Sifted's piece on Monday is built on data from its own Sifted 250 ranking of fast-growing European startups, and only the first paragraph sits outside the Pro paywall, so that is all I could read of the article itself. That paragraph carries the news. "Of the 22 startups on the Sifted 250 Leaderboard planning a Series B or C by the end of Q3 2027, 12 (54.5%) are fintechs, with eight of them based in the UK." The rest came through scrambled.
So I went to the ranking itself. Sifted publishes the 2026 Sifted 250 as a free PDF, and I read the sections on method, sectors and the top ten companies before writing a line of this. The numbers below come from that report. None come from the locked article.
The ranking is in its third year, and I had not read its method before this week, so I started there and only then went back to the fundraising numbers. It orders European startups by revenue growth over their latest three financial years, and Sifted says companies must submit signed documentation for realised revenue before they can be ranked. ARR is not accepted. I like that rule a lot. The report dismisses ARR as "a projection: a good month multiplied by 12", which is the sharpest line in the whole document.
This year's bar is the highest yet. The average two-year growth rate is 249.28%, up from 225.8% last year, and the cut-off for the 250th place rose from 98% to 110.85%. Revenue per employee more than doubled in two years. It now stands at 337,000 euros. The report says more companies qualified before reaching a Series B than in any earlier edition, which fits a queue of firms now heading for one.
The odd part is that fintech shrank on the list. It has 69 companies this year, down from 78, and lost first place to B2B SaaS, which rose to 81 companies on the back of a jump in AI-native firms. Digital banking has 14 entries. Payments and wealthtech have 12 each.
A fintech still tops the headcount table. Danish Flatpay employs 2,068 people. The report recalls that UK fintech Allica Bank set the record growth rate of 1,438% in 2024. This year's winner, the London wellness marketplace Healf, came in just shy of it at 1,403%, after growing from 207,000 euros to 47.7 million euros.
My guess at the gap is simple. Fintechs need more capital per euro of revenue than software firms, so a fast-growing one reaches its next round sooner. That is a guess. I have not seen Sifted test it.
The highest fintech in the top ten is Flowpay, a Prague small business lender ranked fifth, which embeds its loans in the software platforms its customers already use to run their businesses. It has raised 37.6 million euros in total. Its growth rate was 816.31%. Its latest raise, in March 2025, was 30 million euros of debt.
Founder William Jalloul is blunt about money in central Europe. "We always raise 10x less than companies in western Europe," he told Sifted. "People underestimate how good the talent is here." I believe the first part. He is equally blunt about risk: "If you have no defaults, it means you're not taking enough risks." Flowpay's defaults amount to 1.5% of money lent, on loans from 2,000 euros to 200,000 euros. The company is preparing to launch in what the report calls bigger markets, including the UK and Germany.
Places six to eight are all London fintechs, which I did not expect. One automates financial operations for restaurants and last raised a 26.2 million euro Series B in September 2024. Another does open banking identity checks, with a 9.4 million euro Series A from August 2025. The third offers embedded business financing and raised a 13.4 million euro Series A in October 2024.
I can't give their names. The PDF text I extracted shows the profile cards, but the names sit in logos my tools could not read. I suspect two sit in Sifted's UK queue. I can't prove that.
The 12 fintechs are presumably named in the locked part. I don't know them. I also can't see the round sizes they plan or the investors they are talking to, and a plan to raise by Q3 2027 is not a term sheet. I can stand behind the 54.5% figure. It is a share of 22 firms, though. I find that a small base.