Barclays Bank is launching a £100 million fund to provide debt-financing to help fast-growing UK tech startups.
Unlike their US counterparts, access to debt finance - which can provide an attractive alternative to giving up equity - has not been widely available to UK tech companies.
Barclays says it will provide up to £5 million, repayable over three years, to firms that have won VC backing.
A recent report by Barclays showed that UK technology businesses are expected to grow four times faster than GDP in 2015.
Ashok Vaswani, chief executive of Barclays personal and corporate banking, says: “We identified a significant gap in the traditional way technology businesses were financed, and with this new drive we will be truly able to support businesses right from their inception, to becoming major global players."