Why does Wealth Club VCT record figure signal a coming collapse in seed funding?
Timeline for Wealth Club
Published VCT fundraising figures projecting 65% decline for 2026/27
UK Startups and Innovation: VCTs hit £917.7m record, brace for 65% fallBackground
Wealth Club published the definitive data point for the UK venture capital trust market in April 2026: VCT fundraising reached £917.7m in 2025/26, the third-highest year on record, including dividend reinvestment. The figure was released on 14 April 2026 and immediately framed as a farewell rather than a trend: retail investors had rushed in ahead of the 6 April 2026 Deadline after which income-tax relief on VCTs fell from 30% to 20%, a change announced in the November 2025 Budget.
Wealth Club is a UK investment service for high-net-worth and sophisticated investors, covering EIS, VCTs, SEIS, investment trusts, and AIM portfolios. Founded in 2016 by Alex Davies, it operates primarily online and is headquartered in Bristol. Its annual VCT fundraising tracker has become the industry de facto league table, cited by financial media and policy analysts to measure retail appetite for early-stage UK investing.
Wealth Club data gave the sharpest lens on the structural risk facing UK seed-stage capital in 2026/27: if the historical precedent from the 2006/07 relief cut holds, annual VCT fundraising could fall by 65%, erasing roughly £600m of early-stage investment. A Focaldata survey cited by Wealth Club found 43.5% of current VCT investors plan to invest less and 41.6% plan to stop entirely, a consequence directly traceable to the change in relief.
