Headline UK funding has picked up. Our Q2 market report showed the strongest second quarter for sub-£50m rounds since 2022, and Beauhurst's H1 2026 Deal report points the same way across the wider market: £14.4bn raised, the strongest half in real terms since H1 2022 (although three AI companies took 29% of it). Underneath that, getting from a first round to a second has become harder.
We took every equity-backed startup in Sonde whose first round of £250k or more fell between 2017 and 2024, 9,384 companies in all. Then we checked whether each one raised another £150k or more 6 to 18 months later.
Sonde analysis of Companies House SH01 filings, allotments filed to September 2026.
For the 2017 to 2021 cohorts, roughly a third did. For 2022, 2023 and 2024 it has been under three in ten, and flat across all three years. In short, what this means is that a founder who raised a decent first round recently has had worse odds of a timely second one than founders a few years earlier.
It isn't only slower raising
The obvious objection is that companies are simply taking longer between rounds, so the 18-month window is catching fewer of them. If that were the whole story, a longer window would close the gap. It doesn't. Given three years, about half the 2022 cohort raised again, against at least 53% for every cohort from 2017 to 2021.
Same data. The 2023 and 2024 cohorts have not had three years yet.
We will add the 2023 and 2024 cohorts to this chart as their three-year windows close.
Why the two pictures fit together
I suspect the headline recovery and this squeeze are the same story. Capital is concentrating in fewer, larger rounds, and fewer early companies are getting the next cheque. Beauhurst's own detail points the same way: an average round of £5.4m in the half, with three AI companies taking 29% of the money.
A founder who raised a decent first round recently has had worse odds of a timely second one than founders a few years earlier.
Sonde is built by Syndicate Room, and we invest at this stage, so you might expect us to say this. But it does strengthen the case for planning on 24 months of runway rather than 12.
Method
How we measured this
We started from every SH01 (the return of allotment of shares a company files when it issues new shares) lodged by a company carrying Sonde's venture tag. The tag marks companies with at least one clean priced equity round of £100k or more, and leaves out PLCs, holding vehicles and intra-group capitalisations.
We kept only allotments that pass the same clean-round filters as our quarterly market report: sterling, priced above nominal value, and inside our filer-error bounds. We then treated each SH01 filing as one round, dated by the allotment date it reports.
A company's first round is its earliest round of £250k or more. That is not necessarily its first ever: many raised smaller amounts before. We then looked for any further round of £150k or more starting 6 to 18 months later.
We also tested whether the drop is an artefact of those choices. It holds in each case:
- Counting only follow-ons at a new share price, to exclude second closes of the same round: 27.5% for the 2017 to 2021 cohorts, 20.7% for 2022 to 2024.
- Only companies with no earlier SH01 on file at all: 28.0% against 22.0%.
- Moving the thresholds, to a £150k first round or a £250k follow-on, shifts the levels but leaves a gap of six to seven points.
Two limits are worth stating. We parse filings from the last ten years only, so a company that raised before then can look like a first-time raiser; that is why the chart starts in 2017. And recent years depend on recent filings being parsed. More than 99% of these companies' SH01s filed from 2022 to the end of 2025 have been, so the 2022 to 2024 figures are not a backlog effect.
See the numbers
| First £250k+ round | Startups | Raised again, 6 to 18 months | Share | Within 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 1,058 | 383 | 36.2% | 54.2% |
| 2018 | 1,129 | 376 | 33.3% | 53.6% |
| 2019 | 1,193 | 367 | 30.8% | 53.1% |
| 2020 | 1,051 | 382 | 36.3% | 57.0% |
| 2021 | 1,456 | 526 | 36.1% | 54.3% |
| 2022 | 1,327 | 387 | 29.2% | 50.0% |
| 2023 | 1,135 | 330 | 29.1% | not yet |
| 2024 | 1,035 | 278 | 26.9% | not yet |
What's next
Next I want to look at what happened to the companies that didn't get that second round. If you're seeing the same pattern in your own portfolio, I'd be interested to hear: get in touch.