When Eka Ventures held the final close of its first fund at £68 million in 2021, the London-based firm staked a claim that few UK VCs were willing to make at the time: that impact investing and venture-scale returns were not a trade-off but a thesis.
Five years later, it is doubling down. Eka has closed its second fund at $107 million (£80 million), bringing its total assets under management to $200 million and, according to the firm, making it the UK’s largest early-stage impact VC investing across health, wellbeing, and sustainability.
Fund II will back up to 30 pre-seed and seed-stage companies in the UK, with an average first cheque of roughly $2 million and reserves set aside for follow-on investments. The firm says it will continue to lead or co-lead 90% of its deals, a discipline it maintained through its debut fund.
The investment thesis remains unchanged: consumer technology companies operating at the intersection of preventative healthcare, sustainable consumption, and widening access to essential services such as housing, insurance, and education.
The backers lining up behind that thesis are a conspicuous mix of public-interest capital and philanthropic foundations. Eka’s LP base for Fund II includes the British Business Bank (which committed £36 million to Fund I), Better Society Capital, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation, The Health Foundation, WRAP, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, John Ellerman Foundation, and Vivensa Foundation, among others.
Eka says its debut fund’s performance supports the thesis. The firm claims Fund I is in the top 5% for both DPI (distributions to paid-in capital) and TVPI (total value to paid-in capital) in its 2021 vintage, though these figures have not been independently verified.
The portfolio includes Runna, the running training app that was acquired by Strava in April 2025, alongside Urban Jungle, Axle, Hived, Foresight Data Machines, Jude, and Flok Health. Several portfolio companies have gone on to raise from Index Ventures, Accel, and Balderton.
The market Eka is targeting is enormous, even if it does not always register as “tech” in the traditional VC sense. The UK spent 10.9% of GDP on health in 2023, according to the King’s Fund, with total healthcare expenditure reaching roughly £317 billion in 2024.
Yet preventive care accounted for just 5.2% of government healthcare spending, according to the ONS. Eka sees the gap between treatment spending and prevention spending as one of the highest-leverage commercial opportunities in the UK economy: the companies that help people stay well through earlier detection, behaviour change, and digitally delivered care are addressing a structural inefficiency that costs the NHS billions each year.
On the sustainability side, the firm points to ONS data showing consumer expenditure is now the single largest contributor to UK greenhouse gas emissions at 26% of the 2024 total, with transport close behind at 16.1%.
The implication is that decarbonisation increasingly depends on consumer behaviour, not just industrial policy, and that the companies reshaping how people eat, travel, heat their homes, and buy things sit at the centre of that shift.
The relationship between venture capital and climate technology remains complicated, with sustainability startups often requiring longer development timelines than traditional VC fund structures comfortably allow. Eka’s model, investing early and focusing on consumer-facing technology with clear product-market fit, is one approach to squaring that circle.
One distinctive element of Eka’s operation is its AI-backed sourcing platform, which the firm says has been responsible for 47% of Fund I investments since 2021. Built in-house, the tool is designed to surface founders who are not yet on the radar of larger firms.
In a seed-stage market where deal flow often depends on personal networks and warm introductions, a systematic approach to sourcing is a meaningful differentiator, if it continues to produce results.
Founded in 2018 by Jon Coker and Camilla Dolan, Eka emerged from a venture background that included early involvement with Gousto, Bloom & Wild, and Elder.
Jon Coker, co-founding Partner at Eka Ventures, said: “No society can succeed without a healthy population, a sustainable climate, and communities that have access to essential services. That’s why our conviction in these markets is unwavering: startups innovating in these spaces are not only laying the foundations for a better future, but are also tapping into the biggest market opportunities the world has ever seen.
“The success of Fund I is testament to the strength and long-term potential of this model, and we’re already seeing that success replicated across the initial Fund II investments. Eka is proud to be catalysing impact alongside commercial returns at scale across the UK and beyond.”
The firm’s roots in consumer tech are visible in its portfolio construction: these are not deep-tech bets requiring decades of R&D, but product-led businesses addressing measurable consumer pain points in markets where regulation and demographic pressure are creating tailwinds.
Camilla Dolan, co-founding Partner at Eka Ventures, adds: “Our philosophy from day one has been that investing in the right founders and giving them the autonomy to move fast, take risks and set audacious goals is what unlocks truly game changing outcomes, both commercially and societally.”
As Europe’s broader VC ecosystem continues to grapple with a persistent funding gap relative to the US, a UK fund raising £80 million for impact-driven seed investing is not going to close that gap on its own. But it does suggest that the appetite for purpose-aligned capital, at least among LPs willing to bet on the long game, is growing rather than shrinking.
Whether Eka can sustain top-percentile returns while scaling from a £68 million debut to an £80 million follow-on is the question that matters most, and the one that only the next five years can answer.
