My £50m mission to make British women big in business

It’s clever branding — emotive and sexy — because any woman in business should, probably, be a bit righteously angry at the odds stacked against her. According to Forbes, data shows the amount of capital going to back all-male founder teams went up from 80 per cent in the first half of 2023 to 86 per cent in the first half of 2024. The amount of capital going to back businesses founded by women has fallen from 2 per cent to 1.8 per cent. Last year, the British Business Bank found that the share of equity investment to all-female-led businesses here has remained roughly static for the past decade.

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“Deals get done on golf courses,” Daly says when we meet in the Kensington hotel in west London. “They get done late at night over dinner, in clubs and bars. How often do [women] have to say no to a networking opportunity because they have to get home to the children? What have we missed because of that?”

In 2018, Boston Consulting Group reported that, although start-ups founded by women generated 10 per cent more cumulative revenue than men’s over five years, female business owners receive “significantly less” early stage investment than their male counterparts. Yet a study by First Round Capital found that companies with a female CEO had a return on investment 63 per cent higher than those run by men.

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“You’re more likely to make your money back if you invest in women and you’re going to have more growth if you have diversity around the table. This is just good business. We need to teach investors and corporate teams the monetary value of inclusivity,” Daly says.

Nell Daly has Rachel Reeves in her corner too. In September, the chancellor backed the Invest in Women Taskforce — launched last March by the Barclays exec Hannah Bernard and the AllBright business collective co-founder and entrepreneur Debbie Wosskow — which has at its heart the establishment of a £250 million fund of funds. The initiative is designed not only to help direct capital towards female founders but to encourage more women to invest as well.

“Culturally we don’t give opportunities to people outside the system or who haven’t had a chance,” Daly says. “But Revenge is not philanthropic. We want to make money.”

It was after one of her regular segments as a commentator on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show that Daly realised she was too poor to feel safe. After being made redundant during Covid, she and her children had just moved back in with her terminally ill mother.

Daly had made a comment about women voting for Donald Trump even after the pussy-grabbing tape had come out — which she refuses to repeat to me in case it reopens the abuse — that Carlson quoted in his opening monologue. Her social accounts racked up 2,000 comments within an hour and her voicemail filled with hate messages threatening extreme sexual violence.

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“I was lying in bed, with three little kids and my mom dying of cancer in the other room, with someone ringing my phone,” she tells me. “I had a Taser flashlight. I was on the local police radar. But I didn’t have the money for security or to put a fence system around my house.”

That was her last appearance on the show. “My friends said I was setting myself up by being a liberal commentator. In the end, it just felt too dangerous.

“I said to my mom before she died, ‘I could get a job as a hospital administrator — and there is nothing wrong with that — but I’m never going to work myself out of this hole, and I’m never going to be able to send my kids to college. ”

Instead, she decided to close her private practice as a therapist and pivot to venture capital, a form of private equity that funds fledgling businesses with growth potential in the hope of making money off the back of their success stories. Her part of the chain was the schmoozing and persuasion needed to convince investors to part with their cash.

“To make real money in America, you either build a business and sell out or you get into venture,” she says. “Or you marry the guy from the country club. But I married an artist and I was a social worker with a master’s in fine art. Which are two careers where you choose to be poor.”

So, how does one become a venture capitalist overnight?

“I googled that shit.” She laughs. “The hardest thing I’ve done wasn’t raising capital but convincing people I wasn’t a social worker [any longer]. Then one day someone said, ‘Can you help us raise middle market debt?’ And I was like, ‘Sure,’ and hung up. Then I googled, ‘What is middle market debt?’ ”

That was five years ago. Since then, Daly has raised tens of millions for companies and projects — and made several herself, though she is too coy to put a number on it — working alongside the ultra-hip talent incubator Delete Ventures, which matches creatives and edgy brands with investment. One such is the DJ Paul Oakenfold’s cult record label Perfecto, which has plans to expand into events next year.

Yet the more successful Daly was with the money, the less difference she felt she was making to the people she had once taken an oath to look out for — a legal requirement so she could practise as a social worker in the US.

“There’s a big difference between getting a seat at the table and having a voice at the table,” she says. “I hadn’t really disrupted the system.”

The difference in funding and opportunities between businesses run by men and those run by women is about more than sexism, she explains. Female entrepreneurs tend to set up consumer businesses that serve other women or make and sell products, while investors know they can make more money by putting their funds into tech businesses, which are more often than not founded by men.

“There are specifically female funds out there — every woman is hitting them up for money. What irritates me is that when a female founder goes to raise capital, she gets this answer: ‘I have a friend who’s a woman who invests in women.’ That doesn’t ever happen to a man. So you have all these women fighting for resources — what a great way to keep them busy. Like putting one bit of food in the fish tank and saying: you guys are good now, right?”

That’s why Daly insists Revenge Capital will invest across all sectors, to encourage as many different types of businesses — and owners — to pitch. The fund has already invested in several female-led companies, from a buzzy British canned margarita brand called Pimentae and the hip homeware online marketplace Glassette, founded by the TV presenter Laura Jackson, to a more forward-facing adaptogenic mushroom supplements range called Mother Made and an AI-powered “social listening” platform designed to match brands with record labels and create soundtracks for online content.

“There are enough people giving money to the mainstream,” Daly says. “What will overlooked subcultures invent? As a psychotherapist for a decade, I saw so many people with horrible depression and anxiety that was so often linked to their finances. I feel like I have the skill set and the network to help people by trying to influence economic change.”

On the social work beat “in the trenches” of New York in the early Noughties, Daly saw the Aids crisis in poorer parts of Brooklyn and worked with domestic abuse causes, for a time wearing a bleeper so she could be contacted day or night to accompany rape victims to hospital to ensure evidence was collected. After opening her own practice on Fifth Avenue, she then worked with people suffering from the fallout of 9/11 and the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.

“I learnt to sweat down my back,” she says, “because I couldn’t show it on my face. What good is a therapist who falls apart? You listen, they leave and then you vomit in the trash can.”

Presumably this steeliness is what helped Daly persuade her partner in Revenge, the financier Andrew Antonio, to join forces.

Antonio, 53, is behind the commercial partnership firm Mayfair Associates (which works with talent from sport, film and music), a partner in Method Music (the singer Sam Smith’s label) and a founding partner of the Openwork Partnership, a fintech asset management network that would, were it a bank, be the largest in England by the amount it loans. Having grown up in Weston-super-Mare, working shifts in the roadside caff his Cypriot immigrant parents ran before his school day started, Antonio has since become one of the UK’s most influential power players you’ve never heard of.

“I met him on another deal,” Daly says, “but I thought he was an accountant, so I asked if he could get me an introduction to Mayfair Associates. He said, ‘I started it 30 years ago. So why are we having breakfast?’

“I had the Hamilton music in my head — ‘take a shot’. So I said, ‘I’m looking for money for women in the UK. I cannot find any and if I don’t find any soon, I’m going back to the US.’ I told him I could do more business in Miami in one day than in all of the UK in a year.”

Then she asked him for £10 million. She also asked him how many women he had invested in, how many he knew on boards and how many female founders were in his portfolio.

“It blew me away,” Antonio tells me. “Why women are so undervalued in venture capital is beyond me. I wanted to do something about it.”

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According to Nell Daly, he called the morning after their meeting. “He said, ‘I’m going to make it £50 million.’ ”

Their milieu and Revenge Capital itself feel straight out of the same landscape as the TV series Industry, with its banker interns, druggy traders and venal hedge-fund managers.

“I’ve never done cocaine,” Daly says with a laugh, after holding forth for almost 90 minutes fuelled only by an almond-milk cappuccino, throwing out theories, philosophies, motivational quotes and business plans the way other people talk about the weather. “The world would not be a good place with me on cocaine.”

She does however admit to an intensity that sometimes means working through day and night without realising when she is “in the zone”, but Daly practises yoga and goes running to maintain her wellbeing and equilibrium. Her children are now 20, 15 and 13.

“I slept with my shoes on for years, raising my kids alone on a social worker salary,” she says. “It’s hard to shake that feeling. That’s why I want to do everything I can to make sure more women have more money. That’s my revenge.”