On November 9, 2026, SciBridgeX joined the ScaleUp Institute in London for the launch of its Annual Review, alongside leaders in government, investment, and innovation. We extend our thanks to CEO Irene Graham OBE for the invitation.
The data presented at the Review highlights a fundamental paradox in the UK economy: scaleups are the engine of economic growth, yet the infrastructure designed to support them remains profoundly misaligned with their needs.
The Outsized Impact of Scaleups
The 2026 figures confirm that high-growth firms are a crucial contributor to the UK economy.
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Small numbers, high growth. Firms defined as “scaleups” – those with the highest growth rates – account for just 1.36% of UK businesses, and yet they produce £1.65 trillion in output, or 60% of the total output of UK Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). There are around 75,000 of them, with nearly 28,000 in the pipeline.
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Global velocity: The UK has surged from 13th globally in 2025 to 3rd in 2026 for scaleup velocity, and now outpaces the EU in the creation of private firms worth more than US\$1 billion (known as “unicorns”).
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Diverse founders: of all the scaleups, 31% are women-led and 34% are led by minority ethnic groups and nearly seven out of 10 are already exporting overseas.
The Friction Points
Despite these encouraging signs, the Review also revealed persistent structural barriers. When founders were asked what constrains their growth, the top answers were:
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Access to markets (58%)
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Talent and leadership (44%)
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Finance (38%)
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Regulation (29%) and Tax (28%)
Source: ScaleUp Institute, ScaleUp Annual Review 2026.
A System Failing the Innovators
At the London event, founders shared their personal experiences of some of those barriers. Lucy Goff, Founder of LYMA, set out how she resorted to remortgaging her home to self-fund her first production run, after being rejected by around 100 VCs. That first run of 10,000 units sold out in two weeks, and today, LYMA is a successful business.
Lucy’s story raises a question: how many other capable companies are overlooked because the information about them is too fragmented for funders, buyers and public programmes to see?
The Shift Toward Institutional Backing
The event in London also heard from several funders and backers, who set out their approaches to accelerating scaleup growth.
Innovate UK’s Executive Chairman Tom Adeyoola explained how his institution is pivoting from merely funding projects to backing firms. Meanwhile, Stephen Welton CBE (Chair of the British Business Bank) and Julia Hoggett (CEO of the London Stock Exchange) outlined new structural initiatives, including scaleup funds led by pension investors, and private securities markets.
At the event, SciBridgeX CEO Dr Christina Yan Zhang met leaders in the sector, including Reid Hoffman (Co-founder of LinkedIn and of the ScaleUp Institute), Stephen Welton CBE and Tom Adeyoola. Their conversations focused on the data infrastructure needed to help public funding and procurement reach the firms that need them most.
Appearing in these photographs does not indicate any endorsement of, or relationship with, SciBridgeX.
The Infrastructure Imperative
To unlock the next phase of growth, the market needs standardised, auditable data infrastructure that helps government programmes target support more accurately and enables corporate procurement teams to build reliable and robust supply chains.
Recent years have seen both an explosion in the financial and market data available, and in the AI technology that can analyze and draw insight from it at scale. Now we need to use both to build a better intelligence infrastructure – a better bridge – to link UK scaleups to the new markets they need to grow even faster.