Bootstrap4F has reached a formal £130 million first close for its ‘Women Backing Women’ fund of funds, marking a notable milestone in the UK’s attempt to change who controls venture capital allocation.
The fund is led by Fatou Diagne and Stéphanie Heller, cofounders and managing partners of Bootstrap Europe, alongside Matthias Ummenhofer, founding partner at Mojo Capital and former head of venture capital at the European Investment Fund. Selected from over 25 applicants, the team brings a collective £4.4 billion track record in fund selection to the mandate.
Launched through the government-backed Invest in Women Taskforce, the vehicle is positioned as the UK’s first fund of funds with an explicit mandate to back female-led and mixed-gender managers at scale.
It is targeting a £250 million final close and was built to tackle a structural gap higher up the investment chain, based on the premise that changing who manages capital is essential to changing who receives it.
The first close was completed on 31 March and brings together commitments from Barclays, Nationwide, the British Business Bank and M&G, combining public and private institutional capital in a single vehicle.
Debbie Wosskow, Co-Chair of the Invest in Women Taskforce, comments, “Out of £18 billion equity investment in 2025, fully female-founded teams received just 1.75%. That’s the problem we set out to fix, with institutional capital and commercial rigour.”
The fund sits within the Taskforce’s wider £635 million pool of commitments, of which more than £70 million has already been deployed through partners including the British Business Bank, BGF, Aviva and Morgan Stanley.
Bootstrap4F will now begin investing in fund managers that meet strict criteria for gender diversity and commercial returns. The model acts as a systems-level intervention: by supporting diverse investors first, the fund expects to widen the downstream flow of capital to female-founded startups, reinforcing the belief that inclusive teams are not concessionary capital but a core driver of strong financial performance.
