From April 2026, the amount a company can raise under the Enterprise Investment Scheme doubled. For founders who have found themselves approaching those limits at exactly the wrong moment, the new rules change that.

What has changed

The heart of the reform is a doubling of investment limits. Companies can now raise up to £10 million a year under EIS, up from £5 million, with a lifetime limit rising from £12 million to £24 million. For Knowledge Intensive Companies - those with significant intellectual property or R&D at their core - the figures go further still: £20 million annually and £40 million over a lifetime.

The ceiling has been raised at precisely the point where many businesses were being forced into decisions, they were not quite ready to make, whether to list, to restructure, or to seek capital through less suitable routes.

On the VCT side, income tax relief for investors has reduced from 30% to 20%, while EIS investor relief remains unchanged at 30%. The likely effect is more investors coming directly to EIS-qualifying companies -  a wider pool, and a more direct relationship with the people backing your business.

 Why this matters for women building businesses

The funding landscape remains, by any honest measure, uneven. Female-founded companies still receive less than 2 per cent of UK venture capital. In the first three quarters of 2024, female-founded businesses raised £1.48 billion in equity funding against £9.28 billion raised by male-led ventures in the same period.

EIS has been one of the more accessible routes precisely because the tax incentives it offers investors reduce the perceived risk of backing growth-stage businesses. The problem has been the ceiling. Companies that were scaling well were running up against limits that no longer reflected the reality of what it costs to grow. The new thresholds change that.

Debbie Wosskow, co-founder of AllBright, has spoken about what genuine access to capital can mean:

These changes are a step in that direction. Not a solution to the funding gap, but a meaningful expansion of what is available to the businesses that are ready to use it.

What you can do

If EIS has been part of your thinking - or should be - this is a good moment to revisit the conversation. The limits that may have shaped your assumptions have changed. What felt like a ceiling may no longer be one.

The question now is what you build toward it.

If you would like to talk through how these changes affect your business or your plans for growth, please contact us.