Thena Capital has closed its first fund at £45m ($60.4m), the London venture firm announced this week, after a £27m first close in March 2025. The fund backs early-stage British medical-technology companies, and it is now fully closed.
The milestone is not only the money. Thena is the first all-female general partner team to win backing from the British Business Bank’s Enterprise Capital Funds programme, the state-supported scheme that anchors the fund.
Where the money goes
Thena Capital invests in UK digital health and medical devices at the earliest stages. It plans to back about 25 companies, writing cheques of £500,000 to £1m at seed, then helping them scale into the United States.
Founded in 2021, the firm is led by co-founders Tatum Getty, Pamela Walker Geddes, and Esther Reynal de St Michel Richardot, all healthcare-industry veterans. Its strategy is “gender-smart”, backing diverse teams and products built for both women and men.
Five companies in year one
The portfolio is already moving. Plexāā has launched its BLOOM43 product in the US and brought the Mayo Clinic onto its cap table. Salient Bio won UK regulatory clearance for an inflammatory-bowel-disease test. Heim Health made the 2026 NHS Innovation Accelerator. Sanome and Zonova round out the five.
An LP base built for value
The backers are as pointed as the bets. More than half of Thena’s limited partners are women, and the roster includes Baroness Martha Lane Fox, the Lastminute.com co-founder, the chair of BlackRock Switzerland, and the chief executive of Hellman & Friedman. Senior figures from GSK, Novartis, and AstraZeneca sit alongside them, bringing exit routes and credibility, not just cash.
Why it matters
The raise lands against a stark backdrop. Europe’s AI boom has left femtech behind, and female-only founding teams still take about 6 per cent of venture money, a share that has barely moved since 2016. A fund run entirely by women, backing health startups, pushes against that.
It also bets on a hard sector. Healthtech founders face a tough road scaling in Europe, where investors often want commercial proof early. And while UK venture funding has doubled this year, the cash is piling into a few giant AI rounds, not seed-stage medical devices. The UK digital-health market is forecast to reach $7.45bn by 2030.
Thena’s wager is that patient, specialist money can build companies the generalist boom overlooks. A £45m first fund is small next to the AI mega-rounds. Whether it can turn five early bets, one already in the US, into exits that prove the model is the test of the next few years.
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