Peeds Initiative Empowering Female Entrepreneurs

The Lifted Project is a nationwide initiative that is creating regional growth boards in five cities across the UK, in a bid to make high-growth entrepreneurship more accessible to women outside of London and the South East.

The Lifted Project was set up by Zandra Moore, Co-founder and CEO of Panintelligence, an award-winning business intelligence software based in Leeds. It was established as a result of a recommendation from a new government taskforce established to boost private investment in women-led businesses across the UK.

The project has created five Regional Growth Boards in Leeds, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Birmingham and Newcastle with the aim of increasing the number of female-founded high-growth enterprises by 50% within three years. The initiative is backed and supported by Lloyds Bank and is being led by Lifted Ventures.

Lifted Ventures, co-founded by Jordan Dargue and Helen Oldham, is an early-stage investment connector, existing to increase the flow of early-stage capital to female founders, and to promote the business benefits of backing women.

Research has confirmed that there is a higher proportion of high-growth enterprises, founded by women, in the South East than elsewhere in England due to easier access to funding, connections, knowledge sharing, talent, and customer base.

Panintelligence CEO, Zandra, is also set to be the board chair for the Leeds Regional Growth Board. As a tech entrepreneur, Zandra is passionate about enabling more women in the industry, improving gender equality and increasing investment in businesses founded by fellow female entrepreneurs.

This has led to Zandra being involved in the creation of LeanIn Leeds, The No Code Lab and the Yorkshire Growth Tech Group, all with the focus of supporting and championing female representation. Zandra was also invited to become a member of the UK Government’s Taskforce for diversity in fast growth companies in 2022.

As a female founder outside of London, you are faced with a double disadvantage. You already have to work harder than a man to sell yourself and your business, working through the countless barriers that we outline in this report. But you also have to sell your city as a place to grow and scale a business. The ambition and talent are there in our regions. The support and access to capital is not.

Supporting Zandra as vice-chair is Natalie Boswell of Lloyds Bank. Natalie is the Regional Development Director for North East and Yorkshire. Leeds is one of the fastest growing economies in the UK and central to our regional development programme, focusing on supporting businesses with productivity, international trade, access to finance and net zero transition. Natalie is passionate about supporting women owned and led businesses. Natalie joined Lloyds Bank after graduating from Leeds University and has spent 11 years in customer-facing relationship management roles, supporting businesses across various sectors delivering their strategies and growth ambitions.

The Women entrepreneurs programme at Lloyds Bank is led by Eleanor Baker who will be working alongside Natalie as part of the Leeds regional board.

Through their leadership, the Leeds Growth Board will support female entrepreneurs using real-time data sets provided by PanIntelligence and fellow Leeds-based tech company, The Data City. The sustainable data model will underpin regional activities, drive the strategy and accelerate momentum, while allowing for progress to be monitored.

Earlier this year, Zandra and Natalie hosted their first regional roundtable event which brought together founders, investors and regional stakeholders to discuss the imbalance in the region and how the board can harness the power of data to provide female founders with better pathways of support.

The outcome of the roundtable event centred around how to support better access to capital, networks, advice and acceleration, as well as building a community of like-minded entrepreneurs and role models to catalyse and support female founder growth.

For more information about The Lifted Project, visit www.theliftedproject.co.uk