Bristol, 15 September 2026. Georgia Stewart, CEO of Tumelo, a leading stewardship technology company, has been named a winner of the Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards 2025/26, chosen from a record 1,590 applications. The award comes with a £75,000 grant and 12 months of business support from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation. The grant supports Tumelo's work to let UK pension funds and other asset owners vote directly on the shareholder resolutions that matter most to them, while leaving the remaining votes with their fund managers.
UK pension funds are expected to vote at thousands of company shareholder meetings each year on issues such as executive pay, climate and equality. Where a pension fund holds its investments in a segregated mandate, an arrangement that accounts for 54% of UK assets under management according to the Investment Association, it has historically faced a choice between voting on every ballot itself or handing all of its votes to the fund manager. The tools available to do anything in between have been manual, relying on emails and spreadsheets, and many asset owners have disengaged from voting as a result.
Tumelo's platform gives pension funds another option. The fund and its manager see the same list of upcoming votes on one system. The fund chooses the votes it wants to decide itself, its manager decides the rest, and a record is kept of who decided what.
Georgia Stewart, CEO of Tumelo, said: "Today is the International Day of Democracy and it falls in Pension Awareness Week, which is a good moment to say something plain about how democracy works inside the pension system. Millions of people's savings give their pension fund a vote at thousands of companies, and yet most funds have had no practical way to use that vote selectively. They either do all of it, at considerable cost, or none of it. We make the middle option possible, so that a fund can decide the votes that matter to its members and trust its manager with the rest. I am grateful to Innovate UK for backing a piece of financial technology that most people will never see but that affects how effectively their money is managed, and the world they will retire into."
The Women in Innovation programme marks its tenth anniversary this year. Innovate UK announced 61 award winners and 39 highly commended innovators in August 2026, its largest cohort to date. Since 2016 the programme has backed 260 women innovators, who have gone on to raise more than £358 million in further funding and investment.
Emily Nott, Head of Inclusive Innovation at Innovate UK, said: "Reaching the 10th anniversary of the programme with record levels of engagement demonstrates the extraordinary talent, unstoppable ambition, and groundbreaking innovation being developed by women across the UK."
ENDS
About Tumelo. Tumelo was founded in Bristol in 2018 and works with more than 30 institutional investors and six global asset manager teams. Its ProxySphere platform lets investors in pooled funds direct their share of a fund's votes, and its ProxyBeacon platform uses AI to produce voting research tailored to each client's own policy. tumelo.com
About the Women in Innovation Awards. Innovate UK's Women in Innovation programme was launched in 2016 to address the barriers women face in bringing innovations to market, in particular access to funding, visibility and networks. Award winners receive a £75,000 grant and 12 months of tailored business support, training, networking and mentoring. The 2025/26 awards attracted a record 1,590 applications. Georgia Stewart's cohort profile: iuk-business-connect.org.uk/projects/women-in-innovation/georgia-stewart
About Innovate UK. Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is the UK's innovation agency. It works to create a better future by inspiring, involving and investing in businesses developing life-changing innovations. Its mission is to help companies to grow through their development and commercialisation of new products, processes and services, supported by an outstanding innovation ecosystem that is agile, inclusive and easy to navigate.
Media contact. Helen Cane-Hardy, Head of Marketing, Tumelo. helen@tumelo.com