BGF commits over £3bn to back British business

BGF has announced a major commitment to invest more than £3 billion in UK businesses over the next five years — a decisive move to increase investment into high-potential companies across the country.

The new commitment represents a step-up from the £2.3 billion deployed between 2020 and 2024, and is aimed at scaling support for growth and early-stage businesses that are the engine of the UK economy.

As part of the £3 billion pledge, BGF is committing at least £300 million to female-powered businesses, to support more diverse leadership in the UK’s growth economy. This builds on BGF’s initial £25 million commitment to the Invest in Women Taskforce (IWT) initiative, which raised more than £250 million last year. It will form part of the Partner Programme’s investments, which sits alongside the Women Backing Women Fund of Fund, and takes the IWT’s total funding pool to over half a billion pounds.

Andy Gregory, CEO of BGF, said: “Despite ongoing macro-economic uncertainty, BGF is reaffirming its mission to be the long-term partner of choice for ambitious entrepreneurs in every corner of the country. Our £3 billion commitment is about backing British business through the cycle, and helping drive their success, sending a clear message that we believe in the potential of this country’s entrepreneurs, and we’re ready to go further.”

The commitment is supported by newly released impact data, which highlights BGF’s contribution across the UK. Since 2011, the BGF portfolio has delivered a combined economic impact of £7.1 billion in revenue growth and £1 billion in export growth, and created 27,000 new jobs. Financially, BGF’s performance continues to place it among the leading investment managers in the market, delivering top quartile rankings for metrics used to measure returns on investment.

BGF is a regional-first investor, with teams in 15 cities across the UK and Ireland. With 74% of its capital deployed outside London and the South East, BGF’s reach makes it uniquely suited to addressing the long-standing regional capital gap in all parts of the UK.

Andy Gregory continued: “BGF is an investment platform built to solve a hard problem. With our platform advantage, we’ve proven we can deploy scaleup capital into a broad base of UK businesses, in a way that is commercially rigorous, regionally inclusive, and can help businesses grow in all conditions.

“Few investors have the nationwide reach to deploy capital at the scale required to make a meaningful difference to the UK’s scaleup landscape, and this next phase is about leveraging our platform advantage to unlock even greater impact for UK plc.”

Debbie Wosskow OBE, Co-Chair of the Invest in Women Taskforce, commented: “This is a historic moment. BGF’s £300 million commitment to female-powered businesses, which builds on the work of the Invest in Women Taskforce, is one of the largest ever made in the UK. It marks a turning point in how we back women-led enterprise and is exactly the kind of action that can start to reshape our business landscape for the better.”