, retail, health and education among them), recovered filings that had failed to download, and corrected cap-table readings that had wrongly marked independent companies as subsidiaries. Q2 2026 now reads £3.02bn across 3,268 companies, against £2.51bn and 2,421 when we published it, and Q2 2025 moves from £2.15bn to £2.60bn.
The method now judges every company as it stood when it issued the shares. Public or private is read from the date of the allotment, and so is whether a company was a subsidiary: earlier editions read that from the latest confirmation statement, so a startup bought by a corporate after it raised lost all its earlier rounds. Shares paid for in kind no longer count, and a venture business that moves under a new parent is followed there. Recent quarters barely move; older years rise, 2019 from £5.5bn to £7.1bn, so growth since 2019 is about half what the old method showed, in line with other market data.
This page was first published on 20 October with the subsidiary test read from the latest confirmation statement, and revised the same day. Q3 2026 moved from £2.18bn to £2.19bn; the history before 2024 moved most.
Every figure on this page comes from a single pull dated 20 October 2026. We flag revisions when they happen, and we do not mix pulls.