Yesterday we launched our latest Female Founders Forum report at the Barclays Entrepreneur Awards. In Here and Now we interrogate follow-on funding data to reveal that women-led businesses are just as bankable an investment as exclusively male-led businesses.

Using Beauhurst data, we reveal that female-founded startups were just as likely to raise additional rounds of funding compared to non-female-founded firms: 52% vs 51% for businesses without a female founder.

As Annabel Denham concludes in her Telegraph column: "There is more to do. A lot more. We must continue to highlight the challenges still faced by female entrepreneurs, but these new figures show we are on the right course. Only by celebrating how far we’ve come can we inspire the next generation."

We've been running the Female Founders Forum for three years in partnership with Barclays. In previous years we revealed the equity funding gap in the Untapped Unicorns report and championed paying it forward in our Mentoring Matters report. In the process we've held loads of events around the UK.

You can read more about our latest report in City AM, where Juliet Rogan of Barclays has written on why "it’s time to shout louder about the success of our entrepreneurs." And Kim Darrah of the FT's Sifted has written on the fact that "female startup bosses who succeed in raising a first round are (ever so slightly) more likely than men to attract funding later in the game".

At yesterday's launch, Annabel interviewed Emma Sinclair MBE and Tugce Bulut – both inspirational entrepreneurs and Members of the Female Founders Forum. Tugce is co-founder and CEO of the innovative market research company Streetbees, and Emma's latest venture is the corporate alumni network EnterpriseAlumni. Check them out.

You can download a two-page summary of the report here, and read the whole thing here. (Incidentally, the report's designer, and a female founder in her own right, Eleanor Hyland-Stanbrook comes highly recommended. Check out Studio Twenty Twenty.)

If you're keen to get more involved in the Female Founders Forum, sign up to Annabel's quarterly newsletter.

SEIS The Opportunity
The Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) are seen by many entrepreneurs and investors as critical to supporting startups and scaleups.

We’re keen to make it easier for startups to access capital and anecdotally we’ve heard that the Advanced Assurance process for EIS and SEIS can cause real headaches for entrepreneurs.

Our Research Director Sam Dumitriu is investigating ways to improve the EIS and SEIS Advanced Assurance process to reduce unnecessary delays. If you’ve gone through the process, he’d love to hear about your experience (good or bad). Your experiences will go into informing our policy work. Drop Sam an email if you want share your experiences.

Read the full newsletter here, and sign up here.