Wayve, the automated driving scaleup, is the UK’s fastest-growing scaleup by number of new hires after recruiting nearly 200 new employees over the last year, according to the latest figures from job search platform cord.

Fresh insights from the The State of UK Tech Hiring – Winter 2025 report show that scaleups are fuelling UK job creation as growing firms added nearly 10,000 people to their teams over the last twelve months, with the top nineteen companies hiring over 100 new employees each.

Following close behind Wayve, the men’s health scaleup Manual signed on 188 new hires, while AI Video scaleup Synthesia each added over 150 people to its headcount.

However, the data shows that the fintech sector is dominating UK hiring activity, with these scaleups adding 2,127 new employees over the last year and accounting for 21% of companies hiring, which cord said reflects the industry’s rapid expansion and sustained investor interest.

Fintech startup Capi Money was among the twenty firms to have doubled their team sizes, with a staggering 150% growth, although still lagged behind legal-tech scaleup Lawhive (306% growth), AI firm PhysicsX (221%), and space startup Lumi Space (157%).

Aside from fintechs, cord found that AI firms continue to grow at pace, accounting for 1,630 new hires, a surge reflecting most organisations’ ongoing objective to integrate more machine learning and automation at scale.

Meanwhile consultancy scaleups (993 hires) and healthtechs (938) also saw significant workforce growth, which cord attributes to rising demand for tech-driven solutions across more established industries, followed by e-commerce (803) and data & analytics firms (741), driven by evolving consumer behaviours and the growth in data-driven decision-making.

When it comes to speed of scaling, however, companies working at the edges of emerging tech are outpacing the rest.

Cord found that the UK’s blockchain scaleups are growing at breakneck speed, boasting an average 40.5% growth rate despite representing just 2.4% of the companies indexed, and blockchain firms accounting for 3.84% of overall hiring growth – a 56% over-performance on market share.

Recommended

• Scottish Scaleups Attracting Record Investment
• Deputy First Minister Delves into Techscaler Two Years On
• What Are VCs Looking For in 2025?

Unsurprisingly, AI scaleups come a fairly close second, with 35% average growth per company, with some of the highest growing companies operating in the space, including AI enterprise efficiency firm Mimica AI, which grew by 165% over the year, and Samaya, which builds AI agents for financial institutions, with 130% growth.

While cord argues that these figures show a bright picture of sustained growth for the country’s tech ecosystem, techUK, recently claimed that the UK Government must do more to prioritise support for high-growth tech businesses.

With its Scale-Up Action Plan, the tech trade body has urged the government to simplify funding, improve visa schemes, and create dedicated support programmes for the fastest-growing tech firms, and hopefully limit early-stage failures.