We expect our £50m fund to back the best purpose-led founders tackling the cost of living crisis by creating more resilient societies.

Ascension’s mission is to identify commercially astute impact founders capable of generating attractive venture style returns, while reducing social inequalities. We strive to back the next impact dragons (fund returners).

Ascension is led by Jean de Fougerolles, an exited entrepreneur dedicated to finding the UK’s best seed startups since 2015 and Emma Steele (ex. corporate banking and impact consultant).

For the past 5 years, this duo have built an extensive track record backing leading UK Tech4Good businesses, such as Wagestream and Credit Kudos (exit to Apple). One of Ascension’s key superpowers is the 300+ founders and hundreds of angel co-investors who form a highly supportive community that share, access and assess the UK’s leading early stage deal-flow.

In recent years, Ascension has seen a wave of the best founders wanting to launch and scale businesses leveraging technology to solve our biggest social issues.

These businesses should outperform the market, given their ability to attract and retain the most talented employees and better engage their stakeholders (customers, consumers, corporates, investors, government, and the media), leading to accelerated routes to market.