Meet the 100 fastest-growing startups in the UK and Ireland

0:28Hello, as usual, it's your host Amy Lewis. usual competitors Paris and Berlin, with a lot more deals done and equity raised. Joining me today to discuss the findings of the report, along with why London is in again with the tech crowd, are my colleagues from Sifted's intelligence team, Aina Kelly and Jonathan Sinclair. Aina and Johnny, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Where are you both calling from? Well, I'm in Paris. I do quite a bit of London maxing though, even from Paris. I'm always telling my wife we have to move back to London and she's getting sick of hearing it. And yeah, where else but London?

1:03The sun is starting to shine and it feels like the sun is shining on the UK and London ecosystem in particular right now. What a lovely segue into the start. So it has been a very good year for London so far. 5.45 billion euros in equity funding has been raised so far thanks in large part to two 1 billion euro plus mega rounds from the likes of data center company nscale and the self-driving car company wave johnny rattle us through some other numbers that are proving the point that the london maxes are onto something of course yeah i mean some of the numbers are really off the charts we saw momentum picking up second half of of last year in london and it's it's the same again really to to start the year so we've already had uh nearly as half as many of these kind of 100 million plus euro rounds as we did the whole of last year and in terms of what the kind of total numbers are saying we've had already not even having finished q1 is already kind of eclipsed what we saw in the first half of 2025 and not far behind H2 of last year either.

2:18So really some strong numbers. I think what you said about the gap between Paris and Berlin, obviously we know London is by far and away the European's strongest tech ecosystem, but the gap seems to be growing right now. In terms of kind of deal count, what we saw in 2025, so London had three times as many deals as it did in Paris and 4.6 times what it had in Berlin, but those numbers are up. So it's 3.5x compared to Paris and 6x compared to Berlin. So really London is the epicentre of Europe right now for 10. Before I make any more references to London maxing, and listeners are thinking, what the hell is she going on about?

3:05Eina, how would you sum up the very recently coined term London maxing? What does it mean? Well, I just came to this term last week as well. It means, in this case, it means a lot of optimism for London, which our colleague Martin wrote about this week for Sifted. And it's been applied to lots of things I learn on the internet. There's another term called lux maxing, which basically means making yourself as handsome as possible. So, yeah, it's a very popular term. And Martin writes about it really nicely for SIFTED. Check it out. Yeah, and I guess slightly compounded by a bunch of tech people who had been very anti-London and very pro places like Dubai, realising given recent geopolitical happenings that maybe Dubai isn't quite the wonderful haven that they thought it was and maybe London isn't quite so bad after all.

4:07So yeah, check out Martin's piece. We'll drop a link in episode description. But in terms of the funding, all of the startup successes, do we think, does the UK government deserve some credit here? I mean, it's always sort of talking the good talk of investing in AI. I see on LinkedIn that our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, always seems to be inviting scale-up CEOs over to number 10 for a chinwag, who seem only too delighted to post about it the following day. And also all over LinkedIn last week was the Swish new website for the£500 million sovereign AI fund, which is something set up by the UK government's sort of science, innovation and tech department.

4:49And it's tasked with building and scaling Britain's AI capabilities. It's planning to start deploying capital in April. And it's run by a very interesting woman called Josephine Kant, who my colleague Maya interviewed for SIFTA just a few weeks ago. We'll definitely check that out. Do we think this is all kind of contributing to the good momentum or is that just a lucky happenstance for the government that wants to show it's doing some good stuff for tech? I think it's certainly being more proactive. I mean, I think there was a little bit of a call to arms and I think the sort of geopolitical situation has forced the government's hand and we need to do some of this stuff in the UK or in Europe.

5:34So from a kind of sovereign debate, I think that's definitely helped us. I also think NVIDIA have kind of put a light on the UK massively and they've really put a lot of backing behind both through their support and financial backing into a number of some really high quality UK AI businesses and that's got people believing in what the UK can produce and other investors are following suit Yeah, I think it deserves credit as well even though a lot of the founders you speak to are very begrudging and unwilling to give the government credit. But I think this AI strategy that Labour have come up with is probably better and more thought out than what other European governments have produced so far.

6:24I mean, I also spoke to Irish founders this week, and they are jealous of what the UK is doing. they think the irish government doesn't really have a plan for tech and actually when it comes to ai there's a moratorium in ireland at the moment on new data centers so that's that's made a lot of ai founders in ireland unhappy and yeah i think there's just been a few things that the tech folk didn't like i mean there's tax on non-doms some of the founders tell me that this did chase some very rich investors out of the UK. But on the whole, I think it's done a decent job. It just today, we're recording this on Tuesday, the 17th of March, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, announced another£2 billion package to establish the UK as a world leader in quantum.

7:20So it feels like there's no end to these kind of announcements coming up. And I guess if nothing else, it shows that the government wants to work with these businesses and keep them here in the UK, which is an important message to be getting out. I guess we just need to see how much sort of follow through there is. I think actually, I mean, I think a lot of the UK founders are looking at the US though, and still feeling that there's more support, more championing being done at the moment for the tech elites in the US. You know, we've all seen those sycophantic kind of round tables involving Trump and Sam Altman and other CEOs.

8:07And yeah, there's some UK people who want a little bit more of that going on. And so turning to the report, what are the headlines there, Johnny? Headlines. So I think we've talked about London. London comes through really strongly in this ranking as well. So 75 out of the 100 startups ranked on this year's leaderboard basically ranks companies by revenue growth over the last three financial years. 75 of them were from London, long way ahead of the next best tech hub was Dublin with seven startups and then Cambridge with four. I think there's so much growth. That's really what stands out. We look at the sort of average two-year CAGA, which is what we rank companies on, and that is massively up on what it's been for the past two years.

8:59CAGA stands for compound annual growth rate. So that's basically looking at companies' revenue growth over their past three financial years. So a lot of companies, particularly at early stage, are able to grow really fast from the off. And I think what we're seeing towards the top of the ranking is that serious money, for example, is being made by digital health and well-being scale-ups. Number one, we have Wellbeing Marketplace Health, spelt with an F, which tops our ranking this year with a staggering CAGA of 1 ,003%. They've scaled their revenue from 177k just a couple of years ago to 40 million in the financial year ending to March 2025.

9:52So a massive jump. some other names you might have heard of um within the digital health space newman it's it's another health products site specifically for for men's health um they they're making 157 million flow health which is obviously the the kind of female digital health app they're making 209 million so really some some big sums um which is equally important And as we know, we want to rank some bolters, some really high growth stories. But equally, we know these companies really need to scale their revenues as quickly as possible. Sustainably, of course, but as quickly as possible in order for them to generate more traction, get the funding they need in order to keep on progressing.

10:39Some of the UK's greatest tech titans. So another thing I found interesting, Amy, there is a Revolut Mafia story going on here with these leaderboards. Obviously Fuse Energy, run by Alan Chang. He's ex-Revolut. There's a company there called Apron, the CEO of Bogdan. He's ex-Revolut. And a previous winner, Alicabank, run by CEO Richard Davies. He's also ex-Revolut. So that company is having a massive contribution to these rankings. To add to that, something else obviously we are paying close attention to were the number of AI native companies coming through. So last year we had 16 on the leaderboard.

11:23That has shot up to 24, so nearly a quarter of the 100 this year are on AI native. Obviously we expect that number to keep on growing. the top ranked AI native startup this year is a legal tech. Unsurprisingly, an AI sector doing really well. That company is LawHive. So they do both B2B and B2C legal work. But they get the top AI crown this year. Not quite in the top five, though. They came in at number six. And there were some other interesting findings as well, weren't there? One thing that stood out to me is that I feel like for a long time, employee growth was a real marker of success. And you could almost go onto a company's LinkedIn page and go onto that insight section and see how much it was kind of, you know, the number of employees was heading up to the right.

12:15But it feels like that's very much no longer the case. And with these particular companies, average number of employees of the 100 that made it to the top of our annual list is decreasing year on year. So this is the third year we've done it. And the The average number of employees is now 107 for each company, down from 165 the first year we did it in 2024. Aina, you write our Startup Life newsletter wonderfully, delightfully, hilariously. Everyone should sign up. We will also drop a link to that in the episode description. But you're speaking to founders and operators all the time. Is that all just AI replacing people's jobs or efficiency being found such that companies don't need to hire as many people as they once did?

13:03Or do you think there's something else going on there as well? I think companies are definitely slowing down hiring. And, you know, it's particularly bad news for entry level folk who are seeing opportunities dry up a little bit. There's an efficiency story there as well, I think. All the founders say they're moving quicker. they're doing more they're bringing their roadmaps their product roadmaps up by a few months so yeah I think as you said Amy I mean it used to be a mark of success this this headcount grows but the story they all want to tell now is how much they're doing with AI and actually I mean I spoke to I spoke to quite a few founders on this ranking and I enjoyed my chats with Fuse Energy boss, Alan Chang.

13:52And he said to me that if he could, he'd still hire, you know, he'd 4X or he'd quadruple his headcount if he could. And actually, he had a pretty optimistic take on where we're going with AI because there's a lot of debate about whether companies of the future will invest more in software or in people. And he thinks, well, you're still going to get people in the door and they're just going to actually do more work. So on balance, that's probably better than a lot of people now having work. It means we're all going to work a bit harder with these AI tools, but I took that as being somewhat optimistic about the future.

14:34And what impact is the smaller headcount having on revenue, would it seem, Johnny? What are we seeing on that front? I think the goalposts have changed, really. I mean, the expectations, I suppose, that investors have now of companies at early stage are a lot greater than they used to be. So, you know, we've written recently that Series A obviously now feels like seed just in terms of, you know, the kind of revenue metrics you need to be hitting in order to generate that next round of investment. I think maybe as well, because it is so competitive out there, you know, companies are having to push really hard, having to work really hard to kind of keep up with what it is doing, keep on, you know, of pushing out new product updates that's maybe taken a slight hit to the to the bottom line so we've actually seen the the share of profitable companies falling um so that had risen from from year one and year two to the ranking but that that has fallen back so again you know maybe at an early stage that is not quite as top of mind as it used to be for for these early stage companies you know they need to focus on on revenue gaining that that market share obviously we've seen that with some of these the massive rounds that are happening across the ecosystem that is that is to get ahead and to get that market share that they need in order to dominate their sector or their landscape that they're working in so the same applies and it's really a bit of a rat race especially at the the early stage it's interesting what you say about the companies maybe raising before they even need to.

16:10Some of them, I've been having conversations with more investors around this, perhaps some of the companies that are much more later stage than some of the ones that we have on this leaderboard. Some of the ones who are already really confirmed as category leaders, but that a lot of the big rounds we've been hearing about, Lugora from Sweden recently, Alain from France, these companies raising huge, huge funding rounds, perhaps do not actually need this money. It's just a way of them, their investors making them the winner. I feel like we saw that happening quite a bit in COVID. it's interesting that we're seeing that happen again now with a lot of these rounds apparently being preempted i'm hearing from investors that they're they're going out and they're asking the the lovables little goras you know they're saying we want to invest in you before those companies are even asking for more capital which is an interesting shift um and on the topic of investors who are the ones who are best at picking the winners or at least the winners as per the sifted leaderboard for companies that can really see their revenues grow quickly.

17:28So this is kind of winners with an asterisk. Obviously, we try with the investor ranking to give a good impression of the investors that are doing particularly well in that year at kind of picking these rising stars and maybe some of the huge scale-ups of tomorrow. It's Axel, So the US VC that tops the investor ranking for the first time has seven of the 100 companies. So seven of its portfolio are on this year's ranking. They have, for example, Fuse Energy, the energy provider that Ana was mentioning. They featured in the top three. Some of their portfolios are Irish cybersecurity company, Tynes, FinTech Primer.

18:16So they're doing really strongly across the board there. If you look at some of the other investors doing really well, I was having a look back at the investor ranking over the last three years. You know, who are the investors that have done the best year on year? It's Phoenix Court Group. So obviously with their local Globe and Latitude funds, they are the only VC. that have featured in the top 10 three years in a row. So year-on-year picking and showing a great track record of investing some of the UK and Ireland's fastest growing startups. Our biggest climbers this year were the VC's Triple Point Ventures and Molten Ventures, who had four more than last year, both UK-based.

18:57But you can see, certainly, more US capital coming in. So 11 of our top 50 were for US-based, some other big names in the top 50. GV for example and Cosler Ventures but generally speaking most of the the investors that have done well are UK based so 34 of the top 50 remain in the UK and obviously we want to see UK investors backing domestic companies that are doing well. And Aina as you said you spoke to quite a few of the companies on the list which ones which conversations really stuck in your mind which Which companies do you think are really onto something interesting or have an especially eccentric or amazing founder?

19:45Well, I've mentioned them already. Alan Chang of Fuse Energy. He was the standout interview for me. He's quite an intimidating guy. He's quite abrupt. and he had two PR people with him, which tells me something about their expectations for these interviews. Yeah, so he's very interesting. I mean, it does feel like he's an Elon Musk fan. He mentioned Tesla and SpaceX quite a few times in the chat. But he does feel like he is a bit like Elon Musk. You know, there's that self-assuredness, that self-confidence is there. he said they want to be the most or the biggest energy company in the world in a few years time and yeah he was he was very interesting he's he can he does a lot of you know overstatement at times when you chat to him uh you know he said there's no there's virtually no goods companies in europe uh revolute he's an ex-revolut guy he used to work there but apart from that a lot of founders in europe are unimpressive and then in the next sentence he can he can do understatement he says his company isn't even that well run it's just slightly better run than the worst performing or worst run companies and he said yeah they're not really doing something that ambitious they're just trying to do a thousand things better which i told him sounded like a lot but yeah so that was a good chat i think alan chang is very interesting i think sifter is going to write a profile on him now uh quite a polarizing guy i i imagine i spoke to the the ceo of the company that's finished top of the ranking help is a young guy called less stats himself and his brother are running this company and actually last year's winners of this same ranking was a pair of brothers running a company called vertice and yeah these brothers have developed this marketplace the company's obviously doing very well they finished top of the ft 1000 list as well fastest growing company in europe and yeah he's just really into fitness he said he used to do yoga with his grandmother before school he's done ironmans he's done marathons it's it's a very intensive work culture i i gather at his company and that holds for probably most of the companies i chad to 996 the grinds 9 9 a.m to 9 p.m six days a week i think all these companies are doing it frankly i spoke to ben freeman he's ceo of omnia they're trying to simplify procurement they're doing very well they've got a lot of well-known clients like like spotify like Xynthesia.

22:36So they're moving super quickly. I spoke to scan.com. The CEO is called Charlie Bullock. And that's just a website where you find MRI scans. And it sounds really simple, but they're doing very well. They're in the US. A lot of these companies obviously are expanding to the US too. And that's something I think is always great about the Sifted Leaderboards is there's always a bunch of names that we all know pretty well in there, the likes of a fuse energy that's raised a lot of money from very well-known investors and got a lot of attention. And then there's always a whole load of these other sort of hidden gems, it feels like, who maybe haven't raised quite as much venture capital, but are actually doing super well and making a lot of money.

23:23So listeners, I encourage you to go check out the leaderboard. We will put all the links to that and other things that we have mentioned in the episode description. And I think that's us out of time. Thank you. Thanks, Amy. Looking forward to celebrating with all the 100 companies and all their investors at our awards event on the 25th of March in London. The UK and Ireland leaderboard report and investor ranking are available on the Sifted website now. We will also drop a link in the episode description. If you want to hear more from us, please sign up to Sifted's daily newsletter and Aina's weekly startup life newsletter.

24:02And if you'd like access to all the amazing data and insights that Johnny and Aina dig up every day, please check out Sifted Pro. And as always, please rate, review and share the podcast. This episode was produced by the stupendous Maya Durampo-Honby.