The Keith Arundale Website

RTC Investment Summit 2025 – Friday 4 July 2025 9.00am to 5.30pm – at the ICMA Centre, Henley Business School, University of Reading – Whiteknights Campus  The Reading Tech Cluster Investment Summit 2025 will showcase selected Thames Valley, Berkshire scale-up tech companies with the potential to become unicorns. These companies will gather at this launch event […]

The Chancellor’s plans for economic growth announced on 29 January are to be welcomed. It is good news for the Oxford – Cambridge Arc, and Manchester too. But let’s not forget that there are many other tech hotspots around the country in need of financing and government support, including Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Wrexham and […]

The AI Opportunities Action Plan launched by the UK Government today https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-opportunities-action-plan/ai-opportunities-action-plan is to be welcomed though the Prime Minister’s determination that “the UK will be the best place to start and scale an AI business” is perhaps somewhat ambitious as the USA has so much more firepower in terms of the financial resources from […]

A paper that I presented at the 2022 ISBE conference in York with Emeritus Professor Colin Mason of the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow has been published in the International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal. Our paper entitled “Business angel groups as collective action: an examination of the due diligence process” investigates the collective […]

Impact for entrepreneurs, the PE & VC sector and the Thames Valley The much anticipated change to tax carried interest as income on private equity fund manager investment gains did not materialise in that this remains taxed as capital gains for now. However CGT is increased from 28% to 32%. The Chancellor stated that there […]

Research into venture capital fund performance and investment practices in UK / Europe and USA                                           Dr Keith Arundale Key messages1) This research is the most up to date, complete and extensive qualitative review of the entire venture capital (VC) investment process featuring interviews with 70 VC investment executives from 64 separate venture capital firms in […]

The government backed programmes of the British Business Bank (set up by the Conservatives in 2014) have provided much needed start-up loans for companies and through British Patient Capital, a subsidiary of BBB, with its $2.5bn of funding provides finance for venture and growth capital funds in the UK. BPC comes in where the pension […]

The Reading Tech Cluster, encompassing Reading and surrounding areas such as Bracknell, Slough and West Berkshire is a key part of the wider Thames Valley economy, one of the UK’s most successful regional economies. One of the key attributes of Silicon Valley in the USA as an economic powerhouse is the global supremacy of its […]

Challenges for SMEs in seeking finance The key challenges that SMEs face when seeking finance, including venture capital, have been widely researched and reported in the academic literature and professional press for many countries, including the UK. Such challenges   include: not knowing which types of finance to access and the pros and cons of each […]

Clearly NHS nurses are underpaid. We all know of nurses who have to take two jobs to support their families and still have to rely on food banks. And the toll that the profession takes on their lives and their physical and mental health is all too plain to see. No wonder nurses are leaving […]