Female Founders, Funding and 2025: The Year We Stopped Performing.
TRANSFORMATION IS RARELY JUST ABOUT THE OUTER CHANGE. YES, YOU MIGHT be scanning your calendar for the next milestone — the pitch, the board meeting, the launch, the round of funding — wondering whether you need to be louder or quieter, tougher or softer, more visible or more contained. You might fall hard for a new strategy, a new future offer, a brand so elegant it makes you consider scrapping everything else just to give it room to breathe.
But in 2025, for me and for the female founders I work with, growth hasn’t been a checklist. It’s been a wardrobe change at soul level: identity, boundaries, ambition and belonging — tailored, re-stitched, and finally worn properly.
If fashion is how we signal who we are, then personal transformation is how we become who we are. What begins as a private decision — I can’t keep doing it like this — ripples outward. It changes how you lead. How you sell. How you choose clients. How you recover from rejection. How you walk into rooms. It changes the culture you build and the conversations you spark, from your team Slack to your industry’s quietest corners.
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For years, my own growth looked like “more”. More output, more proof, more resilience, more competence. I wore achievement like an outfit with sharp shoulders: impressive, efficient, and a touch too tight. It photographed well. It also made it hard to breathe.
And then last year happened — 2025 — and it did something I didn’t expect. It didn’t ask me to upgrade my goals. It asked me to upgrade my self.
There was a moment (you’ll know yours) when I realised my old ways of operating were like wearing last season’s shoes on new terrain. They had carried me brilliantly — until they didn’t. I could still walk, technically. But everything took effort. My confidence was doing the heavy lifting for a nervous system that had been overworked for too long.
So I began to change what I was wearing internally.
I started with the basics: the founder “underlayers” no one compliments, but everything depends on. Sleep. Food that steadies me instead of spikes me. Walking without my phone. Saying “no” without a monologue. Letting a draft be imperfect. Letting silence sit in a conversation without rushing to fill it with performance. In fashion terms, it was swapping scratchy synthetics for breathable cotton — the difference between looking pulled together and actually feeling well.
Then came the accessories — the small things that tell the truth. The way I started speaking about my work: simpler, more direct, less apologetic. The way I stopped over-explaining my pricing, as if value needed pleading. The way I stopped treating my ambition like something that required permission.
I learned, slowly and sometimes stubbornly, that clarity is its own kind of elegance.
Of course, there were pieces I clung to because they had once kept me safe. Over-delivering. Hyper-responsiveness. The “I’ll handle it” reflex. These were my emotional support suits: beautifully cut habits designed for environments where I had to prove I deserved to be there. But there comes a point where a suit stops being armour and starts becoming a costume.
This year, I began to retire costumes.
Not because I had nothing to prove — founders always have something to prove — but because I finally understood what it costs when your business runs on your adrenaline. Growth, yes. But at the expense of your inner life, your body, your relationships, your ability to feel joy in the work you once dreamed of.
And here is where the metaphor becomes real: the most powerful “wardrobe” isn’t the one with the most items. It’s the one where every piece fits, belongs, and reflects who you are now.
There is armour in this kind of transformation, too — but it’s not a hard shell. It’s a boundary. It’s the calm “no” that protects your time. The unapologetic “this is how we work” that filters out misaligned clients and collaborations that have run their course. The decision to lead from your values rather than your fear.
There is discovery
Discovery is the moment you stop asking what should I do next? and start asking who am I now — and what do I actually want?
Not what looks good on paper. Not what your peers are chasing. Not what your younger self thought success would feel like. But what makes you genuinely happy, steady, and content when nobody is watching.
For many of us, that’s the biggest transformation of all: realising we’ve been building a life that photographs beautifully, while secretly starving the parts of us that needed simplicity, joy, spaciousness, pleasure, and truth.
And then there’s another type of awakening — just as common, and often more tender.
The realisation that we never truly discovered ourselves in the first place, because discovery can feel dangerous when you’ve spent your life equating love with approval and safety with being easy to accept. So instead of exploring what we wanted, we became expert at anticipating what would be welcomed. We learned to shape-shift into the version that got praised, picked, promoted, included. We didn’t choose our path so much as we negotiated it — staying close to what felt safe, familiar, and validated.
When you live like that long enough, you can become incredibly high-functioning… and quietly disconnected.
You can hit goals and still feel strangely empty. You can build something “successful” and still sense that it’s not quite yours. You can be surrounded by acknowledgement and still feel unseen — because what’s being celebrated is the performance, not the person.
That’s why discovery in 2025 has felt so radical for so many female founders: it’s not about becoming someone new. It’s about meeting the woman who was never allowed to take up full space in her own life — and finally letting her speak.
Discovery isn’t just “finding your niche”. It’s identifying the conditions you need to thrive: the pace your body can sustain, the clients your nervous system can hold, the type of leadership you respect in yourself, the kind of money that actually feels like freedom (not a trap disguised as success).
And once you start discovering yourself, something else comes back online.
There is instinct. The female deep knowing. The signal beneath the noise.
It’s the part of you that registers the micro-moment — the slight tightness in your chest on a Zoom call, the subtle mismatch between what someone says and what they mean, the way your energy drops when you consider a partnership that looks “perfect.” It’s an inner intelligence that doesn’t always have language, but always has information.
Instinct is how you learn who to trust — and why. Not based on charisma, or credentials, or the thrill of being chosen, but based on consistency. How someone behaves when there’s nothing to gain. How they respond to your boundaries. Whether they honour your time. Whether their words match their actions. Whether their presence calms you or scrambles you.
This is where so many female founders transformed in 2025: we stopped overriding ourselves.
We stopped rationalising red flags because we wanted the opportunity. We stopped negotiating with our intuition because we didn’t want to seem “difficult.” We stopped calling our discernment “overthinking” when it was actually precision.
Instinct says: this is aligned.
Instinct also says: this will cost you more than it pays.
And the more you listen, the cleaner everything gets — your team choices, your client choices, your pricing choices, your pace, your positioning. Because your business can only feel as safe as the decisions you make while you’re ignoring yourself.
There is ambition
Then — once discovery clarifies what you truly want, and instinct protects what you’re building — something beautifully inevitable rises.
There is ambition. Not the frantic kind. The true kind. The kind with backbone.
Ambition is the desire for your life.
It’s revenue, yes — because money is not a dirty word, it’s a delivery mechanism. It’s impact — because you didn’t come this far to play small. It’s dream clients who value you and pay you properly. It’s being fully booked without being depleted. It’s building a body of work you respect.
Ambition is the breakthrough funding round, the keynote where you finally speak from your whole voice, the dream role or board seat, the press that finds you at the exact moment your message becomes undeniable. It’s the offer that sells while you’re living your life. It’s the moment you look around and realise: I did it — and I didn’t lose myself to get here.
And here’s the part that feels like “style”, but is actually transformation:
Discovery is choosing the direction that is yours.
Instinct is knowing what doesn’t belong.
Ambition is wearing your future — before anyone else agrees with it.
Ambition in 2025 hasn’t been about chasing status. It’s been about claiming a standard.
A standard for your time. A standard for how you’re treated. A standard for what you sell, and how you sell it. A standard for the life your success is meant to fund — the spacious mornings, the travel without guilt, the childcare that doesn’t feel like a scramble, the team that can function without your nervous system as the engine.
And now, the outer world is shifting too: funding, power, and the UK ecosystem
This inner transformation isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening inside a very real economic and investment landscape — one that has historically asked women to be exceptional just to be considered.
In 2025, the UK has been talking more plainly about what many female founders have known for years: that the funding system isn’t a pure meritocracy, it’s a mirror of who already holds power. The numbers are improving in places, but the gap is still stark — and now it’s being discussed at policy level, investor level, and national-media level.
There are also tangible shifts underway. The Department for Business and Trade’s Investing in Women Code report (2025) argues that investing in female and ethnic minority-led businesses isn’t just “the right thing”; it’s a growth lever — estimating it could add 13% to the UK equity market.
And the momentum is becoming structural. The British Business Bank has increased commitments into the Invest in Women Taskforce ecosystem — including backing a “fund of funds” designed to get more capital flowing to female-led funds and, in turn, to female and mixed-gender founding teams.
This matters because capital isn’t just money. It’s time. It’s optionality. It’s the ability to hire without panic, to build product properly, to expand into markets, to compete.
It’s also why communities that translate founders into fundable businesses — without sanding down their identity — are becoming part of the UK’s growth infrastructure.
Female Founders Rise: community as a funding engine
This is where my world and my work meet something bigger.
Female Founders Rise — founded by the brilliant Emmie Faust — has grown into a powerful collective of 11,000 female and non-binary founders.
And it’s not just a “community” in the soft sense. It’s increasingly a convening force: bringing together founders, investors, operators, and institutions — building social capital at scale.
Every January, Female Founders Rise’s flagship fundraising-focused conference, Female Founders Raise, gathers founders and investors in London — and it’s already drawn 200+ founders in a single day. Happening next week in London.
Alongside that, Female Founders Rise has hosted major in-person days at Google HQ in London — rooms full of founders who are scaling, hiring, and fundraising, with sessions designed to turn ambition into strategy and connection into opportunity.
And what I’ve witnessed — from inside that ecosystem — is this: when women have access to the room and the inner capacity to hold the room, everything accelerates.
The Rise Report: data with teeth (and a benchmark we can track)
In 2025, we also saw something crucial: a move towards better, more robust data.
The Rise Report on Female Entrepreneurship is scheduled for publication in February 2026 and is led by Female Founders Rise and Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, supported by Barclays UK.
The project is gathering insight at real scale — the Rise Report platform has stated it is reporting on insights from 2,000 female founders (with a goal of tracking annual progress).
Why does that matter? Because if we want change, we have to measure the right things — not just how many women started businesses, but what happened next: access to networks, access to finance, the confidence gap, the regional gap, the cost of caring responsibilities, the invisible labour of proving you belong.
A credible benchmark turns “we should support women” into “here is what’s working, here is what isn’t, and here is what must change next.”
The next generation is already here
This year, I’ve also seen the future up close.
I spoke on panels at Warwick Business School. I watched students showcase startup ideas — bright, ambitious, and surprisingly execution-focused. I judged a hackathon at Queen Mary University of London as an investor. And what struck me most was not just how curious and hungry these women are — but how willing they are to do the inner work required to lead: self-trust, resilience, communication, boundaries, courage.
They’re not just building businesses. They’re building teams. They’re building cultures. They’re building a different normal.
Conclusions on 2025
The biggest transformation I’ve seen this year — in myself, in my clients, and in this wider ecosystem — is women moving away from performative strength and towards embodied power.
Not hustle, but precision.
Not constant visibility, but intentional presence.
Not proving, but choosing.
Because when a female founder becomes clear on who she is, what she wants, and what she’s no longer available for — her life starts to match her vision.
Not by forcing. By aligning.
And if 2019’s Rose Review gave us one of the most quoted economic truths in this space — that the UK could unlock enormous value if women started and scaled at the same rate as men — then 2025 feels like the year we stopped treating that as a slogan, and started treating it as strategy.
The work now is both inner and outer: building businesses that don’t require self-abandonment, and building a funding landscape that doesn’t require women to become smaller, sharper, or less human to be backed.
And that leaves me with one question — not “what will I wear next season?”
But: what kind of woman am I willing to become next?
May 2026 be our year.
Sources and references
UK Government: Investing in Women Code Annual Report 2025
British Business Bank: Invest in Women Taskforce / Women Backing Women fund updates
Female Founders Rise: community size + events (incl. Google HQ summit)
UKTN: Female Founders Raise (January, 200+ founders)
Rise Report (Jan 2026 publication plan; led by FFR + Nottingham Business School/NTU; supported by Barclays)
Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship (2019)
