Tech and policy in 2025
Our take on the year ahead, and a recap on Form's 2024
Four predictions for 2025
1. Do-or-die for UK growth policy
The economic and fiscal outlook leaves no room for softballing the headline mission of the new government - kickstarting economic growth. After a Budget that left the startup sector feeling bruised, the burden of proof is on Ministers to deliver - aggressively - the regulatory reform and institutional capital-unlocking that underpin its growth agenda.
At the same time, the tech community will reach an inflection point. After a 2024 characterised by doom-mongering about the UK and Europe’s prospects, and swallowing whole the American oversimplification that ‘Europe regulates while the US innovates’, 2025 is the year for impatient optimism.
2. The year of proving who you are online
In the internet safety sphere, Australia’s ban of social media for under 16s, the guidance on the Online Safety Act in the UK, and Instagram’s new age-verified teen accounts all point to an inflection in how seriously online ID and authentication is being taken - this will gather pace in 2025.
In the financial sphere, fraud and scams will reach a tipping point - where novel tech solutions, coupled with policy focus, begin to turn the tide on the wave of gen-AI enabled crime. GenAI has vastly increased the sophistication of scams, and then democratised the ability to deploy them at an industrial scale. But we’ve also seen a crop of talented, ambitious founders making it their life’s work to change the picture (please continue to pitch us!).
3. Agentic AI reaches deeper into regulated markets - and that’s a good thing
AI agents are already having remarkable impact on the back-office processes of regulated markets (think clinical coding in healthcare and parts of the CFO stack), but we’ve seen far fewer startups tackle problems closer to the more sensitive parts of the value chain - such as patient handling in healthcare, or in the flow of funds in either consumer or enterprise use cases.
We think it’s only a matter of time before the world’s best founders tackle these spaces. But obviously the regulatory consequences of this will be vast, so if you’re thinking about taking this on - please reach out!
4. The crisis in UK and European capital markets reaches its peak
As the IPO market begins to open, and European champions increasingly choose to list in the US, it will become clear that the evolutionary reforms being pursued in the UK and Europe cannot arrest the decline.
So what to do? We expect that just as the impressive eu/acc campaign has pushed a single legal startup entity (i.e. a Delaware C-corp of Europe), the “nuclear option” of a single European IPO tech venue will come into focus. The failed LSE - Deutsche Borse tie-up and the beady eye of merger control regulators will cast a shadow over this, but it will become clear that a collection of subscale venues cannot compete with the US.
Form’s 2024: a year of…
…continuing to back great founding teams
We made eight new investments in a year in which the market felt more buoyant:
Stealth startup - a team out of Revolut building the future of palm-based payments and authentication.
Tipple - the tax and logistics infrastructure for cross border trade of alcohol.
Ontime - enabling employees to pay bills and loans directly from payroll, as a new way to pay and manage regular outgoings.
Heim Health - solving the last mile of healthcare delivery for public and private healthcare providers.
Stealth startup - building the most secure way to share sensitive content online, starting with intimate images.
Snoots - offering veterinary primary care as a single subscription, through telehealth and low cost clinics.
Workflow AI - a tool to manage a company’s pipeline of creative content, automating the review of content against both brand guidelines and regulatory requirements.
Stealth startup - automating the valuable but painful task of corporate tax returns.
As well as those new investments, we saw a crop of fundraises in the existing portfolio, most of which are yet to be announced, but particular congratulations to Infact for nailing a £4m seed round (and for the kind words about Form)!
…fixing the regulators
This year we ran a punchy campaign to make sure the regulators have the right structures, risk appetite and funding to support the best tech companies in the world. That meant a Ministerial launch event in February; giving evidence to Parliament; securing a Big Read in the FT, and speaking to the founders in our network who have already built unicorns in regulated markets. As well as banging the drum for change in countless private discussions with ministers, senior officials and regulators.
The new Government has taken steps in the right direction, actioning our recommendation to create a Regulatory Innovation Office, and only in the last few days the Prime Minister wrote to the regulators asking for reform ideas to boost growth. The proof will be in the pudding - see prediction #1 above…
… and developing the Playbook for regulated markets
With 25 instalments in 2024 alone, The Form Playbook goes from strength to strength. We’ve heard from policymakers like Lord O’Shaughnessey, Lord Vallance, Kate Jones and Kanishka Narayan MP; from founders and operators like Greg Jackson and Simon Taylor; and of course from the Form team. We’re pretty sure that we already have the single most extensive compilation of insights into building venture-backed startups in markets shaped by policy and regulation.
We also ran three in-person Playbook breakfast events, covering the future of tech in energy, scaling AI in health and the UK’s new Employment Bill, with fintech and social care in our sights for 2025.
Perhaps topping it all was the barnstorming success of Mayowa’s round table session at the WCV:E conference in Paris, focused on assessing founding teams, accompanied by the launch of her new quarterly Team Talks series - it’s not too late to register your interest!
That’s it! With a huge thanks to our investors, portfolio founders, coinvestors, wider supporters - and of course our departing team member Andrew. Watch this space for Form team updates and have a fantastic start to 2025.