Levi Roots, Simply Business Back 'Second Act' Fund for Over-40s

Simply Business, the UK small-business insurance broker, has partnered with entrepreneur Levi Roots to back a Second Act Entrepreneur Fund aimed at founders aged over 40, according to reporting from LBB — Little Black Book.

The campaign, branded "Over 40s to Dream Big," positions the insurer alongside Roots in a vehicle aimed at later-career entrepreneurs. The LBB report — published by the advertising and creative-industry trade title — is the primary public airing of the initiative. Neither company had issued a separate press release on the fund at the moment of writing.

Who is the fund for?

The fund's name carries weight. "Second Act" reads as a deliberate move away from the youth-skewed founder stereotype. It targets people launching a business after a first career, returning to entrepreneurship after a setback, or building a venture in mid-life rather than in their twenties.

Roots built Reggae Reggae Sauce into a national grocery brand after pitching the product on the BBC's Dragons' Den in 2007. He has long been cited as the marker for late-blooming British entrepreneurship. His name on the fund lends it credibility with applicants who might not respond to traditional venture branding.

The "Over 40s" cutoff puts the program clearly outside the median-age profile that much of UK seed and Series A capital chases. It also opens the door to a customer cohort Simply Business already insures, making the campaign an extension of the broker's existing pipeline.

Why is an insurer fronting this?

Simply Business occupies a different vantage point from a venture firm. Its day-to-day work is insuring sole traders, limited companies, and the working backbone of British small business. That is a population that rarely intersects with founders chasing institutional rounds.

An over-40s fund gives Simply Business a vehicle to engage a customer base it already knows well. The brand also gives the initiative a commercial backbone that a pure angel syndicate could not easily replicate. Marketing reach, brand familiarity, and access to small-business insurance data each give the insurer tools a typical fund manager lacks.

For Roots, the upside is sustained relevance as a founder-mentor figure. He remains the most-cited British example of building a consumer brand after a public pitch event. Attaching himself to a later-life entrepreneurship fund keeps that profile alive. His brand recognition converts into reach Simply Business would otherwise have to buy through paid media.

What does the publishing venue signal?

LBB — Little Black Book is primarily read by creative-agency and brand-side executives. The publication of an initiative announcement there rather than in a financial outlet such as Sifted or Financial News suggests the announcement leans marketing rather than investor-facing. That framing is consistent with Simply Business's customer-base logic.

The channel does not mean no money is involved. But it signals what the parties want read first: awareness and brand association, not fund documentation. That matters because the credibility of any founder-fund rests as much on its public framing as on its underlying economics.

What is still unknown

The LBB report does not state fund size, ticket range, application deadlines, cohort size, or geographic focus. Anyone seeking those specifics will need to watch for a separate announcement from Simply Business or from Roots's own channels.

What the headline does establish is clear: a mainstream UK small-business insurer has put its name behind a demographic most growth-capital vehicles in Britain continue to overlook. The full mechanics remain to be set out, but the framing alone signals where Simply Business sees a commercially addressable gap in the UK's entrepreneur-support market. The next test is whether the broker backs that positioning with the cheque sizes and timelines a real "second act" founder actually needs to clear payroll.