Today, The Financial Times have released the third edition of their annual list of leading startup hubs across Europe. For the third consecutive year, Hatch Enterprise have ranked amongst the top hubs in the UK.
The 2026 ranking contains 28 hubs from the UK, with Hatch Enterprise ranking alongside only one other charity. This marks a significant achievement for Hatch, amid a rigorous research process required to make the list, which typically identifies over 3,000 individual hubs as potential candidates.
Why this ranking matters.
As a charity, Hatch Enterprise rely on the support of like-minded organisations, businesses and local authorities to offer enterprise support. Receiving placement on the list for a third consecutive year is recognition that our programmes are consistently delivering and delivering effectively.
The Financial Times works alongside international data and research company Statista and Sifted, the FT-backed leading media brand in Europe’s Startup ecosystem, to identify the leading hubs each year.
The ‘Europe’s Leading Startup Hub’s Special Report’ is an annual opportunity for our programme graduates to give an honest assessment of their experience on a Hatch programme.
However, it’s not just the assessment taken into consideration when the final list is pulled together. Additional elements, such as recommendations from angel and venture capital investors, entrepreneurs, and academics, are taken into consideration. The most successful startups emerging from each Startup Hub’s interventions are also examined.
Social innovation is at the heart of our mission to build a better world.
The term social innovation describes as the development and implementation of new, effective solutions to challenging and often systemic social and environmental issues.
Social Innovation for local economies
Through our partnership with Southwark Council alone, 101 jobs have been created in the borough since 2022, with 389 jobs safeguarded.
We are successfully tackling localised and community-based problems that can drive positive outcomes for those facing additional barriers to accessing food, housing, education, employment or healthcare.
Entrepreneurial success at the local level has a wide range of positive impacts on the local community. Firstly, thriving local businesses boost employment opportunities and increase a collective sense of wellbeing for communities. Secondly, increased revenue by local businesses increases tax revenue that councils can reinvest across geographical areas. Lastly, social enterprises operating within local areas are uniquely positioned to tackle local challenges with precision.
Social Innovation young people
We’ve developed strategic interventions for young underrepresented entrepreneurs, including programmes to address the widespread entrepreneurial appetite of young people.
58% of young people are considering entrepreneurship, yet only 16% are actively running their own businesses (The Federation of Small Businesses, Simply Business).
Last year, we launched the Young Entrepreneur Fund alongside Simply Business. 12,000 aspiring business leaders submitted an application. The ten successful applicants will receive a £5,000 grant provided by Simply Business and six weeks of bespoke business support by Hatch Enterprise. This collective support will give them the solid foundations necessary to grow their businesses in a sustainable way.
Social Innovation for disabled and neurodivergent people
30% of our graduates identify as Disabled, due to our ongoing commitment to provide accessible enterprise support especially designed for Disabled people.
For many people with disabilities, starting a business is about creating stability, income, and independence in a flexible way that suits their needs.
In 2024, we launched the UK’s first pre-launch and early-stage business support programme for Disabled people in partnership with Ares Charitable Foundation. Since then, we’ve delivered four cohorts for early-stage Disabled entrepreneurs, won awards for our commitment to inclusion, and built a waiting list of over 1,000 aspiring Disabled entrepreneurs.
To address the growing demand for our services by Disabled and neurodivergent entrepreneurs, we launched our Elevating Ability campaign at the end of 2025. This campaign aims to ensure that Hatch Enterprise have the income necessary to support Disabled people requesting support from us.
Social Innovation for people of ethnic minorities
Last year we partnered with NatWest and Girldreamer to award ten young women of colour £2,500 through the Dream Fund.
The £25,000 total investment will support the development of businesses led by young women of colour tackling social inequality across Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Bristol.
Economic empowerment, social mobility, and equal access to health and wellbeing services play a key role in the collective mission of businesses successfully awarded funding. Under these umbrellas, a wide range of key target audiences will be reached, tackling these challenges head-on. They include Black and ethnic minority communities, women, socioeconomically disadvantaged professionals, young people (under 26), socially isolated adults, those from low-income backgrounds and those living with chronic illness.
Social Innovation for women
Last year, 77% of founders who graduated from a Hatch programme were women.
This means that a high proportion of The Hatch Fund is also distributed to women, vital when only one in three UK entrepreneurs is a woman. This represented a gender gap equivalent to around 1.1 million missing businesses and up to £250 billion that could be added to the economy if women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men.
Furthermore, 12% of the businesses we supported last year directly addressed Sustainable Development Goal 5: Gender Equality. Many of the women who take part in a Hatch programme are outstanding, strategic leaders with big ideas for widespread social change through entrepreneurship.
In 2024 we released The Entrepreneurs Club. Our research found that more than a quarter of people in the UK believe that men have a better chance of success in entrepreneurship than women, and twice as many men as women had at least ten entrepreneurs in their network.
Social innovation to address our collective challenges
Altogether, our focus on intersectionality and on developing the founder, not the business, produces an environment highly enabling of advancing social change through innovation.
Our total focus on those underrepresented in entrepreneurship enables our programme participants to embark on the Hatch experience with people who share their challenges, struggles and lived experience, whilst leading with their passion to make the world a better, more equitable place.
We know that a resilient startup ecosystem in the UK requires adaptable entrepreneurs, and Hatch Enterprise helps to build these critical entrepreneurial skills through startup support that’s there from the beginning.
Last year, we received various acolades for our commitment to fostering social innovation by underrepresented communities in the UK. We won the Outstanding Startup Support category at The Hustle Awards, and the Social Impact and Community Engagement category at the UnderOne Diversity and Inclusion Awards.
As of today, these examples of success sit alongside a three-year streak of rankings amongst Europe’s Leading Startup Hubs.
A lot of these entrepreneurs that are underserved, when they actually get their hands on capital and make something, those things serve a community, and I think everyone deserves to be served, not just a select few.
Entrepreneurship has long been a powerful tool for influencing change and redistributing power on a grassroots and national scale.
We pride ourselves on our ability to upskill the founder at the helm of a business, not simply the business itself. We recognise the long-term impact of nurturing strong, knowledgeable, confident leaders who can act as role models for those around them, shifting narratives that allow exclusion from investment, funding and other opportunities to continue.
I'm absolutely thrilled to hear of Hatch Enterprise ranking amongst Europe's Leading Startup Hub's for the third consecutive year. Seeing first-hand how responsive the team are to founders' needs in real time, it comes as no surprise that our commitment to equity and quality enterprise support shone through to The Financial Times and Statista. It is a testament to the outstanding work of the Hatch team, and our wider ecosystem of partners, experts and founders who have continued to develop together since our ranking last year. Hatch Enterprise plays an important role in the current economy, and every public accolade we receive is a signal that the work we're doing both publicly and behind the scenes is pushing us in the right direction.
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