Features

Technology is constantly evolving, and some trends, like AI, have been dominant players over the last few years. While AI isn’t going anywhere, there are other themes and trends that will be taking the world by storm next year.

Alison Imbert shares with Startups Magazine what makes a winning team, how her team is shifting strategies in an unpredictable market, and why she thinks being considerate isn’t incompatible with being a top VC.

Speed and reliability have become the foundation of any good online experience. Now, shoppers expect sites to load without hesitation, checkouts to work flawlessly, and performance to hold steady regardless of device or demand. Data reflects this shift too, with a two second delay being enough to double bounce rates. When experience falters, customers rarely wait. Instead, they’ll move on to the next merchant offering the same product with a smoother journey. In a market where alternatives are just a click away, even brief moments of friction can mean a lost sale.

Artificial intelligence has already become a powerful democratiser for smaller companies and startup ventures, enabling them to achieve faster growth and enterprise-level efficiency. As the sophistication and simplicity of AI improves, there are also expanding opportunities for companies to enhance their competitive edge by taking direct charge of advanced technologies.

You are not your grandfather’s SMB.

While many mid-market manufacturers still fax purchase orders and wrestle brittle ERPs, born-in-the-Cloud startups enjoy a greenfield. That blank canvas is both a luxury and a trap: copy yesterday’s stack, and you inherit yesterday’s headaches.

Fintech is nearing the end of 2025 with an unmatched pace of innovation. AI is now embedded in daily operations, and the industry has grown noticeably more ambitious. But while technology accelerated, communication systems inside many organisations failed to keep pace.

A new education technology company, PupilPower, has launched with an ambitious mission: to bring immersive, virtual reality (VR) learning into UK classrooms – completely free for schools.

Startups love building elegant technology and chasing ideas no one has tried before. But in the supply chain, elegance rarely survives contact with reality. Julia Sanzharova – a supply chain transformation leader with deep FMCG and product-development experience – explains why even the most advanced AI models fall short without a solid understanding of how operations actually run.

Founders get early traction through pure hustle, personal networks, charisma, and tenacity, but at some point, relying on the hustle inhibits growth.

Early-stage founders spend a huge amount of energy on the usual forms of capital: cash, talent, time, and product. But purpose-driven startups have access to a fourth resource that often makes the biggest difference in the years where margins, headcount, and certainty are all painfully thin – their community.

When I started my business from my bedroom in 2013, I didn’t have investment, a five-year plan, or even a proper desk. What I did have was a belief that I could do things differently.

The upcoming Autumn Budget has been sparking debate across the UK economy for several weeks, largely due to leaks. The rumoured measures, from a possible exit tax (which thankfully now looks to have been abandoned) to changes to capital gains tax and pension rules, could reshape the landscape for investors, fund managers, and entrepreneurs alike. With the government looking to balance competitiveness with fairness, overburdening businesses and investors in private markets could ultimately backfire, hindering the UK’s position as a leading home for private capital.

As enterprises race to deploy AI, a startling trend is taking shape: the majority of initiatives never evolve into long-term investments because big businesses pull the plug before results can materialise.

Many leaders treat Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) as little more than a legal formality or a simple perk to attract talent. According to Stefan Surina, CEO and Founder of Eldison, this is a critical mistake. Drawing from years of experience advising founders, he believes that an ESOP isn’t just a part of a compensation package – it’s the foundational tool for building a company’s culture. Done right, strategic ESOP turns employees into true owners, while a poorly planned one risks creating resentment and killing motivation before a company even gets off the ground.

If you had met me in first year of university, you would have found a completely normal student. I showed up to lectures half awake, clinging to a coffee, and hoping the problem set I “remembered” submitting had not just been a dream. Nothing hinted that a year later I would be sitting in the entrepreneurship hub, convincing myself I was building the next big thing. All I lacked was a turtleneck and a slide with a graph going neatly upwards.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after two decades specialising in leadership it’s this: startups don’t fall apart because of strategy, they fall apart because of people.

I’m Dani, and I’m the CEO of The Sleep Consultant Academy. I specialise in helping women set up an online business, specifically in infant sleep.

Once, product managers were measured by their ability to translate user needs into feature roadmaps and shepherd products to launch. Today, as AI moves from the fringe to the core of countless products, PMs are expected to master an entirely new language, where concepts like retrieval-augmented generation, dataset curation, and bias mitigation are daily realities.

Black Friday is the biggest seasonal peak for sales for many retailers. Nationwide predicts over 12 million transactions on Black Friday, despite low consumer confidence, as well as over 260 million transactions across November in the run-up.

Every founder reaches a moment where growth becomes harder than it used to be. Early expansion might come from a great product, strong word-of-mouth, or the founder’s own network, but scaling beyond that can be a different game entirely. That’s where many startups find themselves stuck – growing, but not fast enough; investing in ‘random acts of marketing’ but not seeing a return; and spending more time being reactive and tactical rather than proactive and strategic.