Welcome to the 2026 Cloud Challengers report

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Welcome to the fifth edition of Notion Capital's annual Cloud Challengers Top 100 - the definitive guide to the best emerging business software start-ups in Europe. We identify the most promising early-stage companies with the vision and momentum to challenge established incumbents and become the enduring success stories of tomorrow.

Our definition of business software spans data, developer tools, cybersecurity, fintech, industrials, robotics, and SaaS. The vast majority of this year's companies are AI-native, reflecting the profound platform shift reshaping the technology landscape.

Since 2022, our data-driven methodology has evaluated companies across three core pillars: founders, funding, and product - the strongest predictors of long-term success at the early stage.

Congratulations to every company that made this year's list. We hope you enjoy the report.

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Jos White
General Partner, Notion Capital

81%+

of this year's Top 100 are AI-native companies

5th

edition of the Cloud Challengers annual report

100

emerging B2B software companies featured in this year's report

The vast majority of this year's companies are AI-native, reflecting the profound platform shift reshaping the technology landscape.

Jos White, General Partner, Notion Capital

Report contributors

Meet the team at Notion who put this report together 

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Jos White

General Partner
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Kamil Mieczakowski

General Partner
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Radu Bozga

Principal
About the report

What is Cloud Challengers?

Now in its fifth edition, the Cloud Challengers Top 100 is Notion Capital's annual data-driven ranking of the most promising early-stage B2B software and SaaS companies across the UK and Europe.

Covering data infrastructure, developer tools, cybersecurity, fintech, industrials, robotics and cloud-based SaaS platforms, it is the definitive guide to the tech startups to watch in 2026.

Notion Capital is a London-based venture capital firm that has been investing in Europe's most promising B2B software founders since 2009. Since 2022, we have tracked Europe's hottest emerging SaaS startups, identifying the companies with the vision and momentum to challenge established incumbents and become the category-defining success stories of tomorrow.

Finding 01

81% AI-Native: The Landscape Has Shifted

Eighty-one percent of this year's top 100 are AI-native companies — products built with machine learning and deep learning at their core that simply couldn't exist without AI. Two years ago, that number was just 24%. This is the most compelling evidence yet that the window for building a category-defining AI-native business is open right now. We're not just observing the AI super-cycle - we're naming and backing the best AI startups defining it across diverse sectors.

Finding 02

Key Findings: UK Leads, AI Dominates

The UK leads the 2026 cohort with 28 companies in the top 100, reflecting the strength of the UK tech startup ecosystem in B2B SaaS and enterprise software. Germany, France, and the Nordics follow, with strong representation in AI infrastructure, fintech, and developer tools. Across the cohort, companies are enabling organisations to streamline workflows, automate data analysis, manage customer data at scale, and unlock value across the entire enterprise software stack - from sales CRM and content management to cloud computing and application development

Finding 03

Why the Best B2B Startups Are Targeting 90% of Enterprise OPEX

The average company today spends around 10% of its OPEX on software solutions. As the AI super-cycle unfolds, the real opportunity for B2B software businesses lies in the remaining 90% - automating complex workflows, delivering data analytics and intelligence that simply wasn’t possible before, and replacing manual processes across every corporate function. The founders building the best startups in our 2026 cohort understand this: they’re targeting the entire operating cost of a business, not just the software line item, unlocking huge market value.

Finding 04

How Europe's Top AI Startups Build Defensibility

The most important question we ask any AI-native founder isn’t about their model or their roadmap. It’s about compounding value. The strongest companies we see are those where every new customer makes the product meaningfully better - where proprietary data deepens, where context accumulates inside a customer’s environment making off-boarding increasingly painful, and where deep domain expertise creates barriers that horizontal players simply can’t replicate. This is how you defend prices and margins as markets mature. Defensibility in the age of AI isn’t a feature. It’s a flywheel.

Finding 05

Building More With Less: How the Best Startups in 2026 are Scaling

Our 2026 cohort data reveals something equally striking about how the best B2B startups are operating. The median team size across this year’s top 100 SaaS companies has dropped to just 10 people - down 60% from 25 just two years ago, demonstrating year-over-year growth in capital efficiency that’s reshaping the industry. AI-powered automation is enabling founders to do more with dramatically fewer people. The minimum viable team has never been smaller.

At the same time, hiring patterns are shifting decisively towards quality over quantity. The dominant pattern across the cohort is a strong preference for senior engineers who can architect software solutions and validate AI output, rather than write boilerplate code. Over 80% of new code across our cohort is now AI-generated. The constraint is no longer who can write the code - it’s judging whether it’s right.

Finding 06

A Track Record That Backs Up the Thesis

Our evaluation framework is built around three pillars - founders, funding velocity, and product - and our results as a leading UK venture capital firm speak for themselves. The 2024 cohort achieved a 63% next-round conversion rate, collectively raising over $1.1B in follow-on funding. The 2025 cohort raised $795M in follow-on funding within just 12 months of the report’s publication.

SaaS startups featured in our cohorts include Lovable, Synthesia, and Sana Labs. We’ve backed Aikido, now valued at $1B, and Upvest, which raised a $100M Series C in 2024 and another $125M in early 2026. The Cloud Challengers report has become one of Europe’s most recognised annual startup rankings for identifying companies before they scale.

Get involved

Looking for Investment?

If you're an AI-native B2B founder based in Europe, raising a seed or Series A, and looking for a lead investor - we'd like to hear from you. Notion Capial invests in the best early-stage SaaS and B2B software startups to watch across the UK and Europe.

It takes five minutes. No deck required. Just tell us what you're building.

We hope you enjoy the report!

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