These Are the Top 25 UK Startups to Watch for 2024

Bloomberg ventured into its second year running the UK startups list in a landscape dominated by artificial intelligence. Venture capital investments, which had stagnated in 2023, returned to growth by the midpoint of the year and the AI mania unleashed by OpenAI two years ago was apparent in the UK.

Wayve, a London-based autonomous driving company that’s on the list, attracted $1 billion in a round that included SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft this year. And investors weren’t the only ones lauding British advancements in the technology. Scientists at Google DeepMind, an AI lab founded in the UK, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for a model that helped unravel the 50-year-old problem of predicting protein structures.

The hundreds of applications submitted from Cardiff, London, Bristol, Southampton and other corners of the UK also revealed innovative companies in green energy, carbon accounting, health tech and a startup working on solving one of quantum computing’s great mysteries: how to make the technology accessible for practical applications. We also had some firsts, with Sibstar, a debit card designed for people with dementia, and Arondite, which builds software tools for the military.