The Raise Lab: Built by Founders, for Founders

For most founders, fundraising is one of the hardest – and most defining – parts of building a company. Fundraising shapes how you tell your story, allocate time, and set the pace for growth – yet it remains one of the least transparent parts of building a company.

Most of us start from scratch: trying to work out what investors expect, what a good raise looks like in our sector, and how to build materials that land (usually without prior examples or guidance). The invisible front labour of learning the process while running the company costs time, energy, and often momentum.

For women founders, the challenge compounds. With less than three percent of global venture funding flowing to female-led companies, every knowledge gap is amplified. But this is not an inevitable disadvantage; it’s about systems design: and it’s one we can solve. 

That’s why we built The Raise Lab: the first founder-led programme to come out of the Cambridge Female Founders Network. 

What is The Raise Lab

The Raise Lab is a two-week, founder-led fundraising bootcamp designed to make the raise process clearer, more structured, and genuinely useful.

It’s a working space, not an accelerator. You’ll come together to refine strategy, test materials, and understand what the fundraising process actually demands – with input from those who’ve done it before, and from investors who want the best founders to know how to reach them, pitch effectively, and build relationships that last beyond a single round.

You’ll work through:

• Structuring your raise around milestones and strategy

• Understanding investor logic and communicating on equal terms

• Building decks, models, and data rooms that tell a connected story

• Developing investor relationships early, before the round begins

  
  

Each session is led by founders who’ve raised, investors who’ve backed them, and partners who’ve seen hundreds of deals through to close.

This is about collective precision: creating a shared environment where fundraising is demystified and shaped by real data, real experience, and real context.

A collaborative approach

The Raise Lab was developed collaboratively with people across the Cambridge ecosystem – founders, angels, VCs, and legal partners – all focused on one thing: making fundraising work better for everyone involved.

Each brings a different kind of expertise – legal, financial, technical, or operational – but what unites them is a bias for doing. Cambridge’s strength has always been its ability to connect people and ideas across boundaries, creating the kind of proximity where useful collisions happen. When those capacities align, the result isn’t theory, but progress that feels almost serendipitous – the right people, in the right room, working on the same problem from different angles.

The Raise Lab is one expression of that alignment: founders and partners working side-by-side to create the conditions for better, faster, and fairer raises.

What’s taking shape is a more connected infrastructure: where founders can build with greater confidence and investors can engage with sharper context. That shift matters because it turns fundraising from a barrier into a catalyst for growth.

Registration now open – Join the Raise Lab

If you’re part of the wider ecosystem and want to help shape what’s next, join the network.