Corporate chief executives have spent the past few years warning that the capital’s entrepreneurial spirit has packed its bags, driven out by rising taxes, tighter regulation and falling confidence. Yet beneath the gloomy rhetoric, a different picture is emerging: a growing cohort of start-ups that are continuing to scale rapidly, attract global investors and enhance London’s reputation as Europe’s leading tech hub.
London now hosts 70 of the UK’s 92 private companies which have been valued at more than $1 billion (about £750 million). This is the coveted “unicorn” status: the tech world’s benchmark for arrival. Despite tougher funding conditions and a wider slowdown in venture capital investment over the past few years, three UK companies have already joined the unicorn cohort this year.
They include battery developer Nyobolt, which secured $60 million (£44.5 million) in funding this month, and fintech Allica Bank, which joined the unicorn club in February. The third is Ineffable Intelligence, founded in January by former Google AI scientist David Silver. Last month it raised $1.1 billion to create “superlearner” AI, which claims not to rely on human data.
Right behind these names sit a number of rapidly scaling firms which are lining up to join them. According to analysis from Beauhurst, there are currently 32 private London-based companies valued at between £400 million and £745 million, sitting in the tantalising anteroom of unicorn status. Collectively they have attracted £5.72 billion in investment, spanning sectors from AI to insurance and clean technology. Yet many are firms that most Londoners have probably never heard of, reflecting how much of the city’s start-up growth is happening away from the public spotlight.
Much of the city’s start-up growth is happening away from the public spotlight
The question is: which of them will grow its unicorn horn first and join the billion-dollar ranks? As Beauhurst’s analysis flags, “nobody can predict definitively which companies are guaranteed to become unicorns, but there are signs you can follow to help build the case”.
Its indicators include having a founder who has successfully built businesses before; early and repeated rounds of fundraising; a rapidly increasing revenue or headcount; and operating in a high-growth sector such as the green economy and biotechnology.
Here we take a look at some of the capital’s “soonicorns” — the companies hoping to grow their unicorn horns next.
Connected Kerb
Connected Kerb, based on the South Bank, has installed more than 10,000 electric vehicle charging points around the UK. These include ones on residential streets for drivers without home chargers, for local councils and for prisons. It raised £65 million from the Government’s National Wealth Fund and Aviva Investors last year to expand its UK EV charging network towards 40,000 sockets — a fraction of the 300,000 public EV chargers the UK is forecast to need by 2030.
Run by former EY global infrastructure expert Chris Pateman-Jones, the company is valued at $729 million (£541 million), according to Dealroom, and earlier this year bought the assets of rival charging supplier Trojan Energy out of administration, increasing its network. Connected Kerb is a major beneficiary of the Government’s £400 million Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure fund, which councils are using to encourage residents to switch to greener cars. Connected Kerb claims each of its charging units diverts three and a half truck tyres from landfill.
PhysicsX
Start-up PhysicsX is focused on using artificial intelligence to speed up the engineering cycle for defence and manufacturing products. Having raised $135 million (£100 million) from investors including Siemens and Singapore Airlines-backer Temasek last year, the firm is on the cusp of a $1 billion valuation.
Founded in 2019 by former Formula 1 engineers Jacomo Corbo and Robin Tuluie, who met while working on Renault’s F1 team, the Old Street-based firm works across sectors including aerospace, semiconductors, automotive and energy. It is particularly benefiting from increased national defence budgets driven by geopolitical instability. “We want to bring the next 100 years of engineering progress into the next 10,” says PhysicsX’s product manager Garazi Gomez De Segura Solay.
Moneybox
School friends Ben Stanway and Charlie Mortimer launched digital savings app Moneybox in 2015. Mortimer certainly ticks the “serial founder” box — he also launched floral giant Bloom & Wild. Now the personal finance business manages some £18 billion in assets for almost two million customers across Isas, pensions and savings accounts and has grown to be the UK’s biggest supplier of Lifetime Isas. Moneybox was valued at £550 million in 2024, when it raised £70 million from backers including Apis private equity. It coincidentally has its headquarters in the same South Bank building as Connected Kerb.
Shop Circle
Shop Circle, founded in 2021 by Luca Cartechini and Gian Maria Gramondi (pictured top), is a serial shopper for tech: it buys ecommerce software firms, then modernises them by adding AI to automate HR, marketing and finance tasks to boost profitability. The firm, which has its headquarters in Paddington, has bought 16 companies over the past four years, raised more than $200 million (£148 million) from backers including Founders Factory and QED Investors and has 200,000 customers using it to run their operations.
Shop Circle has 250 staff, but it’s not easy to join them: Cartechini has said the firm reviews more than 45,000 applications every year and picks out “the top 0.1 per cent” for its roles.
