NatWest puts £100,000 on its London pitch final in November
Five finalists will pitch at the bank's Bishopsgate office on 19 November. Entry is limited to UK companies incorporated in the past five years with revenue up to £1m.
NatWest has opened applications for the next round of its Accelerator Pitch competition, with £100,000 split between three places.
The winner takes £70,000. The runner-up gets £20,000 and third place £10,000.
Five finalists will pitch on 19 November at the bank's conference centre at 250 Bishopsgate, opposite Spitalfields Market, in front of investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders.
The eligibility terms are narrow. Entrants must be a UK-registered limited company, incorporated within the last five years, generating up to £1m in annual revenue.
Applicants must also join the free NatWest Accelerator community and submit an online form plus a 60-second video pitch setting out how the money would be used to grow the business.
The final is in London but the competition is open to founders across the UK, according to the bank.
A closing date for applications has not been published. Nor has the judging panel; NatWest says it will name the judges before the event.
The London contest sits inside a UK-wide programme that the bank says will award £1m across 2025 and 2026 to early-stage businesses.
Previous finals give some sense of the odds. At the Oxford final on 18 June, held at Saïd Business School, five finalists were picked from more than 600 applicants, with more than 400 people attending. A Wolverhampton final has also been held.
This is the second London final. The first was won by Dr Mark Cox of Orli, a behavioural intelligence platform for childhood emotional wellbeing, who took the £70,000 top prize. NatWest says it has continued to support Cox and the company through its wider Accelerator community.
Beyond the cash, the bank points to coaching, investor introductions and peer networks through the Accelerator programme, which it says it is expanding to 50,000 entrepreneurs this year and which runs regional hubs including one at Tyseley Energy Park in Birmingham.
For a founder weighing it up, the arithmetic is straightforward. On the Oxford numbers, roughly one applicant in 120 reached the stage, and only three of those five left with money.
The cost of finding out is an application form and a minute of video. The cost of missing it is a year: the last London final was almost a year before this one.