Best Startup Hubs in Europe According to FT
Financial Times recently published the rankings of startup hubs in Europe for 2025. A first glance at top 10 of 150 shows Germany, France, UK, Switzerland, Spain and Sweden as top startup countries.
A simple summary analysis provides more aggregate information about the places, focuses and foundation years. UK has the first place in terms of number of programs, followed by Germany, Spain and France. Having Spain with more programs than France is interesting.
The start-up hub must be based in one of the following countries: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom. Turkey is not included in this ranking.
Most programs focus on “technology” (55), followed by “no specific focus” (32). We can safely say more than half of the programs have no narrow focus.
Many programs in the list has a history of not longer than 10 years, though there is one dating back to 1918 (Athens/Greece).
Methodology and Criteria
FT explains its methodology and selection criteria in a separate page. It mostly consists of surveys and scoring according to relevant criteria.
Alumni are asked to evaluate their programmes with the following criteria (direct quote)
- Mentoring & training
- Infrastructure
- Legal assistance
- Business development advice
- Networking opportunities
- Funding opportunities
“The Overall Score for a start-up hub was calculated as a weighted average of the Alumnis Score (overall recommendation and evaluation of subdimensions), the Expert Score and the Track Record Score.”
More Detail
You can see the top 150’s accomplishments here. Apparently Celonis is a kingmaker in this list and Lilium is still considered a success.
Spanish startup alumni are really generous with the mentoring rankings.
If you also need an office try one of these hubs.
Conclusion
Overall it is a good overview of startup hubs across Europe. However, addition of Turkey would be better as it is considered a European hub with significant stellar startup performance (both rising and falling).
