Serial entrepreneur Jenson Brook built Britain’s Got Startups to close the funding gap between London and the regions — and has helped raise over £10 million doing it.
Fifty-three percent of Britain’s high-growth businesses are based outside London. They receive 39 percent of the funding.
That disparity is the founding premise of Britain’s Got Startups — and the problem that Jenson Brook, a serial entrepreneur from Yorkshire, has spent the past several years trying to dismantle.
Brook is not an academic. After school, he took an apprenticeship at an accounting firm, which gave him early exposure to private businesses and founders. He spent seven years in London building and exiting companies focused on research and development tax relief, grants, and startup funding. When he moved back to Yorkshire, the contrast was immediate.
“The network was far more fragmented. Investors were harder to find, often institutional rather than angel-led, and resources were very different,” he said.
The question that followed was straightforward: London had density — events, investors, deal flow, infrastructure. Why couldn’t something equally serious exist outside it?
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A Pilot That Became a Platform
Brook tested the idea with a Northern Investment Event. Sixteen startups pitched. Around 20 London-based investors attended. The demand was unmistakable — and so was the geography of it. Within weeks, founders from the South West, Wales, and Scotland were reaching out asking for something similar in their regions.
Britain’s Got Startups was built to answer that demand. The platform operates as a curated event series and deal flow mechanism, identifying high-potential startups across the North of England, Scotland, Wales, and the South West, and creating direct pathways to investors who would not otherwise encounter them.
To date, it has helped raise over £10 million for regional businesses.
Why the Gap Exists
Brook is precise about the structural causes of regional underfunding. More than 80 percent of early-stage investors in the UK are based in London, and they invest close to home — not out of bias, necessarily, but because they have abundant deal flow on their doorstep and no particular incentive to look elsewhere. The expectation that founders should travel to London to raise capital compounds the problem, as does a broader shortage of financial education around fundraising pathways outside the capital.
“There’s also a broader mindset — many founders believe they need to move to London or the US to succeed,” Brook said. “It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.”
The UK has one of the most active angel investing ecosystems in the world, largely sustained by government tax incentives through the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme and Enterprise Investment Scheme, which approximately 90 percent of angel investors use. But the geographic concentration of that activity remains largely unchanged. Investment continues to flow disproportionately into London and the South East, and the dense informal networks of angels that exist in the capital have no regional equivalent.
“Regionally, people might build and exit a business — and then step back,” Brook observed. “In London or the US, founders often reinvest and stay active in the ecosystem. We’re starting to see more early-stage venture activity outside London, which is encouraging. But angel investment still lags.”
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What Regional Founders Are Actually Building
The startups emerging from outside London do not conform to a single profile. Software companies dominate, but what distinguishes them is their application — technology solving problems in legacy industries like engineering, construction, and manufacturing, rather than purely digital or AI-first products.
Strong clusters have formed. Bristol and Leeds have significant concentrations of tech talent. Manchester and Liverpool are growing hubs. The so-called Golden Triangle of Oxford, Cambridge, and London continues to anchor much of the UK’s biotech and life sciences spinout activity, with universities in Leeds, Manchester, and Liverpool developing their own commercialisation pathways.
University spinouts, however, come with a structural complication. Equity stakes taken by institutions can be large enough to complicate future fundraising rounds — a tension that organisations like Startup Coalition are actively pushing to resolve.
The Missing Link: Collaboration
Beyond capital, Brook identifies a coordination failure at the heart of the regional startup landscape. Organisations operate in silos. Regions compete with each other rather than presenting a unified proposition to London investors and European networks. And founders, asked to pitch repeatedly across multiple programmes with little follow-through, are experiencing fatigue.
“One of the key pieces of feedback we’ve had is that they want more meaningful engagement — not just more events,” Brook said. “There’s a real opportunity to think beyond ‘this region versus that region’ and instead build a more unified national ecosystem.”
The founders themselves, he is clear, are not the problem.
“Regional founders often work incredibly hard — sometimes harder — because they’re further away from capital and networks. They’re persistent, they follow up relentlessly, and they don’t give up easily. I’ve seen founders fundraise for months without success, only to finally make a breakthrough through a chance connection.”
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Beyond the Pitch Competition
Brook is deliberate about what Britain’s Got Startups is not. It is not a pitch competition with a trophy and a press release. It is a programme in continuous iteration — refining its format based on founder feedback, introducing ambassador roles for participants who have given critical input, and measuring itself against actual funding outcomes rather than event attendance.
“At its core, this is a passion project,” he said. “We’re trying to build something that genuinely helps founders — not just another event.”
The investors who have engaged with the platform have often been surprised by what they found. The companies coming out of Hull, the North East, and similar areas are not scrappy experiments — they are serious, scalable businesses built by founders who had no choice but to be resourceful.
The funding gap between London and the rest of Britain is not a reflection of where the talent is. It is a reflection of where the attention has been. Brook is working, methodically, to redirect it.
