London may be criticised for “losing its edge” to Paris or Stockholm, but the reality we see every day is the opposite. London still attracts the best founder talent in Europe, says Adam French
If you only read the headlines, you might think building a start-up in the UK right now is an act of madness. Capital markets remain cautious, the macroeconomic mood music is gloomy, and founders are contending with everything from rising costs to slower customer decision-making. Yet inside Antler’s London office this autumn, more than 100 new founders are 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 here. They include senior leaders from tech unicorns and some of the world’s best tech companies. And 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 or Stockholm, but the reality we see every day 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.
Speed is everything
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. The pressure is real. AI companies have proven that European start-ups can scale as quickly as their US peers, and that technical excellence can trump access to capital. That’s inspiring, but also daunting. The founders in our current 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’s why the calibre of founders choosing to build in London matters so much. We have a tech ecosystem whose maturity and scale is surpassed only by Silicon Valley. So the founders we produce are serial entrepreneurs, technical domain experts, or senior operators leaving top global companies to start again from scratch. They aren’t tourists in entrepreneurship; they’re elite builders.
And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Take our current cohort: a second-time founder with a medical background who’s 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. A pair of second-time venture-backed founders creating an AI chief of staff that fits in your pocket. These aren’t hobby projects. They’re moonshots being built by people who’ve 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.
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. These are people who could work anywhere in the world, but have chosen the UK because they believe it’s still one of the best places to start.
These are founders who routinely work 80-plus-hour weeks and sacrifice salary, stability and family time to pursue their vision. Seventy-two per cent say it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Yet 98 per cent say they love what they do. That tension, between sacrifice and ambition, is what I see every day.
And it produces results. One of the companies formed in our last residency, Pesto, has already raised £1m 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.
The truth is, the UK’s advantage has always been its people: ambitious, pragmatic builders who thrive in complexity. The founders in our residency embody that. They’re here not because it’s easy, but because London remains the best place to do something hard, to build, test, fundraise and scale alongside peers and investors looking for rocketships.
In the end, ecosystems don’t rise or fall on headlines. They rise on the belief and execution of their founders. And right now, the founders building in London are doing exactly that, proving that even in a tough climate, the UK remains Europe’s beating heart of innovation.
Adam French is partner at Antler