UK launches refugee-focused venture fund with initial £300,000 investment

The UK has a new venture fund built for one narrow group: refugee founders. The Refugee Venture Fund opens with £300,000, plans to lift that to £500,000, and says it will back just three to five companies at £50,000 to £100,000 each.

That is the small opening act. The bigger ambition sits further ahead, in a planned £10 million fund aimed at refugee-founded businesses. TERN, which has spent a decade working with refugee entrepreneurs, set it up with support from Atomico. The first backers named in the fund briefing are Dominus, This Day Foundation and Future Leaders.

The case for the fund is simple enough. TERN and Square estimate that 26,500 refugee entrepreneurs already add £520 million to the UK economy, with another £5.1 billion in possible economic activity still on the table through business creation, growth, jobs and investment. Yet refugee founders still run into the usual wall: thin UK track records, smaller networks, less familiarity with how venture capital works, and investor bias dressed up as caution.

The Cedar Review, published in September 2026 and based on 81 refugee entrepreneurs, found that 56 per cent had run a business before arriving in the UK. It also found that 79 per cent already employed people or expected to soon, while 40 per cent said startup finance was a major problem. Charlie Fraser of TERN says the issue is not ability, but access to the networks and capital that other founders get by default.

The fund is being run through a special purpose vehicle with a dual-class share structure that gives TERN extra governance rights to protect the mandate. It will be sector-agnostic, but wants high-growth businesses, especially in software, AI and climate tech. Founders need to be UK-based, hold legal refugee status and have majority refugee ownership or leadership. The bar is also higher than an idea and a pitch deck: the fund wants teams with a minimum viable product, a pilot or some commercial traction, plus a believable route to exit within five to ten years.

It opens for applications on 14 October 2026. The first investment round is due to close in December, and all initial capital is scheduled to be allocated by March 2027. Until then, the fund’s real job is obvious: prove that refugee founders are not a special case, just a missed one.