A fresh look
You'll notice we've had a refresh
Over the past few months we've refreshed the Ascension brand and rebuilt our website from the ground up. There are lots of great new features, including our new illustration tool and a renewed founder page.
The look is new, the focus isn't. We're still backing ambitious founders at pre-seed and seed. To find out more about us and see the rebrand, take a look for yourself at ascension.vc.
Winner: Seed VC of the Year
A big night at the UKBAA Awards
It was quite a night for us at the UK Business Angels Association Awards, where Ascension and our portfolio companies were up for 7 of the 13 awards. We were named Seed VC of the Year, an award we first won in 2022 and have been a finalist for every year since, so taking it home again means a great deal.
There was plenty more to celebrate. Our Venture Partner Emma Blackburn was named Angel Investor of the Year; Emma introduced us to Monolith, whose exit to CoreWeave returned a fund, and which was itself a finalist for Exit of the Year. Our portfolio company Fifth Dimension took home Scale-up of the Year.
We were finalists in three more categories too: Impact Investment of the Year (for Sprive), Women Investing in Women (for Ascension Partner Iulia Tudor and founder Ioana Manescu) and Hardtech Investment of the Year (for NunaBio). We were also Highly Commended at the EISA Awards, as a finalist for Best EIS Investment Manager. Thank you to the UKBAA, and above all to our founders.
New investment
We led Hosel's £500k pre-seed
The Edinburgh team at Hosel is building a dedicated marketplace for second-hand golf clubs, bringing price transparency, authentication and trusted fulfilment to a fragmented £2bn-plus market. It's exactly the kind of early, high-conviction deal our investors get access to.
“We're excited to back Andrew and Charles early in what we believe is the Vinted for golf.” — Toyosi, Ascension Principal
New investment
We also led Voxmind's pre-seed
Voxmind builds physics-based voice authentication and deepfake detection that runs on-device, with no GPU or cloud needed, and works across any language. As the big cloud providers step back from voice biometrics just as AI voice fraud takes off, it's moving into a wide-open gap for banks, telecoms and contact centres.
These are just the two we can talk about. We've made several more new investments this year that we're not able to share quite yet, so watch this space.
Portfolio momentum
Our founders have been raising
- $26M Series AFifth Dimension — The decision-intelligence platform for real assets. Its agentic AI screens deals, drafts IC memos and surfaces risk for real-estate investors. Led by HV Capital.
- $7.5M RoundBondio — Led by Breega. Bondio's marketplace lets businesses provision local mobile, voice and IoT connectivity across 200+ carriers through a single integration, with no more roaming premiums.
- £4.5M SeedRound — The AI-native finance automation platform that actually moves money across payments, payroll and cash. Led by Alstin Capital with BACKED VC and Love Ventures, and around 10% of the round came from Round's own customers.
- £1.5M SeedSaltroad — Raised £1.5m and acquired AI platform Ogma to scale its network matching families with speech-and-language therapists, with AI handling clinical notes so clinicians stay focused on care.
- £3M RaisedNeuronostics — Co-led by Empirical Ventures, with The FSE Group and others. Its patented BioEP platform is a digital biomarker for epilepsy diagnosis and prognosis, in a field where patients can wait over a year for answers. We've backed the team since pre-seed.
Why pre-seed with us
We back founders at the very start
We invest through our generalist and institutional, thesis-driven funds, into pioneering outlier founders. Our job is to be the first institutional cheque in, backing them with conviction long before the wider market catches on. Time and again, the calibre of investors who follow into their later rounds validate our early conviction.
Since January alone, we've completed 13 pre-seed deals and just over 20 seed and seed-plus rounds. We're really excited by the deals we've done, and if you have a business you think would be a good fit, please apply via our website.
From the team
What we've been up to
Rakesh on the longevity revolution. In a recent article, our COO, Rakesh Murria, explores how AI-driven drug discovery, next-generation metabolic therapies and affordable personalised genetics are reshaping the future of ageing. If we live longer, healthier lives, retirement could span 35–40 active years, with major implications for how we invest, save and plan for the future.
Freya's Fundamentals. Freya Wordsworth co-hosts Fundamentals, an investor education series helping people get to grips with the essentials of early-stage investing. Recent episodes have included Rakesh leading an 'AI Tools 101' on the kit that helps lean teams do more.
Jean in North America. Our Managing Partner Jean has been working from North America following his son's World Cup performances for Canada, reaching the round of 16. See more here.
Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment, and you are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong.