From Boardroom to Founders’ Corner: Beth Crosier and CO4CH

Some start-ups are built by people who’ve just left school or university. CO4CH was built by someone with more than 20 years in corporate finance, who decided to use that experience to help other founders.

Two decades of finance

Beth Crosier began her career as a graduate at PwC. She went on to hold senior finance roles at major technology companies, including Sage, Just Eat and ARM, and later became a chief financial officer in private equity. Across more than two decades, she led finance teams for UK technology and professional services firms.

In 2024, she left the corporate world to work directly with founders building businesses with a purpose.

Closing the funding gap

Crosier had seen, and experienced at first hand, how hard it can be for entrepreneurs to find their way through the investment world. The problem is especially stark for women. According to figures quoted by MPs, women received less than 2% of UK venture capital investment in 2023.

She founded CO4CH in Newcastle in 2025 to tackle that gap. The business offers financial modelling, fundraising advice and part-time finance director support to early-stage and growing companies. It combines expert coaching, group learning and outsourced finance help, with a particular focus on female and under-represented founders.

The goal is to give founders the knowledge, tools and confidence to scale successfully. Her reasoning is straightforward. “Founders tell us their biggest challenge isn’t coming up with ideas,” she says. Instead, it’s a lack of access to money and the right contacts. In her view, that access “shouldn’t depend on who you know or where you’re based”.

Early recognition

Recognition came fast. Just months after launching, CO4CH was named UK Business-to-Business Start-Up of the Year at the 2025 UK StartUp Awards. “CO4CH only launched a few months ago, and we’ve been blown away by the demand for what we’re building,” Crosier said. “We’re only just getting started”.

Later that year, it won the Early Stage Stand Out Award for the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards.

Giving time for free

Much of CO4CH’s early work has been unpaid. By late 2025, it had given 239 hours of free support to entrepreneurs who might otherwise have struggled to get specialist financial advice. Businesses it has helped include Financielle, a financial wellbeing app founded by sisters Laura Pomfret and Holly Holland, and several other female-led firms.

The company has also launched a Female Founder Initiative to improve access to support and investment for women-led businesses. Crosier describes the aim as taking what is usually “kept out of reach” and making it available to founders who are often “overlooked, underestimated and underserved”. Crosier is also an angel investor backing under-represented founders, and a significant share of CO4CH’s profits is reinvested in early-stage businesses.

A free community

In April 2026, CO4CH launched Finance 4 Founders, a free online community offering structured financial guidance and peer support. Its flagship programme, run three times a year, teaches founders how to build financial models, understand investors and prepare for due diligence. Members also get templates, monthly money masterclasses and sessions with founders and investors. Before launch, the content was tested with founders through earlier masterclasses.

According to Crosier, the biggest challenge founders describe is a lack of financial literacy. “We believe financial knowledge and education shouldn’t be gatekept,” she says. She adds that capital shouldn’t depend on whether you “speak the same language as investors”.

The lesson

CO4CH shows that a start-up doesn’t have to begin with a new gadget or product. Sometimes the opportunity is to share expertise that others can’t easily get. For any small business owner, Crosier’s message is worth remembering: understanding your numbers is the first step to taking back control.