A world where enterprise is rewarded, not resisted.

Harriet has stood on both sides of the table, as the entrepreneur trying to raise, and later as the person deciding who gets funded.

She started her career the way many founders do, by building something and getting it wrong. That failure led her into helping others raise instead, and eventually into the investment side itself, first at Capital Enterprise, then Connected Places Catapult, where she is Head of Investment.

It was there, working across infrastructure, transport and advanced manufacturing, that the pattern became impossible to ignore. These were not businesses with a traction problem. They had the contracts, £103m of commercial contract revenue secured by businesses on a single £10m programme she led across three cohorts. Industry wanted what they had built. But the capital was not there when it was needed, because it had been structured around software timelines: invest after traction, when in these sectors the traction moment is precisely when the money was already required.

Games has the same failure, in four forms at once, and almost nobody is treating it as a capital design problem. Studios win publisher deals and run out of cash between milestones. They take advances that must be repaid before they see a penny. They claim a tax credit a year after the money is gone. Harriet founded Calyx to fix that sequence, bringing over £300m secured for SMEs and start-ups across her career to a sector she also works in directly: she runs her own games studio.