Reading captions of some newspaper articles one might get the impression that building a startup these days in the UK is not the right thing to do. Capital markets remain cautious, the macro-economics is gloomy and tech founders are contending with everything from rising costs to customers taking their time to make decisions.
Yet inside Antler’s London office (a global early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech startups), Adam French, a partner in the firm, says there will be more than 100 new founders proving that the UK’s tech ecosystem is the best in the world. Half of these founders have relocated from outside the UK to build in this country.
They include senior leaders from tech unicorns and some of the world’s best tech companies. They include outliers who know what it takes to perform at the highest level and are now entering entrepreneurship, people such as a former Team GB boxer now launching a health-tech venture.
London may be criticised for “losing its edge” to Paris earlier this year when it was overtaken by the French capital as Europe’s leading tech hub for the first time, reigniting concerns over the strength and attractiveness of the UK’s biggest city.
But the reality we see everyday is the opposite. London still attracts the best founder talent in Europe. It still has the most experienced investors, the deepest capital markets and a talent pipeline that can compete with anywhere in the world.
That does not mean it is easy. The pressure is real. AI companies have proven that European startups can scale as quickly as their US peers and that technical excellence can trump access to capital. That is inspiring but also daunting. The founders in UK residency know they are building in an era where product cycles have compressed from months to weeks. In this execution era, speed and precision are everything.
That is why the calibre of founders choosing to build in London matters so much. There is a tech eco system here whose maturity and scale are surpassed only by Silicon Valley. So, the founders produced in the UK are serial entrepreneurs, technical domain experts, or senior operators leaving top global companies to start again from scratch. They are not tourists in entrepreneurship, they are elite builders and that’s exactly what we are seeing.
Take the present cohort: a second-time founder with a medical background who is building a reusable rocket launch system for biomedical purposes in the UK. A lawyer who retrained as a software engineer to democratise access to legal support. A physicist whose quantum computing ideas are drawing attention from everyone he speaks with.
These are not hobby projects. They are major plans built by people who have already proven they can execute. And they chose London because nowhere else offers the same combination of technical talent, domain expertise and capital willing to back hard problems.
The UK now produces four times as many technical founders as it did five years ago and the number of AI specialist founders has doubled since 2022. French says, these are people who could work anywhere in the world, but have chosen the UK because they believe it is still one of the best places to start.
One of the companies formed in the last residency, Pesto, has already raised £1 million in funding to transform operations for food and drinks manufacturers. That’s a tangible example of what happens when world-class founders are backed early and supported to execute.
In fact, the UK’s advantage has always been its people: ambitious, pragmatic builders who thrive in complexity. The founders in residency embody that. Currently, the founders building in London are proving that even in a tough climate, the UK remains Europe’s beating heart of innovation.
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