The awards programme, intended to support female entrepreneurs, has come under fire for underfunding women founders by more than £2 million.

This year's competition saw 1,452 female-founded and female-led businesses from across the UK apply for a £75,000 grant to develop their innovative projects. A total of £4 million was earmarked to fund 50 winners. However, last week, it was revealed that only 25 grants had been awarded, despite some applicants achieving scores exceeding 90%.

The announcement triggered widespread backlash on social media, with both entrepreneurs and the broader business community demanding answers from Innovate UK. In response, the campaign group Let’s Fund More Women swiftly mobilised, uniting hundreds of founders, investors, and supporters to challenge the public body's decisions.

Leading this campaign is Becky Lodge, recognised by TechRound as a ‘Woman in Tech to Watch’ and listed among Computer Weekly’s Top 100 UK Tech Leaders. The collective is calling for a thorough overhaul of Innovate UK's Women in Innovation Awards, citing concerns over the programme's transparency, fairness, and overall impact. Their demands include:

• Full allocation of the remaining funds: Ensuring the £2.125 million in unallocated grants is awarded to the highest-scoring applicants who were initially overlooked.
• Constructive engagement: Collaborating with the Let’s Fund More Women collective to address the concerns raised and to implement necessary reforms.
• Recognition and correction of flaws: Conducting a detailed review of the assessment process to identify and rectify any deficiencies, preventing similar issues in the future.
• Redesign of the award programme: Introducing a revamped Women in Innovation Award in 2025 with a clear and transparent funding and scoring system, aimed at restoring trust in Innovate UK.

Speaking about the campaign, Becky comments: “The Women in Innovation Awards have fallen short of their intended goals, and we are calling on Innovate UK to take immediate action to ensure that future awards are more equitable, transparent, and supportive of female founders. Women-led businesses are significantly underfunded in comparison to their male counterparts and we rely on a public body to exercise fairness and equity when it comes to distributing public money.

“As part of their acknowledgement of their failings, we would also like Innovate UK’s CEO, Indro Mukerjee, to publicly apologise to the 1,400 women who have spent – on average – 80 hours completing the onerous application process, only to receive inconsistent feedback from assessors. In some cases, we’ve heard of people scoring over 95% and still not being successful. It’s just not good enough.”

Becky Lodge is founder of Little Kanga and StartUp Disruptors, the largest online community for under-represented founders and minorities in the UK. She was also one of the founding signatories that, as part of InvestHER, saw the last Government make a u-turn on their plans to increase the thresholds for Angel Investment. She launched Let’s Fund More Women alongside Zandra Moore and Tara Attfield-Tomes, two leading voices in the female investment space.

Zandra is CEO and co-founder of Panintelligence and sat on the UK Government’s Taskforce for Women Led High Growth Enterprises. Her work has led to the creation of The Lifted Project, a data and ecosystem led approach to increasing the flow of capital to regional, high growth female founders. Tara is co-chair of The Lifted Project’s Birmingham Board and is founder of PR agency EAST VILLAGE., which works with female-founded, female-led, and female-serving brands and The 51% Club, a community that helps female founders scale.

The campaign is also supported by Emmie Faust, founder of Female Founders Rise, which has over 7,000 members nationwide, who has been an active promoter of the awards. She is an exited entrepreneur, a micro angel investor in over 30 female-led businesses and a Dragons' Den winner.  Female Founders Rise also runs a directory to find and buy from women-led businesses called Find a Female Founder.

A survey of unsuccessful applicants is underway, revealing significant challenges, including excessive time commitments and a lack of clarity in the assessment process. Managing the collation of data is Zandra Moore, who comments: “As a data-driven professional, I knew the importance of capturing these experiences in black and white. But the reality is that there are thousands of women who are deflated and defeated by a process that should have been there to serve them. I am one of them. Having spent significant time on this application process only to receive such vague feedback and from assessors who I know nothing about, is a kick in the teeth.

“We hear the stats around there being £250 billion left on the table from underfunded women – it’s a huge part of the work we did with the taskforce – and yet we’re letting public money be spent so inefficiently. Reform is needed because there are thousands of female-led innovations simply not making it out alive.”

Let’s Fund More Women is committed to working with Innovate UK to create a more inclusive and effective funding landscape for women entrepreneurs, and will be issuing its full findings and reforms in a private letter to Indro Mukerjee this week.