Fund 2 Announcement
Issue 154 l Eka’s Weekly Roundup (13 April 2026)
Building for a healthier, more sustainable decade
Today we are announcing a huge moment in the Eka journey, with the final close of our second fund at $107m (£80m).. It makes Eka the UK’s largest early-stage impact VC investing across health, wellbeing and sustainability.
We want to use this note to say thank you, and to share a bit of the thinking behind where we’re heading next.
Why these sectors, and why now
When Jon & Camilla founded Eka in 2018, the prevailing view was that “impact” and “returns” sat on opposite sides of a trade-off. Eka’s thesis has always been the opposite: that the biggest commercial opportunities of the next decade will come from the companies rewiring the systems society depends on, including how we eat, how we stay well, how we move, how we consume, how we power our homes.
Three shifts in particular sit at the heart of what we back.
The first is the move from reactive to preventative healthcare. The UK spent 10.9% of GDP on health in 2023, and total healthcare spending reached roughly £317 billion in 2024. Yet preventive care accounted for just 5.2% of government healthcare expenditure: meaning that for every £1 we spend treating illness, we spend around 5p trying to stop it happening in the first place. The companies that help people stay well, through earlier detection, behaviour change, better access, and digitally-delivered care, are tackling one of the highest-leverage problems in the UK economy.
The second is the decarbonisation of major consumer industries. Production-side emissions have fallen meaningfully, but consumption tells a different story: consumer expenditure is now the single largest contributor to UK emissions, at 26.0% of the 2024 total, with transport close behind at 16.1%. In other words, the climate fight is increasingly a consumer fight: what we eat, how we travel, how we heat our homes, how we buy things. This goes beyond consumer products, into supply chain and infrastructure for the entire economy.
The third is the widening of access to the social determinants of health. There is an opportunity to use technology to bring essential products and services to people who have historically been priced or locked out of essential products and services like insurance or housing. This is where commercial and social returns compound most cleanly: every new customer is both a unit of growth and a unit of impact. Legal, education, community, safety, and identity include some of the themes which sit under this third pillar.
These three themes touch the largest consumer markets in the world, and the founders building into them are doing so with a clarity of purpose we find genuinely exciting.
What Fund I taught us
The numbers speak for themselves: Fund I is in the top 5% for both DPI and TVPI in its 2021 vintage, and Eka’s total AUM now stands at $200m following this close.
That performance came from a disciplined approach: leading or co-leading 90% of our deals, with an average cheque size of $2m, and backing founders at pre-seed and seed. Fund I’s portfolio includes Runna (seed round, recently exited to Strava), Urban Jungle, Axle, Hived, Foresight Data Machines, Jude and Flok Health. Several have gone on to raise from Index Ventures, Accel and Balderton.
We’ve also leaned hard into how we find founders. Since 2021, 47% of Fund I investments came through our in-house, AI-backed sourcing platform: built specifically to pinpoint founders flying under the radar of other firms. The pattern we see is consistent: ambitious teams, pointed at systemic problems, building category-defining businesses.
What Fund II will do
With Fund II we’ll back up to 30 UK pre-seed and seed-stage companies, with an average first investment of c.$2m and meaningful reserves for follow-ons. We’ll continue to lead or co-lead 90% of our deals. The remit stays the same: health, life essential products and services, sustainable consumption, but the scale of what we can do for each founder grows.
We’re grateful to the LPs backing us in this next chapter including British Business Bank, Better Society Capital, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation, The Health Foundation, WRAP, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, John Ellerman Foundation, Vivensa Foundation and many others. Their conviction that commercial and societal returns can compound together is the reason a fund like ours exists at this scale in the UK.
To the founders reading this
If you’re building something that makes people healthier, makes the planet more liveable, or makes essential things more accessible: we want to hear from you!
Thank you for being part of the journey so far. There’s a lot more to come.
- The Eka team