In 2014, Sarah Turner started taking pictures at pitch events.
You would think it was for a portfolio or for a deck of her own, but rather she wanted a record of something she kept noticing and couldn't quite believe: a room full of men, pitching to an audience of men, with maybe a couple of women investors visible around the edges.
Even then, they were usually running the event, not writing the cheques.
By that point she'd already spent two decades on the other side of these rooms; she'd built and sold interactive training for large corporates - floppy disc, then CD-ROM, then the early web – before moving into helping start-ups raise money through Wired Sussex, then running her own consultancy, Turner Hopkins, with clients including the BBC, Ofcom, the Barbican and the UK government's Global Entrepreneur Programme.
She knew the mechanics of fundraising cold, but in twenty years of watching other people do it, she had never once become an investor herself, despite two decades spent circling the world of angel investing from the outside.
“I met a lot of angel investors and they were always men." - Sarah Turner, Co-Founder & CEO, Angel Academe
So ask yourself how many rooms you've sat in for twenty years without ever imagining yourself on the other side of the table.
That's roughly where Turner was until a friend went looking for backers.
The room that left her to negotiate alone
The shift arrived almost by accident, when a friend was raising twenty or thirty thousand pounds from people close to him, and Turner put some money in.
It wasn't exactly a Dragons' Den sum, but it was manageable and, for the first time, within reach of someone who wasn't already wealthy in the way she'd always assumed angel investors had to be. Curious, she went looking for an existing angel investors network to learn the mechanics of angel investing properly, expecting some structure, some collaboration, maybe a bit of hand-holding for a first-timer.
What she found instead was a room that handed her a drink, made a few introductions, and then left her to negotiate alone with a founder she barely knew how to evaluate, rather than the collaborative angel investors network she had hoped to find. She wasn't really a finance person; she was acutely conscious of it and equally conscious that the entrepreneur's time was better spent with someone who actually knew what they were doing.
Now, let's sit with it for a second: an experienced operator, twenty years into a career built on helping other people raise money, still felt too unqualified to ask a founder a direct question about their business. If that's the effect on someone with her CV, what does it do to someone with less experience walking into the same room for the first time?
The credibility gap
That discomfort sharpened into something more specific once Turner started paying attention to who else was in those rooms, and how they were treated.
“Female founders came to present, and they're at an immediate disadvantage, there is nobody who looked like them in the audience. It's not because they're unconfident. It just felt like on the investor side, there was this immediate credibility gap. What is this woman doing standing up there talking about software?”— Sarah Turner, Co-Founder & CEO, Angel Academe
It's a small question, phrased almost gently, and it does a lot of work. Turner has pointed out that the reverse doesn't hold - a male founder pitching a product aimed at women doesn't face the equivalent instinctive doubt.
The credibility gap, in her account, runs one way.
That diagnosis became Angel Academe, co-founded that same year with her then-business partner, now husband, Simon Hopkins. The model was straightforward, if not easy to execute: bring women investors into a structured, collaborative angel investors network; pair newcomers with experienced angels, and remove the isolation she'd just lived through herself.
“I didn't write business plans. I kind of dived straight in. I was confident about my instincts.”— Sarah Turner, Co-Founder & CEO, Angel Academe
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A decade of compounding, then an escalation
The numbers built slowly and then kept building up and by early 2023, Angel Academe's angel investors network had backed more than 45 startups through over 70 funding rounds, helping them raise upward of £100 million.
By mid-2025, that had grown to 53-plus startups across more than 100 rounds, and over £200 million raised through the angel investors network from angels, VCs and family offices - spread across medtech, cleantech, fintech and enterprise software.
Turner has been clear that the point was never to build a large business off her own back.
“It's never been about building a huge business, it's not about making me rich personally through Angel Academe... I'm hoping to make my money back on my investments rather than Angel Academe itself.”— Sarah Turner, Co-Founder & CEO, Angel Academe
This year, Angel Academe's angel investors network went a step further, in partnership with fund manager SyndicateRoom, launching the UK's first Enterprise Investment Scheme fund built specifically around female-founded companies – letting an individual investor back seven to ten women-led startups with a single £10,000 ticket, with full EIS tax relief attached.
The timing wasn't subtle: by mid-2024, all-female founding teams were securing just 1.8% of UK equity investment, according to Beauhurst data cited at the fund's launch.
“Too often, efforts to address the funding gap have been focused on words rather than actions. For women to scale their businesses, they need money, not mentoring. This fund aims to put capital directly into the hands of female founders building innovative businesses. It's not about pledges - it's about action.”— Sarah Turner, Co-Founder & CEO, Angel Academe
“The bottom line is that backing female founders represents a market inefficiency and untapped investment opportunity.” — Tom Britton, Co-Founder, SyndicateRoom
We'd note that “money, not mentoring” is Turner's own framing, and not a neutral read of the funding landscape - plenty of people working on the same gap would argue it's not an either/or.
Still, it's consistent with how she's talked about the mission from the start: less about changing minds in the room, more about changing who's allowed to sit in it with a chequebook.
Still not looking for permanence
Twenty years on from the pitch events she started photographing, Turner isn't arguing for a world that needs permanently separate infrastructure for women.
“I'd love to get to a point where we don't have to talk about gender, I really would, but I think we have got to accept we've got a fundamental, structural imbalance.”— Sarah Turner, Co-Founder & CEO, Angel Academe
She's also said, elsewhere, that she isn't convinced by quotas and that the more durable fix is mobilising the growing number of women investors who already have money to put into angel investment, rather than mandating outcomes from the top down.
It's a bet that changing who's in the room changes what happens inside it, sustained through her angel investors network for more than a decade, with the EIS fund as the clearest sign yet that she thinks the job isn't finished yet.
What we'd still like to ask
● How many companies has Turner personally backed as an angel, outside the network itself, and would she name any publicly?
● Now that the EIS fund offering EIS tax relief has been open since Q4 2025, how has deployment actually gone?
● Where does she think the 1.8% funding-gap figure stands today, more than a year after the fund's launch?
We'd love to hear directly from Sarah Turner or the Angel Academe team, and if you're reading this, feel free to reach out.
Editorial note
This piece was compiled from public interviews, press coverage and Angel Academe's own published material, rather than a direct conversation with Turner. If Sarah Turner or anyone at Angel Academe would like to add to, correct, or expand on this story, we'd welcome it, please reach out to the EP+ editorial.
Sources-
This piece draws on the Jazz Shapers podcast interview with Sarah Turner (Mishcon de Reya, February 2023); Computer Weekly's Most Influential Women in UK Tech coverage (2023–2024); the UK Business Angels Association; Startups Magazine, IFA Magazine, BusinessCloud, Tech Funding News, Diversity UK and Sustainable Times (June 2025 coverage of the Angel Academe EIS fund launch); and Angel Academe's own published material (angelacademe.com).
