Sonde Market Data / UK sub-£50m private market
£2.51bn across 2,421 companies.
The strongest second quarter since 2022 for UK private companies raising under £50m, and the first to break clear of the £2.15bn ceiling that held through 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Part of the year-on-year gap reflects improved capture of recently filed and recovered filings, not market movement. Read the direction, not the decimal places. See methodology.
The quarter / 01
The first quarter to sit
clear of the plateau.
The year / 02
Three years inside £8.5–8.8bn.
2026 is tracking above them.
H1's share of the year has slid from 54.5% (2022) to 43.8% (2025), so the forecast is a range: the four-year average share lands 2026 near £9.0bn; last year's H2-heavy pattern, near £10.3bn. Both ends sit above 2025's £8.8bn.
The average sub-£50m raise has climbed 20% in two years: £860k in Q2 2024 to £1.04m now.
Stages / 03
Where in the stack
the money went.
That is consolidation, not decline: the same money, concentrated into fewer hands. HMRC's tax-relief data corroborates it independently, with EIS investment flat at £1.58bn in 2024–25 while 4% of companies took 27% of the capital. Two datasets, no shared methodology, pointing the same way. A further £30m went to 1,369 pre-seed and bootstrapped companies.
Sectors / 04
Fintech pulls ahead. AI is
everywhere it isn't named.
Companies applying AI raised 2.6 times what pure-play AI raised, across more than three times the companies.
At £397m the AI theme is larger than any single named sector in the segment, fintech included. An investor who wants AI exposure in this market gets more of it, more diversified, by backing the sectors deploying AI than by hunting for companies with AI in the name.
The top end / 05
Eleven mega-deals.
Two real rounds.
Eleven companies raised £50m or more in Q2, totalling £1.65bn, but only about £374m of it is confirmed UK venture capital. Both confirmed rounds are AI companies: the pure-play AI story is real, it is simply happening at the top of the market.
The rest is not venture, or not verifiable as venture. The largest single entry is a US parent capitalising a new UK subsidiary, and behind it sit a defence joint venture, an aerospace build-out and intra-group movements. This is why the headline series is sub-£50m: it is the segment UK angels, EIS and SEIS funds actually deploy into.
Regions / 06
Where the capital lands.
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Methodology / 07
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 roughly three weeks after quarter-end, ahead of most coverage. The price of being early is occasional revision: late-arriving and recovered filings lift recent quarters, and filter improvements can correct the historical series.
This page carries a revision. It was drafted from a 27 July pull and is published from an 11 August one, after a batch of previously unreadable filings was recovered. That lifted Q2 2026 from £2.23bn to £2.51bn and, because the recovery reached back through the series, lifted Q2 2025 from £2.06bn to £2.15bn as well. The comparison is like-for-like; both numbers moved.
Every figure on this page comes from a single pull dated 11 August 2026. We flag revisions when they happen, and we do not mix pulls.