7 Enterprise Traits You Cannot Ignore in 2025 

In some respects, figuring out the subsequent trending product or style merchandise is like sticking your finger within the air. You by no means know what customers will latch onto. When predicting this 12 months’s largest enterprise traits, although, we could be savvier, due to the 2025 Startups 100 Index.

Our checklist of startup ‘ones to observe’ over the subsequent 12 months says quite a bit about what route the subsequent era of enterprise leaders can be guided in. Showcasing heightened agility, and new expertise, they aren’t simply responding to buyer wants, however answering them too.

By analysing our prime 100, in addition to our survey of 531 SMEs carried out on the finish of final 12 months, we’ve give you an inventory of seven enterprise traits that may form firm priorities, alternatives, and efficiency in 2025.

1. Help for folks and households

Issues have gone flawed when the present era of staff can’t afford to delivery the subsequent era. In comparison with different nations, the UK is lagging behind on help for folks, with maternity insurance policies and paternity go away each in dire want of reform. 

The federal government has tried window dressing the issue with a a lot maligned childcare coverage, introduced final 12 months. With no actual change on the horizon, although, a variety of startups have stepped as much as act as a life raft for folks and parents-to-be.

Nugget Financial savings has to date helped over 100,000 clients to navigate the confusion. Alongside the “nuggbase,” a database of UK parental go away insurance policies, it additionally offers budgeting instruments and academic movies on how one can construct a postpartum pay plan.

With nursery prices equally astronomical, mums and dads are placing themselves in debt to lift their youngsters, forcing (principally ladies) to sacrifice their payslip or give work up totally.

Flexa, a vetted listing of flexible-work-friendly corporations, helps ladies keep away from the motherhood penalty by matching them with empathetic employers. In keeping with Flexa’s 2024 Versatile Working Index, UK staff are more and more prioritising parental go away when job in search of.

For some, the price of parenthood is a burden even earlier than conception. Gaia Household insures the price of IVF therapy charges, making certain that anybody who desires a household can strive for one.

2. Academic advertising and marketing content material

Because the saying goes, all people has a podcast now (insert shameless plug for the Talking of Startups podcast, right here). Everyone, it appears, together with enterprise homeowners. 

A number of startups within the 2025 Startups 100 Index are utilizing podcasts to market their merchandise and companies, capitalising on the deeper engagement it permits. In an hour-long episode, hosts can maintain in-depth discussions and storytelling, offering worth past only a tagline.

Price range planning app, Financielle is only one instance. Figuring out that their clients anticipate extra than simply spreadsheets, founders created The Vault webcast collection. Every episode tackles viewer-submitted monetary dilemmas, remodeling complicated matters like inheritance tax coffee-shop video anecdotes that entertain and educate.

Whereas some go behind the mic, others are behind the smartphone. Take Tonic Well being founder, Sunna Van Kampen. Van Kampen has distinguished his vitamin model from the market utilizing gonzo journalism ways. He movies himself visiting UK supermarkets and exposing the excessive sugar content material in in style manufacturers, gaining round 45 million month-to-month views.

Such ways will possible be imitated throughout the promoting sector in 2025. With influencer tradition now totally entrenched throughout practically all types of media, customers have come to belief genuine, private branding over conventional PR methods.

3. Style resale and rental

Secondhand clothes had an enormous rebrand this decade. Popularised in response to the carbon-guzzling fast-fashion trade, Gen Zers and different younger buyers have leapt on reselling apps for a guilt-free new wardrobe. One of many largest, Vinted, reported a 61% rise in gross sales to over £500m in 2024, marking the primary time the enterprise has turned a revenue. 

However how guilt-free is it? Some say second-hand demand nonetheless encourages overconsumption. TikTok is stuffed with sartorial scrollers watching infinite movies of ‘Depop hauls’, the place customers showcase tens of things, all of which nonetheless needed to be trucked to their door by a supply van.

Charity retailers stay a step up from shopping for new. With the local weather disaster going nowhere quick, nevertheless, we’re predicting that the subsequent part within the resale craze can be a shift to garments swaps and leases as patrons try and satiate their style wants with out overindulging.

Serving to them can be a variety of new apps together with By Rotation, a luxurious clothes rental model that has already constructed a 220,000-strong neighborhood on social media. Even kiddies can become involved with Swoperz, an app for kids to commerce preloved clothes as an alternative of marbles.

Linked to this development is upcycling, the method of mending or enhancing outdated gadgets somewhat than gorging on new ones. Early adopters embrace The Seam, a fast-growth matchmaking platform that connects garments homeowners to close by menders, tailors, and cobblers. 

4. AI cybersecurity

Final week, the prime minister unveiled the AI Motion Plan, a set of proposals to cement the UK as an AI superpower. We’ve already led the cost on regulation, having hosted the AI Security Summit final 12 months. Now, it appears that evidently AI innovation will take the highlight in 2025.

‘Managed innovation’. It could sound like an oxymoron, however it’s a phrase that may possible come to outline the subsequent period of AI in Britain. Quick-growth startups, comparable to Robin AI, a authorized instrument to automate contract reviewing, and MAGIC AI, a private coach that lives in your mirror, are already dominating. Each made the Startups 100 Index this 12 months.

Nevertheless, after an explosive interval of development, entrepreneurs are additionally balancing progress with accountable growth. Many are rolling out supporting, cybersecure options that harness the ability of AI but additionally mitigate its dangers, conserving builders on a path to good.

That features Unify AI, a London-based startup that organises giant language fashions (LLMs), fashions used to construct generative AI chatbots. By matching the suitable LLM to the suitable process, Unify helps customers keep away from LLM overload and obtain higher outcomes from their tech library.

Threat prevention is one other space. Mindgard, a Lancaster College spinout, offers a full-stack safety answer that helps corporations safely deploy and function AI software program. It’s a response to the businesses stung by poor cybersecurity after bowing to AI stress final 12 months.

5. Predictive advertising and marketing

The time period ‘predictive advertising and marketing’ has been round for over a decade. Merely put, it means utilizing information analytics to foretell client behaviours in real-time. However whereas beforehand a distinct segment space for marketer mavericks, expertise has lastly caught as much as the concept in 2025.

Varied advertising and marketing startups we featured within the Startups 100 Index are utilizing AI and different transformative applied sciences to create extremely focused campaigns tailor-made to particular person buyer wants, giving shoppers a head begin within the race to viewers engagement.

They embrace Userled, which makes use of AI to generate bespoke touchdown pages for buyers. There’s additionally trumpet, a gross sales platform which builds invite-only microsites that account managers can furnish with the shopper’s branding, targets, and priorities in thoughts. 

Sure, it’s all about algorithms, and machine studying. Paradoxically, although, the objective is to maneuver away from digitised promoting and return to the times of people at counters, when store assistants might reply to their buyer’s each eyebrow increase and physique shift.

That’s what Manchester-based Made With Intent desires, anyway. Its mannequin tracks ‘intent metrics’ to measure a buyer’s need to buy, return, or add to a bag. If it senses an imminent cart abandonment, it responds earlier than the customer is conscious of their resolution to bail.

6. Femtech furore

Who knew femtech would show so controversial? Final 12 months, interval monitoring app Flo grew to become the primary ever femtech unicorn. It ought to have been a day of celebration for the burgeoning sector. However questions quickly arose round why essentially the most profitable enterprise on this totally female-focused tech area had been “based by males, led by males, and funded by males”. 

2025 will mark the 12 months that ladies femtech founders replot the trade’s course. Our Startups 100 is stuffed with new software program and on a regular basis use merchandise which are designed to service ladies’s well being points comparable to menstruation, being pregnant, and menopause.

Main the cost are founders comparable to Hannah Samano, who launched Unfabled in 2021. Unfabled goals to handle the info hole for ladies’s well being; leveraging information from over 500,000 ladies to develop and promote sustainable, non-toxic merchandise. There’s additionally Hormona. Began by Karolina Löfqvist and Jasmine Tagesson, Hormona gives accessible sources for hormone-related help, together with an at-home hormone testing package. 

By addressing the gender imbalance in women-focused tech design (and constructing the options ladies really want), each of those startups are working to fight a social problem and have raised vital funding to bankroll their mission statements. 

One agency going additional than others is Asan. As a social enterprise that produces sustainable menstrual cups and gives a free interval monitoring app, it goals to enhance interval training and cut back interval poverty globally. We named it runner-up for our Social Influence award. 

7. Worker recognition on the rise

On the finish of final 12 months, we requested 531 SMEs to inform us what had been the most important contributor to their success in 2024. 52% of enterprise leaders recognized a gifted and motivated workforce as their secret weapon, a 12% uplift on the identical survey carried out in 2023.

That employers have gotten extra conscious of the significance of their folks might sound stunning given the narrative being pushed by Large Tech. If Silicon Valley is to be believed, staff are lazy, overly-reliant on distant work, and can all get replaced by AI in 4 years.

But our findings present that extra leaders are linking worker expertise and happiness to the underside line. In consequence, anticipate to see many bosses rolling out initiatives with a view to construct bridges with the UK workforce this 12 months.

Their efforts can be supported by a string of employee-focused startups which may reply to the altering calls for of immediately’s staff. They embrace Flexa, a job-matching instrument for versatile working employers and job seekers, and UJJI AI, an AI platform that immediately transforms enterprise particular sources into an interactive workers coaching programme.

Area of interest advantages programmes will possible win out over generic perks comparable to free tea and biscuits. Take our prime startup for 2025, Lottie. Lottie boasts the UK’s solely devoted eldercare worker profit, offering help to staff who’re additionally full-time carers.