Every few years, London is declared to be in decline.
The reasons change. Brexit, politics, the shrinking stock market, Silicon Valley’s renewed dominance, closing pubs. But the conclusion is always the same, that Britain’s capital is living off former glories while newer, nimbler hubs pull ahead.
London remains one of the best places in the world to build serious companies, particularly in financial services and technology, and the evidence is becoming harder to ignore.
A global startup hub by the numbers
London has now produced more unicorns than Berlin, Paris and Tokyo combined. It is the world’s fourth-largest venture capital hub, and in 2025 startups in the capital raised $17.7bn, behind only the Bay Area, New York and Los Angeles. Far from converging with its European peers, London is pulling away from them.
Recent independent rankings reinforce that picture. According to the Startup Friendly Cities Index, London is the second most startup-friendly city in Europe and sits inside the global top ten, ahead of most continental rivals. The index assesses the factors that founders care about most: regulatory efficiency, digital infrastructure, access to talent and quality of life. London scores highly across all of them.
Talent remains London’s decisive advantage
The city draws bright minds from across Britain and the world, supported by universities that remain powerful engines of commercial innovation. Around 43% of deep-tech startups that have raised more than $10m since 2010 began life as academic spin-outs. In areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum technology and advanced data science, that pipeline matters enormously.
Global firms vote with their feet. OpenAI chose London for its first overseas office. Palantir made it the company’s largest base outside the United States, citing the depth of the local talent pool. These are not lifestyle decisions; they are strategic ones.
London is also more open than it is often given credit for. It remains the second-most popular destination globally for European founders, helped by targeted visa schemes and incentives for early-stage investors. Add universal healthcare, relatively safe streets and a quality of life that consistently ranks among the world’s most attractive, and London offers something rare: a place where highly mobile technical talent can build both a company and a life.
A culture that compounds rather than fragments
London’s startup culture does not look like Silicon Valley, and that is a strength, not a weakness.
More than half of Britain’s fastest-growing startups were founded by immigrants, making London one of the most diverse startup hubs in the world. That diversity is not cosmetic. Globally minded founding teams tend to innovate faster, scale more naturally across borders and build businesses designed for international markets from day one, a particular advantage in financial services and fintech.
Crucially, London’s ecosystem now compounds. Alumni of successful scale-ups recycle their experience, capital and networks back into the system. Former employees of fintech firms such as Revolut and Wise have gone on to found more than 230 startups, three times as many as their counterparts in Berlin or Paris. DeepMind, Palantir and Uber have all become training grounds for a new generation of founders building companies in AI, defence technology, climate analytics and regulated data services.
Capital: strong early, improving fast
London’s weakness at the very largest funding stages is well documented, and it remains a challenge. Too many promising firms still look abroad when they reach scale, and the city’s public markets have struggled to keep pace with their American counterparts.
But that should not obscure London’s growing strength where it matters most: at the early and formative stages of company building. The UK, with less than 1% of the global population, has attracted more than 18% of global venture funding for quantum technology since 2020. London excels at nurturing technically complex, regulated and research-driven businesses, precisely the kinds that define modern financial services and enterprise technology.
As more founders and early employees achieve liquidity, capital is increasingly being recycled locally. Angel investment, specialist funds and founder-led backing are becoming structural features of the ecosystem, not exceptions.
What practitioners see, not just what rankings say
We have been working with financial technology firms for over 20 years, supporting businesses from their earliest stages through to global scale. Our clients, founders, executives and investors consistently acknowledge and agree with many of these themes. London’s depth of financial expertise, its regulatory sophistication and its ability to attract world-class technical talent remain decisive advantages.
They are also candid about the challenges. Policy uncertainty, mixed political signals on growth and ongoing gaps in late-stage capital all matter. Surveys showing declining founder confidence should be taken seriously. Confidence is not cosmetic; it shapes investment decisions.
But the overwhelming consensus among those building businesses is clear. London remains one of the few places in the world where complex, regulated, technology-driven companies can still be built at speed and at scale.
The real risk is confidence, not capability
London does not suffer from a lack of ideas, ambition or talent. Its risk is erosion of confidence through inconsistency, not decline through irrelevance.
The city has never been frictionless. Its success has always come despite complexity, not because it eliminated it. But when founders hesitate, capital hesitates with them.
For financial services and technology in particular, London’s strengths are unusually well aligned: deep capital markets, regulatory know-how, global connectivity and an ecosystem comfortable with complexity rather than novelty for its own sake.
London does not need to mimic Silicon Valley. Its strength lies in being London: international, intellectually dense, sometimes imperfect, but still very much in the business of building the future.
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