Every year we ask a simple question: where were the founders of Britain’s fastest-growing companies born?
This year, Job Creators 2026, in partnership with Penningtons Manches Cooper, found that 54 of the UK’s 100 fastest-growing companies have at least one foreign-born founder or co-founder. The part that those born outside the UK play at the very pinnacle of entrepreneurship is beyond dispute.
And they are weighted towards the biggest hitters. Drawing on Beauhurst data, those 54 companies are worth a combined £15.84 billion, 70% of the total for the top 100.
Of the 225 founders behind the top 100, 98 (44%) were born overseas. That’s up from 42% last year and more than double the foreign-born share of the population. They hail from 35 countries across six continents. The US is the most common birthplace, followed by Italy, then Germany and India. No single country accounts for more than a tenth. Most of the 54 are built alongside British-born founders — 29 were started by British-born and foreign-born co-founders together.
I wrote up the findings for Forbes this week, and the founders we interviewed make the case better than any statistic.
Alexandra Birch-Mayne, the South African-born co-founder of Edinburgh’s Aveni, co-authored a 2016 paper on byte pair encoding, a technique whose variants are now used in most large language models.
“Birch-Mayne credits her background with her drive: ‘I don’t trust that I will be OK. I pursue opportunities vigorously because I do not have extended family or resources to back me up, and culturally in South Africa that kind of behavior is common.’ … Her verdict on the immigration system is blunt. ‘It has been very expensive and unfriendly to people who are high value and can bring a lot of money to the UK.’”
Tamar Gomez came from France for a PhD at Imperial College London and built Ankar AI here rather than in Paris, for the engineers, the investors and the path into the US market. Her co-founder’s visa needed a third-party endorsement and annual progress reviews.
“Gomez points to an oddity in the system: ‘It’s easier for us as a company to sponsor skilled workers than it was for my co-founder to get a visa. Our skilled workers get a visa way quicker than my co-founder did, which is a bit counterintuitive when you think about it.’”
Tim Chong moved from Australia in 2018, picked London over New York and co-founded the rewards credit card company Yonder after finding that, without a UK credit report, he was an undesirable customer despite a good job and a great credit score back home.
“When his application for indefinite leave to remain was held up by processing delays, the government’s Global Talent Taskforce stepped in to resolve it. ‘Without their help, the uncertainty would have significantly impacted the business,’ Chong says.”
The immediate problem is uncertainty. Last November’s consultation on earned settlement proposed doubling the standard wait from five years to ten for most work visas. It closed in February with more than 200,000 responses, but founders are still waiting to hear how it will affect them.
The case for sweeping restrictions has weakened. Net migration has fallen from a peak of 944,000 to 171,000 in 2025, its lowest level since 2012 outside the pandemic. As Pat Saini, head of immigration at Penningtons Manches Cooper, says: “When uncertainty persists, it becomes harder for entrepreneurs to commit fully to building their future in the UK.”
The report’s first recommendation is simple. Publish the consultation response, with a firm start date. Beyond that, we call for Graduate visa holders to get an extra 12 months while an endorsing body assesses their business for the Innovator Founder visa. We also recommend opening the High Potential Individual visa to graduates of INSEAD, HEC Paris, IIT Delhi and Dartmouth. High visa costs are a false economy, putting off those with their pick of countries: a founder moving with a partner and two children pays £18,694. We argue for bringing those costs down for founders and their first hires.
We also recommend replacing the Innovator Founder visa’s “new and innovative” test with one of viability and growth, and making processing times binding. And we propose stress-testing new visa routes before they launch, rather than opening them, watching them get abused and shutting them down.
None of this would increase net migration, and almost all of it could be done without new legislation. As Tamar Gomez said in her case study:
“If you have a good education, a great professional track record, a company with some form of investment already — in the millions of pounds — it should be easier.”
Seven Up
Thank you to everyone who has already filled in our Entrepreneurs Survey. If you haven’t, there are fewer than two weeks until John Healey delivers his first Budget. The survey asks which changes you would most and least like to see, and what you expect the Budget to mean for your business.
Previous waves have already shifted the debate on tax. After the 2024 Budget, seven in ten founders told us they knew another entrepreneur considering leaving the UK. That kind of evidence only exists when founders tell us. It takes under seven minutes and you can answer anonymously. The results go to ministers, officials and journalists. Take the survey here or click below. Extra kudos to those who forward it, or share it on social media or in a founders’ WhatsApp group.
Way Founders
We have recently revamped our Support for UK Entrepreneurs page and would be keen to know what’s missing. We send it to every founder who signs up through our website, and share one section here each week with over 13,000 readers — scroll down for this week’s, on funding — so we want it to be as good as it can be. Drop me an email with your ideas.a