What drives exceptional growth? That was the question I was asked on stage at the Sifted Summit a few weeks ago, in front of 1500 attendees, with more than 60 partners and over 200 investors packed into Protein Studios in Shoreditch.
It was the Summit's fifth year, and the room felt like it. If you've been to one, you know the difference between a first-year event and a mature one. People weren't there for inspiration. They were there for answers.
My answer probably wasn't what the panel expected.
It's what happened after the conversation that mattered the most.
I've spent enough time working with growing companies to see the pattern. The ones that scale well aren't necessarily the ones with the best pitch or the biggest round.
They're the ones who've figured out how to close the gap between deciding something and actually finishing it. A strategy session that turns into real tasks before anyone leaves the room. A customer call that generates follow-ups the team can act on the same day.
That loop, from conversation to completion, is where growth either compounds or leaks.
I said "conversation to completion" probably three or four times during the panel. It was a bit much, I'll admit. But it kept fitting.
AI as infrastructure, not a label
The part that got the most energy in the room was AI. Another panellist, a VC who's been advising companies for a decade, made the point that AI is showing up in almost every pitch deck right now. But is it actually changing the operating model, or just changing the slide?
I believe it's changing the model, but only when it's built into how a company works day to day. Five years ago, a company of 50 needed to hire analysts, ops leads, project managers and customer experience specialists before it could operate like a serious business.
Today, you can use technology to compensate for the expertise you can't yet afford. Meeting summaries that capture decisions. Follow-ups that travel with the work. Context that carries across teams and time zones without someone manually passing it along.
A company of 50 with the right setup can operate with the discipline of a company of 500. We see it in our Solopreneur 50 programme, where solo founders, selected from nearly 3,000 applicants, are running real businesses with lean teams and recurring revenue. AI isn't their pitch deck — it's their operating model.
If that's possible for a company of one, think about what it means for the companies in the Sifted 250.
There's no such thing as 'good' revenue
The panel got into what constitutes high-quality revenue. ARR, retention, margins. My honest answer: there's no such thing as 'good revenue.' There's just revenue. What makes it last is whether customers actually get what they were promised.
In a subscription model, you need happy customers. And customers are happier when they're not stitching together five different tools to get one job done. When the product delivers after the sale, not just during it, that's when retention holds and expansion follows. That's the platform argument, and it's the one I keep coming back to.
What the Sifted 250 report actually shows
The numbers are worth your time. 56 of the 250 companies are AI-native, up from 18 last year. B2B SaaS is the biggest category again at 81 companies. Average revenue CAGR over two years across the full ranking rose from 225.8% to 249.3%. The bar is moving up, not just the leaders.
The stat I keep coming back to is about team size. Horticultural tech company, Auk generated €21.2m in revenue with 15 employees. HRtech company Toduba generated €41.8m with 39 employees.
N8n, valued at $5.2bn, wants to reach a billion users with fewer than 1,000 people. The company's CEO Jan Oberhauser put it well: "When everyone has access to the same powerful tools, the only thing that's different is the people."
AI changes the economics of scaling. But it makes the quality of your people and your conversations more important, not less.
Thank you to Sifted for having us on stage and at the roundtable. It's one of the few events where the conversations between sessions are as good as the ones on stage.
Get the complete Sifted 250 report here.
Join Zoom’s IT Leaders Circle on November 19 to go deeper on what the Sifted 250 data means for your business. It’s built for IT and business decision-makers at growing companies and includes a dedicated Growth Track on the leaderboard trends behind Europe’s fast-scaling businesses. Zoom and Anthropic will also cover the forces reshaping enterprise and SMB tech. Save your spot here.
