The start of January through to the end of the UK tax year is an incredibly important time for EIS & SEIS Fund managers, with a combination of a large number of early-stage companies seeking to complete their fundraising, as well as increased levels of investor appetite to offset income/capital gains tax liabilities before tax-year-end.

Over this period in 2026, we’ve seen the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) downgrade growth expectations from 1.4% to 1.1%, and confidence in AI-related stocks drop from 50% to 41%. To make matters worse, both of these figures were reported prior to the escalation of the ongoing war in the Middle East, meaning it doesn’t consider the likely knock-on impact of the surge in oil prices that followed.

With all that in mind, one would imagine UK-based investors would be apprehensive about investing in illiquid assets such as early-stage Business-to-Business Software-as-a-Service.
Instead, we’ve seen a record-breaking EIS Fund to close the 2025/26 tax year, as illustrated by the chart below showing our total deployments across both our EIS and SEIS Funds.

The point of this piece isn’t to wax lyrical about the fine work we’ve been doing, nor is it to sell ourselves as a hedge against all of this uncertainty, instead I wanted to use it to flag some of the positive structural changes we’ve seen be accelerated by this period.

As many of you will already be aware, at Haatch we charge our fees to our investors, rather than to the portfolio companies. The origin of this approach is from our founders previous journey raising VC funding, with Elevaate (276x multiple exit) receiving investment from Chris Tottman’s Notion Capital who stood out for their founder-friendly terms and the shared vision for the potential of the business.

As an EIS/SEIS fund, we’ve been on the record championing this approach since the fund was launched back in October 2018 as we believe that the only way to establish yourself in the space is to behave like an institutional investor. For us, the evidence of this approach is who we’re working with, including the likes of:
• Marc Cohen: Early investor into Runna (acquired by Strava) along with numerous Haatch portfolio companies. He has raised a GP/LP fund to accelerate companies growth in the US, and won’t review opportunities led by EIS/SEIS/VCT Funds unless it’s Haatch.
• Happl (Haatch EIS Portfolio Company): Founder Ben Towers started his first business at 11 years old and successfully exited it at 18, and was described as ‘one of the most exciting UK entrepreneurs’ by Sir Richard Branson.
• Trumpet (Haatch SEIS Portfolio Company): Co-founders Nick Telson-Sillett and Andrew Webster previously founded and exited Design My Night, where we secured SEIS allocation in their next venture.

We’re even seeing trusted independent review bodies now recognise this approach and factor it into their analysis, with Tax Efficient Review (TER) now highlighting company-based fees as something that inhibits the ability of funds to invest in high-quality opportunities. The best evidence to date is seeing other funds in our space either adopt our model, or moving to a blend of charging fees to the companies and the investor. Unfortunately for them, the reputation of charging companies will precede them and ultimately prevent access to the rooms that we’re in.

Outside of this, we've seen a slight cooling off in the frenzied hype surrounding AI and AI-adjacent solutions. Value is slowly moving towards companies with demonstrable impact on their clients’ bottom line, and moving away from companies that are serving a market that is yet to exist in the hope that when it does, it will be massive. Capital is and will always be impatient.

As Ken Griffin put it, AI is not the saviour and much of the belief to the contrary is a narrative carefully crafted by those with a vested interest in ensuring that shift takes place quickly. 

Industry leaders are operating in an uncertain geopolitical climate, and their concern will always be growing (or even preserving) revenues whilst reducing their underlying cost base. 

This is a simple view of a complex situation, but we believe that it’s not a time to be investing in speculation, and instead, the lasting companies that emerge from this period will stay razor-focused on these fundamentals and will be obsessed with the needs of their customers.

With all of this in mind, we’re carrying the momentum behind us into the 2026-27 tax year, and will be closing our first EIS tranche in June 2026 where we once again expect to be the only tax-efficient manager with allocation to a host of the best and most competitive B2B rounds in the market.