© Anna Moffat Photography 2026.
For one day at Gogarburn, Edinburgh became the centre of the UK’s female founder scale-up community.
Three hundred founders, investors and supporters of the wider ecosystem came together for the third annual Female Founders Growth Summit, featured in The Scotsman. They arrived from across the UK and beyond with one shared focus: growth.
The summit is built for women already leading businesses with turnover above £1 million, and the ambition in the room showed it. Across 19 keynotes, fireside chats and growth clinics, founders swapped hard-won lessons on international expansion, leadership, investment and building impact at scale. They heard from speakers including Saira Khan, Sahar Hashemi OBE, Darina Garland of Ooni and Irene Graham OBE, people who have built, scaled and led at the highest level.
“Scotland has never been short of ambitious women starting businesses,” said Ana Stewart, founder and chair of Pathways Forward. The summit exists to make sure those businesses have every chance to go further, with the connections, capital and confidence to continue scaling.
The founders’ stories didn’t stay in the room. Through an out-of-home campaign with JCDecaux, some of the attending founders appeared on billboards across the city. See it to be it, quite literally.
Built in partnership
The summit was hosted by Pathways Forward in collaboration with The SuperScalers, Buy Women Built and the ScaleUp Institute. Headline sponsors were Royal Bank of Scotland Business and the Scottish National Investment Bank. Supporting sponsors were the British Business Bank, BGF, Scale Up Scotland (powered by The Hunter Foundation) and Burness Paull LLP. JCDecaux and Muckle Media were media partner, and AccelerateHER and Dechomai were community partners.
