Newcastle initiative empowering female entrepreneurs announces Debra Leeves as board chair

Newcastle, UK. May 1, 2024 - 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 Newcastle, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool 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.

Despite this, a recently released report by iwoca - an online fintech company based in the UK - ranked Newcastle as the second best city to be a female entrepreneur in England with 49% of self-employed in the region being women. Darlington and Sunderland secured the third and fourth spots.

The study used ONS data on female representation among the self-employed workforce, childcare costs, gender pay gap, and small business growth to rank each area. However, regardless of having all of the economical and environmental factors that allow female founders to thrive, access to early-stage capital and critical business support is still a significant challenge.

The Newcastle-based growth board is set to be led by Debra Leeves, current CEO of Hull-based virtual reality software supplier, Vertual. Debra is well established in the tech and pharmaceutical industries, having held various C-Level positions for large multinational corporations including Pfizer, GSK, and GE, as well as having successfully led four start-up organisations throughout her career. “After more than 30 years leading and investing in high growth companies a quote comes to mind ‘Successful businesses are not built on passion alone’” said Debra, the new Chair of the Newcastle region’s High-Growth Board. “My mission as Regional Board Chair is to support and increase the number of women-led high growth businesses, and to work with VCs and angel investors to ensure that the flow of capital comes their way.”

Supporting Debra as vice-chair is Dr. Fozia Saleem, the CEO of Magnitude Biosciences, one of the world’s leading contract research organisation (CRO) providing services to pharma, health and nutrition sectors for determining the effects of products on healthy ageing, longevity and neurodegeneration.

The Newcastle Growth Board will support female entrepreneurs using real-time data sets provided by Leeds based tech companies, PanIntelligence and 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 month, Debra and Fozia held their first regional roundtable event - kindly supported by RBC Brewin Dolphin - which brought together founders, investors and regional stakeholders to discuss the imbalance in the north east 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.

“Lloyds Bank is committed to supporting and championing women entrepreneurs and helping them thrive in their business journey. We’re proud to be working with the Lifted Project in establishing the Regional Growth Boards. We look forward to playing our part to support and increase the flow of capital for high growth women-led enterprises within Newcastle”, said Jo Clough, Director ESG Strategy & Programmes, Lloyds Banking Group

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

ABOUT LLOYDS BANKING GROUP

• Lloyds Banking Group is a leading UK-based financial services group providing a wide range of banking and financial services, focused on personal and commercial customers.  As part of the Group, Lloyds Bank and Bank of Scotland provide expert financial support and guidance to the households, businesses and communities of Britain.
• We help businesses from all parts of the UK, and across all different sectors and sizes, giving them the funding and support they need to grow both at home and abroad. 
• We remain committed to helping customers of all sizes and in 2023 we helped over 105,000 small businesses and charities with new banking. 
• We are also helping British businesses grow back greener and provided £7.9bn of ESG-related financing in 2023. 

Our support for businesses: 

• We are proud to be by the side of British business, supporting more than one million UK businesses with leading digital and relationship banking services, as they start up, grow, thrive and trade internationally. 
• Through a network of relationship teams based across the UK, as well as internationally, we deliver a mix of local understanding and global expertise necessary to provide long-term support to our clients to help them fulfil their growth aspirations. 
• We offer a broad range of finance beyond term lending and this spans import and export trade finance, structured and asset finance, securitisation facilities and capital market funding. 
• Our product specialists provide bespoke financial services and solutions, including tailored cash management, international trade, treasury and risk management services. 

PRESS CONTACT Adam [email protected] 0207 356 2374

ABOUT LIFTED VENTURESLifted Ventures 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. Headquartered in Leeds, UK, Lifted Ventures aims to ensure regional funding is accessible to all, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, neuro or physical diversity. Lifted Ventures has an angel network at its core alongside education, community and consultancy.

PRESS CONTACTLaura Brown, Marketing and Community [email protected]