BGF commits three billion pounds in investments for UK businesses

Barclays-founded BGF has outlined a three billion pound commitment to invest in high-potential UK businesses as it looks to scale support for growth in early-stage firms.

Over the next five years, the firm, which has previously invested in fashion brands like Seasalt and Strathberry, wishes to back British businesses to help drive their success, the company’s chief executive officer, Andy Gregory, said in a release.

He 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.”

As part of the pledge, BGF is dedicating 300 million pounds of the fund to supporting female-powered businesses, an extension of its prior 25 million pound commitment to the Invest in Women Taskforce initiative.

In her own statement, Debbie Wosskow, co-chair of the Invest in Women Taskforce, said the investment is “one of the largest ever made in the UK”. She added: “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.”