Being a founder or leader in business is never easy – and for women from under-represented backgrounds, the journey often starts with proving credibility in rooms that weren’t built for them. I’ve experienced this first-hand – as a Thai woman from a working-class background, I’ve had to overcome biases from investors who didn’t believe I could achieve my ambitions or didn’t have confidence that I would succeed at scale.

But today, the landscape is shifting, and for established female leaders, this is a moment to go further, faster. The conversation is no longer only about access, but about amplification. Female leaders should leverage visibility, networks, and capital to achieve greater successes, which in turn creates the systemic change needed across industries.

A New Era of Opportunity

In July 2025, the UK government announced a £500 million package for under-represented entrepreneurs and merging fund managers – a landmark moment for women in business. This package includes a £400m to support investment fund managers from diverse backgrounds as well as an £100m dedicated to female-led venture capital funds through the Invest in Women Taskforce (doubling the British Business Bank’s previous commitment)

This is more than funding, it is a chance for experienced female leaders to shape the future investment landscape, champion new founders and catalyse innovation in high-growth sectors such as AI, fintech, healthtech and green solutions.

For established women founders and executives, the real work is just beginning. You’ve built credibility and market position, now comes the harder challenge: transforming individual success into systemic change.

Visibility is Leverage, Not Vanity

I learned early that staying visible isn’t about ego, it’s about narrative control. When women leaders retreat after achieving success, we cede the conversation to others. Speaking at policy tables, industry conferences, and global forums and sharing insights via opinion pieces, interviews and features, does more than build your personal brand, it signals to the next generation of female founders that their ambitions belong in these spaces.

Position Yourself Within Ecosystems, Not Above Them

The new government funding initiatives aren’t just for emerging managers, they’re opportunities for established leaders to embed influence at scale. Experienced leaders can join the Invest in Women Taskforce, mentor through accelerator programmes, angel invest in diverse founders. 

This isn’t charity; it’s strategic positioning. By participating in these ecosystems, you shape where capital and opportunity flows. You become the architect of opportunity, not just a beneficiary of it.

Double Down on Emerging Sectors

AI is redefining every industry. Women leaders who develop genuine expertise, whether through hands-on implementation or strategic partnership, will define how these tools are built, deployed and ultimately used.

Diverse teams building decision-making systems produce fundamentally different outcomes. When women shape algorithmic design, those systems reflect reality rather than perpetuating embedded bias. Female leadership doesn’t just become representing women, but fundamentally changes how organisations operate.

Create Conditions for Success

Real significance comes from what happens after leaders step away. Build mentorship schemes; open your network strategically; use your credibility to vouch for emerging female founders in rooms where they’d otherwise be overlooked. Collaborate with other established leaders to co-create pathways that give early-stage founders genuine traction – whether through procurement programmes, investment syndicates, or pilot projects.

Pitfalls That Erode Impact

Even the most successful leaders can undermine their own legacy through strategic missteps. Watch for these:

• Staying too comfortable – Success came from disruption. Don’t let safety become your default now. Cross into unfamiliar sectors, take on roles that stretch you, champion ideas that challenge the status quo. 
• Stay visible – Credibility doesn’t grant you permission to disappear. You should consistently remain visible through events, leadership pieces and LinkedIn posts. Your absence from the conversation means someone else’s perspective dominates.
• Overlooking capital designed for scale – Many established leaders assume new funding mechanisms are for startups. They’re not. Government initiatives, venture partnerships, and innovation funds often support expansion, scaling, and ecosystem-building led by experienced operators. 

Success is about you. Significance is about legacy. The transition requires moving from building your own empire to architecting ecosystems where the next generation of women leaders can thrive.

Turning Capital into Capability

The £500m initiative represents far more than a funding mechanism, it’s an opportunity to fundamentally reshape how we build, scale, and sustain ventures. Real impact doesn’t emerge from capital alone; it flows from the deliberate choices leaders make about how to deploy that capital toward genuine capability building.

This means moving beyond survival funding to strategic investment in the foundational systems, teams, and knowledge that allow ventures to operate independently and scale sustainably.

This initiative offers a different path: using capital not just to grow faster, but to grow smarter, with systems and structures designed to outlast any single funding moment.

Focus also needs to remain on measurable outcomes such as:

• Funding success rates – explains whether your support actually prepared them for investor engagement. 
• AI innovation metrics – tracks actual deployment of technology, not just pilot projects and proof-of-concepts. 
• Job creation figures – reflects sustainable employment, not temporary roles funded by grants. 
• Revenue growth – demonstrates market validation and repeat customer economics, not one-off sales to friendly investors. 
• Customer retention rates – show whether the product actually solves a problem people will pay for repeatedly.

When you track these metrics, you quickly discover which forms of support actually work and which ones feel good but produce minimal results. That’s uncomfortable, but it’s the only path to real improvement.

This initiative will be judged not by the cheques written, but by the ventures that thrive five years from now. Not because they received funding, but because they developed the capability to sustain themselves. Not because they were supported, but because they became part of an ecosystem that rewards rigour, sustainability, and genuine diversity of thought and background.

That’s how capital actually becomes capability. And that’s how capability becomes ecosystem transformation.

Why This Matters: Supporting Female Leaders

Backing experienced female leaders isn’t just ethical, it’s smart business. The evidence is compelling: women-led firms consistently outperform on return on investment and resilience. This isn’t a coincidence. Female founders bring distinct advantages that translate directly into superior business outcomes.

Diverse experience drives innovation and efficiency. Female leaders built their careers navigating different markets and communities, developing deep cultural fluency and genuine insight into underserved customer segments. They understand product-market fit intuitively because they’ve lived it. This translates into leaner builds, cleaner unit economics, faster monetisation, and products that actually solve real problems for real people. More productivity, more jobs, more tax revenue – growth that compounds across the economy.

Untapped markets become accessible. When you invest in diverse founders, you gain access to diverse markets. Female leaders bring trust, cultural credibility, and existing distribution networks into communities that traditional venture capital has consistently overlooked. Global expansion becomes smarter – navigated by leaders who understand local norms, procurement practices, and market gaps from genuine experience, not external analysis. New revenues follow.

Risk-adjusted returns improve through diversification. Homogeneous portfolios are brittle. They correlate too tightly, move in lockstep, and fail together. Diversity across founders, sectors, and markets fundamentally changes the risk profile. Concentration risk dissolves. Risk-adjusted returns improve. This isn’t sentiment – it’s portfolio science.

The Moment is Now

We’re at an inflection point. Established female leaders have built credibility and proven capability. The collective challenge now is amplifying impact, not just succeeding individually. These leaders need visibility and platform. They need access to capital and networks at scale. They need space to lead innovation in high-growth sectors like AI. They need to mentor and invest in the next generation.

When capital, capability, and confidence converge, female leaders don’t participate in the economy, they redefine it. Supporting them at every stage unlocks exponential value across the entire UK economy.

About the Author

Janthana Kaenprakhamroy is the CEO of Tapoly, an award-winning insurtech serving SMEs and freelancers. Recognised by Forbes as one of the Top 6 Women Founders to Watch, she has been named Insurance Leader of the Year (Women in Finance Awards 2021), Innovator of the Year (UK FinTech Awards 2023), and one of TechRound’s Top 50 Women in Tech (2025).

She was a former chartered accountant and internal audit director at investment banks, having previously worked at UBS, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, and BNP Paribas.