Women Founders: Win Funding and Expert Support to Launch Your Startup

Deadline: Friday, 20th February 2026 at 12 noon.

The FoundHER Fund, in partnership with Converge and the Scottish Funding Council, exists to give women founders at the University of Edinburgh the boost they need to succeed. Whether you’re a student, staff member, or recent alumna, this fund can help grow your idea into a real venture.

Prizes

There are two ways to win support (subject to the Terms & Conditions):

Monetary Prize (£5,000 prize pot) - Open to students, staff, and alumni. The prize will be shared between several founders to grow their ideas.

External Expert Fund (£5,000 of external support) Open to students and alumni. Two winners will each receive £2,500 to work with an expert consultant of their choosing.

How to Apply

Submit either a 5-minute video (recommended) or a short written application.

What We’re Looking For

We want ideas that are innovative, scalable and impactful.

A strong application:

• Solves a real problem with a unique solution
• Shows potential to grow and be sustainable
• Explains how funding and/or expert support will help your idea
• Applications that align with the University’s focus areas, Data, Digital & AI; Health & Care; Climate & Environment, are especially welcome.

Who can apply

• Open to all University of Edinburgh students, and to alumni (up to two years post-graduation) and staff who identify as women, including trans women, intersex and non-binary people.
• Applicants currently on a visa must ensure that their visa allows them to engage in business activity, or that they have a plan to transition to a visa that allows this within the next 12 months. Those on a Student Visa typically cannot engage in business activity, so please check your visa conditions and guidance from the Student Immigration Service before applying.

Terms & Conditions:

• Awards are made at the judges’ discretion, based on the quality of applications and the type of support deemed most appropriate.
• Successful applicants may receive funding, expert support, or a combination of both.
• As a condition of accepting the award, all successful applicants must provide a short case study outlining the impact of the support received and provide a short breakdown of how the funds were used.
• Case studies may be used to showcase entrepreneurial activity and shared through programme and partner communications.
• Winners must spend the funds within 12 months
• Winners must attend three advisory meetings with an Edinburgh Innovations business adviser (the first of these must be booked ahead of the funding can be issued)
• Should you win funding as part of this programme, a UK bank account is preferred for all payments. Requests to use non-UK bank accounts may be considered on a case-by-case basis and may be subject to additional checks or processing time.

Privacy notice:

This ‘privacy notice’ explains the personal information the University collects through this FoundHer Fund application process. This privacy notice supplements the respective privacy notices for staff and students.

‘Personal information’ means any piece of information which can identify you, i.e. would make it clear to others that the information is about you. It can be a single piece of information, for example, your name. Or it can be separate pieces of information which, when combined, would help others to identify you.

As part of the application process to the FoundHer Fund Entrepreneurship call 2026, we are collecting Personal Information, including information about your name, university contact details; gender; age; ethnicity; sexuality; disability; staff/student status; and sector.

The table below describes the information we collect and what we need it for.

Your information will be shared under confidentiality terms with a third party (Converge, a brand operated by Heriot-Watt University, whose Scottish registered charity number is SC000278) for the purpose of complying with contractual obligations we have with Converge and the Scottish Funding Council relating to this funding call. Converge will use the information to enable it to carry out its own contractual obligations to report equality, diversity, and inclusion information to the Scottish Government for the purpose of monitoring equal opportunities. Information relating to all applications will not be anonymised.

We may also use information provided by successful applicants to:

• administer the competition and awards process;
• evaluate the impact of the support provided; and
• create case studies to showcase entrepreneurial activity, which may be shared through programme and partner communications (for example websites, reports, and social media).

Any case study content will be agreed with participants in advance, and no personal or commercially sensitive information will be shared without prior consent.

Retention

The information gathered will be retained for 2 years to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected.

At the end of the retention period, your data will either be deleted completely or anonymised, for example by aggregation with other data so that it can be used in a non-identifiable way for statistical analysis and business planning.