The founder mental health data hasn't shifted in two years, and the public accounts of UK founders who've spoken about their own burnout suggest talking about it more hasn't been enough to change it.
The Conversation Changed. The Numbers Didn't
Founder burnout has become impossible to avoid in UK startup conversation this year, it is showing up in panels, newsletters and founder Slack channels, and it's usually mentioned in passing and with a laugh that doesn't quite land, the kind that tells you more than the joke itself does.
There's a Slack channel for it now, a podcast, a “walk and talk” event in central London timed to Mental Health Awareness Week, and investors who once treated the subject as off-limits are starting to say the word “wellbeing” out loud, in public, on panels, as though the taboo has finally lifted.
We think that's real progress, but we also think it's worth asking what it's actually changed.
Sifted has surveyed European founders on mental health for two years running, and the pattern remains uncomfortably steady: in 2024, 45% of respondents rated their mental health as bad or very bad, and by 2025 that figure had risen slightly to 46%.
Founder burnout also increased, from 53% to 54%, while anxiety remained almost exactly the same, at 75% in both years. Fewer founders said they were considering leaving their startup in the coming year, down from 49% to 39%, but the underlying distress hadn't eased so much as become familiar, the kind of thing you learn to carry rather than solve.
Closer to home, the picture of startup founder stress looks similarly stuck.
Virgin StartUp's most recent research found that just over half of UK founders, 51%, reported more instances of burnout this year than last, with nearly one in five saying their mental health had worsened over the previous six months, and the Angel Investment Network's 2025 survey of 435 UK founders found something quieter but just as telling, that when asked what they'd sacrificed to build their business, 17% named mental health outright, behind only sleep and time with family.
The UK Still Doesn't Really Measure Founder Mental Health
We noticed something else while pulling this together, which is that genuinely UK-specific mental health research on founders is thin on the ground, and most of the striking, widely shared statistics, the ones claiming founders experience anxiety at five times the national rate or that 93% show signs of mental health strain, actually come from global or European samples rather than UK-only data. That gap feels like its own small finding, since a country with one of the world's most active startup ecosystems still doesn't have a dedicated, recurring, UK-only study of founder mental health, and everyone seems to be borrowing numbers from somewhere else.
What Founder Burnout Actually Looks Like
What the data can't do is explain why the gap between rhetoric and reality persists, so for that, we went looking at what founders have actually said, on the record, about their own experience of startup founder stress.
Avi Sharma is on his fourth business now, which tells you something before he's even said a word, having left a stable banking career to build Outseen, a content agency, in a leap that coincided with the tail end of the pandemic, when everyone else's social life resumed, and his didn't. He was working alone in his bedroom, building something from nothing, while the rest of the world went back to offices and pubs and the ordinary noise of other people, and he described that period as founder loneliness stacked on top of "immense pressure to succeed," the two feeding each other in a way that's hard to separate once you're inside it. What changed was not the pressure itself but what he did with it; in 2024, he began seeing a therapist every fortnight and, alongside that, rebuilt the basics of sleep, food, and exercise, which are things that are quietly abandoned first when a business takes over. He also joined the Virgin StartUp community, trading isolation for something closer to peer support among founders.He's not framing any of this as solved, but rather as maintained, an ongoing act of upkeep rather than a fix.
Swakara Atwell-Bennett's turning point arrived on a particular day, when she was asked to pitch to a client while running BetterShared, her online marketplace for African art, and that day happened to be the day of a family funeral, and she did the pitch anyway. That single decision, made under the ordinary logic of “the business needs me,” became the moment she later pointed to as the start of a much longer unravelling, and she's spoken since about the specific guilt that sits underneath founder life, the sense that any misstep, even one caused by grief, becomes something she should have prevented.
“There's this guilt that you feel as a founder,” she told Sifted, “where you're like, it's my fault that we didn't get this, I should have been there, and I should be doing better.”
She kept working through the loss rather than around it, and by the following summer she described herself as completely depleted, with nothing left to draw on, which makes her account a useful corrective to the idea that founder burnout arrives all at once, since hers built quietly for months before it became undeniable.
Stephanie Melodia's business, a marketing agency called Bloom, closed last year, after eighteen months in which the maths simply stopped working, not just the financial maths, though that was part of it, but the effort-to-outcome maths that founders quietly run in their heads without ever quite admitting it out loud. She told Sifted it felt like the team was working doubly hard for half the results, and it's that grinding mismatch, more than any single event, where her founder burnout took hold. What's notable in how she talks about it now is the way she ties her exhaustion to identity rather than hours, having spent her whole career believing that what she put in, she got back out, a kind of internal contract that had always held until it didn't, and when the company stopped performing, she says, she stopped feeling like she was performing either, because the two had long since merged into one thing. That fusion, more than the workload itself, is what she now points to as the real cost.
None of these are extreme cases, and that's rather the point, since they're representative of what the survey data describes in aggregate, three founders among the 46% who called their founder mental health bad or the 54% who named founder burnout outright, each arriving there by a slightly different route.
Where the Support Still Falls Short
Sifted's research also points to where the support structures are and aren't: more than half (56%) of the founders they surveyed said they received no mental health support whatsoever from their investors, while only 3.6% said they received a lot. Some VC firms have begun offering coaching, peer groups and structured wellbeing resources to address the rising entrepreneur burnout, but that remains, by every account we've found, the exception rather than the norm.
We don't think this resolves into a tidy conclusion
Founders are definitely talking more openly than they did two years ago, and that shift matters, even if it is mostly happening in podcasts and Slack channels rather than boardrooms. However, the boardroom is where funding decisions, board pressure, and the "always available" expectations that fuel startup founder stress.
Until the conversation reaches that far, founder burnout numbers may continue to look exactly as they do now: slightly worse, quietly familiar, and largely unmoved by how much louder everyone has become about naming them.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This piece draws on secondary research and public interviews rather than direct conversations with the founders named. If any of them would like to share more of their story with EP+, we'd welcome the conversation.
Also read: Inside UK's Tech Brain Drain: The Founders Who Didn't Mean to Leave
Sources: Sifted (Feb 2025, Mar 2024); Virgin StartUp research via Startups Magazine and TechRound (May 2025); Angel Investment Network's AIN Founder Survey via Insider Media and CFOtech (Nov 2025); Maddyness UK (Mar 2025).
