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Who are the future UK unicorns? Discover the 12 new startups on track for billion dollar valuations.
The UK has created 163 unicorn companies to date, with over 90% staying in the UK to scale — that’s according to to The Tech Nation Report 2025, which provides a comprehensive overview of the UK’s booming tech ecosystem.Companies are reaching unicorn status faster than ever before. The UK unicorns founded between 2015-2025 are reaching unicorn status in less than 5 years on average. AI voice generator, ElevenLabs took just two years from launch to unicorn, and Revolut just three.
10 new UK unicorns were born in 2024 – including Quantinuum, Wayve, and Flo Health — Europe’s first femtech unicorn. In H1 2025, we’ve seen two new UK unicorns; AI drug discovery startup, Isomorphic Labs, and biotech, Verdiva Bio.
In terms of capital efficiency, the UK creates unicorns at a comparable rate to the US. 12% of UK companies with $100m-$250m in total funding are unicorns, compared with 14% in the US.
So, who’s next? There are 250 ‘soonicorns’ in the UK – high-potential startups valued between $200m-$999m and tipped for unicorn status. Here’s a closer look at the UK’s newest contenders, all launched in the last three years.
From future AI unicorns to pioneering biotechnology firms, these 12 startups should be on your radar:
Ascend is on a mission to create the most effective, highest-quality, scalable advanced therapies possible to improve human health. It is a development and manufacturing body for developing therapies, from geneaology and immunotherapies to oncolytics and vaccines. It’s working to support the next-generation of life-science innovators in bringing advanced therapy products to patients.
Industry: Health TechHQ: HertfordLaunch Year: 2022Total Funding: $132.5mLast Round: Series A
AscendX acquires and scales Salesforce-native software companies that solve enterprise problems. It offers Salesforce solutions that power sales, service, and operations, turning CRM data into real-time insights, smarter workflows, and breakthrough growth.
Industry: FintechHQ: LondonLaunch Year: 2023Total Funding: $79mLast Round: Early VC
Carbonplace is the only carbon market solution powered by the world’s leading banks. The platform fundamentally transforms how carbon credits are transacted, managed, and retired. It has been developed by leading financial institutions committed to driving climate action at scale, and its unique technology enables the trust, transparency, and accessibility required to open the voluntary carbon market to the world and accelerate global climate action.
Industry: FintechHQ: LondonLaunch Year: 2023Total Funding: $45mLast Round: Seed
Granola is an innovative AI ‘notepad’. It combines your typed notes with AI transcriptions to create comprehensive and helpful summaries, blending human input with advanced AI analysis, tailoring notes to highlight the most important information for each user.
Industry: MediaHQ: LondonLaunch Year: 2023Total Funding: $71.9mLast Round: Series B
Latent Labs is a frontier AI lab building generative models that capture the fundamentals of biology, empowering partners with breakthrough generative AI. It is making biology programmable, gaining control of molecular biology, creating new antibodies, and optimising enzymes to transform health and sustainability for the benefit of all.
Industry: HealthHQ: LondonLaunch Year: 2023Total Funding: $59.1mLast Round: Series A
Nscale provides cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI. Its flagship data centre is located in the Arctic Circle, powered by 100% renewable energy and cooled by the naturally low temperatures, delivering campus scale GPU clusters to its customers.
Industry: Enterprise SoftwareHQ: LondonLaunch Year: 2023Total Funding: $185mLast Round: Series A
Pheon Therapeutics is a leading Antibody-Drug Conjugate (ADC) specialist developing next generation ADCs for a wide range of hard-to-treat cancers. Its mission is to address the unmet medical need of novel targets in hard-to-treat solid tumours across multiple cancer types.
Industry: HealthHQ: St AlbansLaunch Year: 2022Total Funding: $188mLast Round: Series B
Quotient Therapeutics is pioneering the new frontier of human genetics, dedicated to creating revolutionary medicines. Using the most accurate and sensitive sequencing technology in the world, its platform reveals a new universe of somatic genome variation, uncovering novel links between genes and disease and revealing a path to create transformative therapeutics with intrinsically validated targets.
Industry: HealthHQ: CambridgeLaunch Year: 2022Total Funding: $50mLast Round: Early VC
Reka.ai is a multimodal AI that is deployable anywhere. The platform is built to process streams of video, audio, and text. At its core is a series of multimodal language models trained from scratch.
Industry: Enterprise SoftwareHQ: LondonLaunch Year: 2022Total Funding: $58mLast Round: Series A
T-Therapeutics is unleashing the power of natural T cells to reshape the clinical landscape for cancer patients. It harnesses the natural power of T cells by discovering and developing T cell receptor-based drugs designed to recognise specific cancers, using the patients own T cells to kill the cancer cells and ultimately eradicate the tumour.
Industry: HealthHQ: CambridgeLaunch Year: 2022Total Funding: $59mLast Round: Series A
Tessl is reimagining software development for the AI era. Using AI native development, users can define functionality in natural language, leaving AI to handle the implementation and maintenance, delivering secure, high-quality, and auto-maintained code.
Industry: Enterprise SoftwareHQ: LondonLaunch Year: 2024Total Funding: $125mLast Round: Series A
Weev was launched to address the lack of EV charging infrastructure in Ireland. Its EV network allows users to charge wherever you are, and wherever you’re going.
Industry: Energy/TransportationHQ: BelfastLaunch Year: 2022Total Funding: $66mLast Round: Early VC
To discover more VC investment trends and UK startups to watch, download The Tech Nation Report 2025.
