London ranks second to Silicon Valley as world's best startup hub

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London is second only to Silicon Valley for the best place for startups to thrive, according to a definitive ranking of international tech hubs.

The UK capital tied with New York in Startup Genome's Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2021. London was also far ahead of the next highest European city on the list, Paris, which ranked 12th.

The Global Startup Ecosystem report ranks the leading 140 tech hubs around the world and calculated the value of London's startup ecosystem at more than $142 billion.

Despite a turbulent year, the UK capital, along with the four other cities (Silicon Valley, New York, Beijing and Boston) maintained their positions at the top of the rankings.

The report has been published for London Tech Week and the annual event has seen plenty of positive news around the UK's startup ecosystem. In terms of investment, the sector was reported to have generated more in the first six months of 2021 than the whole of 2020. In turn, the country is seeing increased availability of tech-based roles, with London home to the highest number.

Fintech was identified as a particular strength for London, with unicorn startups such as Revolut and Wise making headlines, but there was also plenty of praise for startups that had made the most of the pandemic, such as virtual events platform Hopin.

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"London is a fantastic place to grow and scale a global tech business," Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan said. "We celebrate the diverse, international nature of our tech ecosystem and it is great to see our thriving start-up community being recognised in this report.

"London's tech sector has a pivotal role to play as we rebuild from the pandemic, and I am excited to be part of London Tech Week to discuss how our tech community can work with other start-up hubs to solve global challenges.

"In the face of Brexit and the global pandemic, London has demonstrated its resilience and proven itself once again to be one of the best places globally for tech innovations and startups."

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognise him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.