Introducing Canopy Capital: The Zero-Barriers SEIS Fund Backing Founders From Day One

We are working hard to make December 2025 the start of a new chapter for early-stage startup founders across our community.  The newly formed entity of Canopy Capital is aiming to launch a new SEIS investment fund with a clear purpose: to make early-stage investment accessible to founders who don’t already have a warm network, wealthy contacts, or a ready-made circle of angel investors.

Let's be clear at the start.  We're not ready yet and we're working with the regulators to make sure we say the right things and do the right things to join this all together going forward.  There's a lot of complexity to making this work.  So please read this blog in the spirit it's provided.  It's early sight of what we're working on. It's definitely not a prospectus or invitation to invest.  These things will come later.  What we're looking for when you read this is your reflections on where we are starting from and what we're looking to achieve.

The Canopy Capital SEIS fund should be open for investment in January 2026, with the first deployment planned for April 2026. We are planning to raise our first £1 million by the end of March 2026 so we can deliver our first cheque in April and start backing founders at the “idea-to-MVP” stage.

For founders, our goal is to make a way to access friends-and-family style capital even if you don’t have a friends-and-family network. For investors, our goal is to make a way to invest in diverse, community-validated, SEIS-eligible startups with a professional structure and a clear growth thesis.

Professional Structure, Outsized Ambition

At Canopy Community we champion zero-barrier entrepreneurship, and the Canopy Capital fund will be built to support this with an institutional-level structure for investors who care about performance, governance and tax-efficient startup investing.

We will be partnering with an experienced investment management firm that currently manages 50+ funds with £350 million+ under management, giving investors confidence that the fund administration, SEIS compliance and portfolio reporting are in safe hands.

The ambition we are setting ourselves: we aim to deliver a 3x return from each 1 year closed fund, over 10 years. Rather than simply accepting the usual portfolio statistics, we are busy designing our support model to beat the power law by improving survival and growth rates for the founders we back.

To complement this, we are actively exploring secondary market activity to create opportunities for interim liquidity and potential investor payouts within three years, rather than waiting solely for long-term exits.

A Support Wrapper Built to Outperform the Power Law

The Canopy Capital SEIS fund focuses on first-time founders inside and around the Canopy Community – exactly where peer support, mentoring and real-world validation create the biggest uplift.

Investment is only the starting point. During the first three years – when most startups are at greatest risk – every company receiving capital from Canopy Capital will benefit from a unique “support wrapper”:

• Dedicated Non-Executive / Independent Director for three years
  Drawn from the Canopy In Residence team of seasoned entrepreneurs and operators, offering board-level guidance, accountability and strategic support.

• Specialist Due Diligence Team across three pillars

  • Desirability – led by Stewart Noakes, assessing customer problem, early customer validation and community response.

  • Feasibility (Team, Tech & Product Roadmap) – led by Matt Ville, focusing on technology choices, MVP build plans, Co-Founder team structure and delivery risk.

  • Viability (Finance, Tax & Compliance) – led by Rachel Sestini, our CFO and tax expert, ensuring a robust financial model and SEIS/EIS compliance.

• Accelerated Investment Process
  People’s Choice winners from Canopy Demo Nights move automatically into due diligence. Because much of the early screening and feedback happens live at Demo Night, we aim to complete investment decisions in four to eight weeks, significantly speeding up the fundraising journey for founders.

If we get this all working then for startup founders, it means you’d not just getting a cheque – you’d be getting a board ally, structured incubation and a community that wants you to win. For investors, it would mean each investment is supported by a robust governance and mentoring framework designed to reduce avoidable risk.

Join Our Q1 Fundraising Webinars: Meet the Architects

To support our fundraising goal by the end of March 2026, we’re hosting a series of monthly webinars through Q1. These sessions are for:

• Investors who want to understand the Canopy Capital SEIS fund structure, tax benefits and portfolio strategy.

• Founders who want to learn how we assess ideas, MVPs, customer validation and readiness for investment.

You’ll hear directly from the fund’s core team:

• Stewart Noakes 

• Matt Ville 

• Rachel Sestini 

We’ll also introduce early committed investors and past People’s Choice winners from Demo Night, so you can see the type of founders and ideas emerging from the Canopy ecosystem.

You can also join our “Celebrating the Year” webinar on 3rd December, where we’ll share more about the fund vision, the Canopy Membership, and how community-powered investing can unlock the next wave of startup innovation.

We are creating the future of community-powered investment. Together, we can build and back the innovations of tomorrow.

Join us at the webinars: https://lu.ma/canopy 

So there you have it.  This is how we are thinking at the moment, and before we join everything up with the regulator and put our thesis under more scrutiny with members of the in residence team I look forward to your thoughts on what we're looking to do. Reach out to me on https://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnoakes/ and let me know what you think.

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