What we do

Many high-growth consumer businesses reach a point where their need to scale cannot be matched by the resources or capital available to them.

With its unrivalled reach and high levels of trust, TV remains the best marketing channel for making companies well known by the general public - but many companies can’t commit to spending cash on a TV brand-building campaign.

We’re here to solve this problem. We support high-growth, consumer brands in their growth by providing a significant Channel 4 TV budget in exchange for equity in the business.

Channel 4 is a unique and distinctive part of the UK. Publicly owned but entirely commercial and self-sufficient, our public-service remit mandates us to take risks and offer alternative programming, commissioning all of our programmes externally.

We’re a network of 12 television channels plus a streaming platform. Across our portfolio, we reach 76% of the UK population every month. And we have the youngest-skewing PSB channel in the UK – reaching more 16-34-year-olds than any other commercial broadcaster across TV and streaming.

We are the home of agenda-setting journalism and ground-breaking new comedy, drama and factual programmes that attract significant young and upmarket audiences; from Dispatches, Unreported World and Skins to This is England, Peep Show and The Inbetweeners through to more recent successes including Gogglebox, Hunted, SAS: Who Dares Wins, The Undateables, Friday Night Dinner, Derry Girls, The Great British Bake Off, Kiri, The Circle, Homeland and Leaving Neverland.

We want to help entrepreneurs with their company’s journey to becoming a household name brand. To do this, we offer companies a Channel 4 media budget and support in developing their TV campaigns, in exchange for an equity share in the business.

We typically invest between £1m and £5m of media airtime into an individual business.

As an example, a £1m investment could entail:

• £1m media budget with Channel 4 (able to be spent on any Channel 4 channel, UKTV, or our streaming platform; with the potential for regional targeting)
• Media pricing benchmarked to leading UK agencies
• Media planning support, or media agency recommendations
• Potential for follow-on investment at a later stage
• Access (as appropriate and able) to our network

​​​​​We invest in consumer brands that have the potential to be UK household names, typically taking a small minority stake.

We will consider companies at pre-Series A through to pre-IPO stages.

Typically, our portfolio companies are new to TV (or have run small campaigns previously).

We are particularly fond of companies that fit with Channel 4’s broader values and whose teams are open and collaborative in style.