Startup due diligence in the UK: how to check a company before you invest

Start with the Companies House profile - every UK company has one, and it takes two minutes to read properly.

Incorporation date and registered office. Does the corporate age match the story? A "founded 2019" pitch from a company incorporated eight months ago needs an explanation (there may be a good one - a restructure, a holding company - but ask).

Status and filings. Active, or with strike-off notices? Are accounts and confirmation statements filed on time? Persistent lateness is an operational signal, not a technicality.

Officers and PSCs. Who actually controls the company? The people with significant control are not always the people on the website.

Charges. A registered charge means a lender has security over company assets. Fine when it is a venture-debt facility everyone knows about; less fine when it is undisclosed.

This is the stage almost everyone skips, because it involves reading PDFs. It is also where the most expensive surprises live.

When a UK company issues new shares it files an SH01 stating how many shares were allotted and the price paid per share. Multiply price by the total share count and you have the implied valuation of that round - the number investors actually paid, as filed, rather than the number in the press release. Comparing the two is one of the highest-value checks an angel can run: raises that were announced but never filed, valuations quoted on a different basis, and rounds priced well below the last headline all show up here.

The annual confirmation statement (CS01) lists shareholders - the real cap table, at least once a year. Check the founder still owns what the deck implies they own.

Accounts, even the micro-entity kind, disclose more than people expect: net assets, cash at the small-company tier, sometimes headcount. A company claiming £1m in revenue whose balance sheet shows £40,000 of net assets deserves a follow-up question.

Directors' other companies. Every current and former directorship is public. A portfolio of dissolved companies is not automatically damning - serial entrepreneurs fail - but you want to know before you invest, not after.

The disqualified-directors register. A hit here ends the conversation.

Court records and the Gazette. County-court judgments, winding-up petitions and insolvency notices are published.

Sanctions and the FCA register. Rarely relevant; catastrophic when they are. If the business claims a regulated activity, the FCA register confirms whether the permission exists.

Traction claims can often be tested against independent data: web traffic against search and traffic datasets, app claims against store rankings, hiring claims against live job listings, "partnership" claims against the partner's own announcements. The pattern to watch is not one inflated number - it is a deck whose every number sits at the optimistic edge of what the public data supports.

The filed valuation and the pitched valuation differ materially, with no explanation.

A disqualified or sanctioned person anywhere near the company.

An active strike-off notice or winding-up petition.

A cap table where the founders no longer hold meaningful equity before your round.

Done by hand, a thorough pass over the sources above takes the better part of a day, which is why most angels do a fraction of it. Tero runs the full battery - registry, filings, valuation history, founders, courts, sanctions, digital footprint - in about fifteen minutes, with every claim traced to its source. You can check any UK company free right now, see a full example report, or start with the 12-source checklist if you prefer to run the process yourself. Information, not investment advice.