I love a good underdog story. So when the 2025 Sifted 100: UK & Ireland Leaderboard came out — showcasing younger, leaner and more than twice the number of profitable startups than last year’s cohort — I found myself wondering: who just missed the cut? And what trends are quietly playing out just off the main stage?
Our leaderboards rank startups by their two-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR). This year’s cut-off for the top 100 is a steep 93.8%. Last year’s threshold was 48.4% — also high, but the bar is clearly rising.
Looking at the runner-up list, I found 65 with strong growth rates between 48% and 93%, fast enough to qualify last year, but edged out in 2025. In another universe, they’d be in — and they’re still worth watching. Revenue growth doesn’t tell the whole story.
Here’s what we noticed.
SaaS and fintech share the stage
The sector breakdown among close runner-ups tells a slightly different story to the final leaderboard. While fintech (40) dominates the Sifted 100: UK & Ireland, with B2B SaaS (24) in a distant second, the runner-up list is neck and neck: 19 fintechs and 19 B2B SaaS startups. It’s a sign of the growing demand for tools that boost efficiency, with businesses seeking smarter ways to grow with leaner teams. The number of fintechs waiting in the wings also (again) underlines the UK’s strength in the sector. The rest of the pack includes nine healthechs, eight consumer startups, six climate tech and five deeptech companies.
24.6% of the nearly-rans — 16 companies — are already profitable, a slightly smaller proportion of the top 100 (which featured 25 profitable companies). Given just 12 companies in total on last year’s leaderboard reported profitability, it marks a big improvement.
Lean, but scaling fast
Several of these runner-up companies are growing revenues while keeping headcounts small — being disciplined around costs and deploying AI effectively.
Take Crowd Connected, a profitable Guildford-based B2B SaaS startup three places outside of the top 100 with a CAGR of 90.5% — it operates with just eight employees. Dublin-based Imvizar, a software company using VR for storytelling, has had an average headcount of nine over the past three years. And London-based Sercasa, a hospitality startup, has employed just four employees over the period. Others like Mooncup — a sustainable menstrual product company in London — has 10 employees, up from eight in prior years.
A few even shrank their teams: Mishipay (a retail technology company) and Hadean (deeptech) — also based in London — dropped staff numbers slightly while increasing revenue year-on-year.
Then there’s Transformify, a profitable, bootstrapped fintech with 91.5% CAGR and technically just one official employee. “It’s an all-remote company,” CEO Lilia Stoyanov explains. “Our team are independent contractors working through their own legal entities.”
A dip in rank doesn’t mean a dip in momentum
20 of the 65 companies on the runner-up list were on last year’s top 100 — including consumer-tech Yoto and fintechs Bumper, Plum and Yapily. Belfast’s Cloudsmith, a B2B that placed 38th on last year’s leaderboard, was the only Northern Ireland company to make the Sifted 100 in 2024.
Seven were also featured on last year’s Sifted 250, our end of year ranking of Europe’s fastest-growing startups. As startups scale and revenue increases, it becomes more difficult to achieve as high a year-on-year growth rate.
Investors with multiple near-winners
Several investors appear more than once across the runner-up list: London-based VCs Seedcamp and LocalGlobe — the top-ranked investor within the top 100 — back three companies each, while Tiger Global, Octopus Ventures, General Catalyst, DMG Ventures and Enterprise Ireland have two apiece.
Tiger Global, General Catalyst and DMG Ventures also have multiple companies in this year’s top 100 — a reminder that sometimes, the difference between being a breakout and a runner-up is just timing.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/runners-up-not-slowing-down-65-uk-ireland-startups-just-outside-the-sifted-100/
