Could TFY Be The UK’s First Female-Founded Bootstrapped Unicorn?

The tech industry loves a good unicorn story. Tales of startups run by ambitious founders, pitches to venture capital firms, stressful funding rounds and years upon years of investor backing before a company eventually reaches a billion-dollar valuation.

TFY‘s doesn’t quite follow the usual trajectory from startup to unicorn.

Otherwise known as transformify, the London-based workforce technology company has recently been independently valued at just over $1 billion, according to the company’s founder and multiple independent expert assessments, putting it into unicorn territory without having raised traditional venture capital funding.

Yes, you heard that correctly. TFY has become a billion-dollar, privately-owned company without having received a cent of venture capital.

Indeed, according to TFY, the company’s only external funding came through a Virgin Startup loan in 2016 and an Innovate UK grant in 2020. But other than that, its growth has been achieved by means of nothing more than a combination of customer revenue, profits and good, old-fashioned bootstrapping.

This is, undeniably, an impressive feat. Achieving unicorn status ie. a privately owned company worth more than $1 billion) is an incredible achievement in itself, but for a bootstrapped company to hit that milestone? That’s not something you see every day.

But it’s not just that TFY is a bootstrapped unicorn; it’s also female-founded. And in a startup landscape dominated by male-founded businesses that also receive the vast majority of VC funding relative to female-founded startups, that’s an extra detail that deserves some attention.

An Unusual Route To Unicorn Status

I’d be remiss to neglect mentioning that it’s tough to definitively announce that any company is the first of its type in such a niche category. However, based on our independent research and insights, I haven’t come across any other female-owned, bootstrapped unicorns based in the UK. So, I’m fairly confident in saying that the title of the UK’s first-ever bootstrapped, female-owned unicorn certainly seems to belong to TFY; with the caveat, of course, that this hasn’t been 100% confirmed by external sources just yet.

Founder and CEO, Lilia Stoyanov, has repeatedly described TFY as simultaneously “potentially” becoming “the first female-founded, bootstrapped unicorn in the UK”, while acknowledging the difficulty of definitively proving a claim built around several overlapping criteria.

Whether or not the title can be conclusively verified (I’m sure it will be soon!), one thing appears difficult to dispute: there are remarkably few examples of UK technology companies that are simultaneously female-founded, privately held, bootstrapped and valued at more than $1 billion.

And that alone makes TFY’s rise unusual.

A Unicorn Built The “Unfashionable” Way

Founded in 2015, TFY has grown into a global workforce management platform that helps organisations hire, onboard, manage and pay workers across more than 184 countries.

The company operates in a space crowded with heavily funded competitors, many of whom have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. But TFY took a different approach.

Instead of prioritising fundraising, the company focused on profitability. According to Stoyanov, “The biggest advantage has been freedom.” And that freedom, she argues, comes from being accountable to customers rather than investors.
“When you are funded by your customers rather than by successive investment rounds, you learn to listen very carefully to what customers actually need.”

It’s a philosophy that feels almost counter-cultural in today’s startup ecosystem, where funding announcements often generate more attention than financial results.

Looking Beyond the 1st-Place Price

The fact that TFY seems to be the first of its kind isn’t the most interesting part of this story (although it’s obviously incredibly impressive and noteworthy). The other aspect worth paying attention to is why there are so few companies in the conversation.

For years, the dominant startup narrative has suggested that scale requires venture capital. Founders are often encouraged to raise capital early, raise often and pursue growth aggressively. Having enough capital is absolutely essential for survival and growth.

Yet, TFY’s trajectory suggests that there may be another route. The company was identified by Tech Funding News as one of the UK’s “next unicorns” in 2025, it was ranked among the FT1000 Europe’s Fastest-Growing Companies and has won a string of industry awards while remaining independent.

Of course, nobody’s saying that this is proof that bootstrapping is better than venture capital. But it certainly is evidence that bootstrapping is a viable route to success, and perhaps more so than we’re told to believe.

An Important Unicorn Success Story

There is, undeniably, far broader significance to the milestone.

Female founders continue to receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital investment compared with male founders. In fact, according to the “Women in VC and Startup Funding: Statistics and Trends” 2025 report, of the $289 of venture capital investment in 2024 (in the United States), 2.3% went to female-only founding teams, 83.6% went to all-male founding teams and 14.1% went to founding teams made up of both men and women. The report does note that there was a “modest” improvement in these numbers compared to the 2023 report, but as the Women’s Founder’s Forum notes, “the pace of change remains glacial”.

In fact, they go on to project that if the current rate of improvement is maintained, gender parity in venture capital allocation will only reach parity in 2065. Undoubtedly, not the most encouraging statistic for female entrepreneurs and founders. Thus, perhaps the knowledge and expectation of this precise issue is what forces women to look beyond venture capital. After all, if your chances of receiving funding from traditional sources are slim to non-existent, your best bet would be to look for another route to success, right?

Regardless of how much that fact contributed to Lily’s untraditional route to unicorn status, it’s a noteworthy component and aspect of the female founder’s journey to success. Not only does it narrow the potential ways in which women can be successful as entrepreneurs, but it also leaves them one of the (arguably) most difficult paths to raise funding. After all, there’s a good reason why people shout loudly about companies that achieve success via bootstrapping – it’s damn hard to get it right.

Thus, the emergence of a female-founded company that appears to have reached unicorn status without relying on traditional VC backing is something worth talking about (and writing stories about!). Both as a celebration of incredible hard work and success, but also as a contribution to a conversation about how we need to work towards closing the gender inequality gap in startup funding. A complicated situation with no easy solution.

As Sheela Sharon, Founder of Platesfull, puts it, “Celebrating these “firsts” isn’t about suggesting women’s achievements deserve different standards. It’s about visibility. When more women are seen building companies, raising capital, entering new markets and leading teams, it makes those paths feel more achievable for the women coming behind them.”

And importantly, recognition can have more impact than just a metaphorical pat on the back. Sara Reece, Founder and CEO or Workmind, explained that, in her view, “Visibility matters because disparity still exists. Celebrating consequential breakthroughs can influence who receives attention, capital and opportunity. The strongest recognition honours both the achievement itself and the barrier it changed.”

Indeed, the common consensus seems to be that while we certainly hope that one day, we won’t need to differentiate between male and female achievements, we’re simply not there yet. And until we get there, it’s important to acknowledge female success in the startup and tech landscapes without being patronising or framing it as “impressive” but with a small caveat – “for a woman”. Because that’s very different to celebrating a milestone that’s objectively impressive and then highlighting that the achievement is that of a woman (thus making it even more impressive!).

And in this context, in light of TFY’s impressive milestone and Lily Stoyanov’s personal achievement against all odds, we should be reminded that much like we are all different – competing in different conditions, under varying circumstances and with access to different opportunities – there are many paths to success that ought to be understood and acknowledged for what they are.

As Stoyanov puts it, “You can raise venture capital. You can bootstrap. You can build through revenue. There should not be a single acceptable model of entrepreneurship.”

And we should be ready and keen to acknowledge all of these things and give praise where praise is due.