The Skale Startup-to-Company Index 2026

I like startups. I advise founders. I understand the importance of funding, experimentation and giving an idea enough space to prove itself.

I also spend enough time close to companies to know how misleading activity can become.

A founder can be extraordinarily busy and still have very few customers. A company can raise another investment round while its commercial model remains uncertain. Excellent engineers can spend years improving a product that the market admires more than it buys.

None of these situations means the company will fail. They mean that we need different evidence before concluding that it has succeeded.

At some point the conversation has to move from the idea to the business built around it.

OECD research published in August 2026 helps explain why. Its study of innovative firms founded between 2000 and 2025 in Europe and the United States found that scaling is associated with the commercialisation of innovation, access to later-stage finance, acquisitions and managerial capability. Growth happens through a succession of constraints that companies have to overcome.

That interested me because it describes something advisers and boards see from inside companies. The problem that exists at twenty employees is rarely the same problem that exists at two hundred.

I expected the United States to dominate. It does.

I expected Israel to perform strongly. It does.

Sweden was also unsurprising. Anyone studying European technology businesses eventually encounters the peculiar ability of a country with just over ten million people to keep producing internationally significant companies.

Denmark was more interesting.

Dealroom’s global Country Startup Ecosystem Profiles dataset identifies 1,569 VC-backed Danish companies founded since 1990, 31 companies with annual revenue above $100 million and 24 unicorn outcomes. Their combined enterprise value is approximately $142 billion.

That gives Denmark around 19.8 companies above $100 million in annual revenue for every 1,000 VC-backed startups.

Sweden produces around 23.6. Israel produces around 21.9. Denmark produces around 19.8, while the United States produces approximately 15.7.

This does not mean that Denmark has a better startup ecosystem than the United States. That conclusion would be difficult to defend and not particularly useful.

It tells us something else.

Denmark appears unusually efficient at producing substantial commercial outcomes from a relatively small funded-company base.

I had originally approached Denmark expecting to find primarily a scaling weakness. The data complicated that view.

There is a weakness worth investigating, but it sits alongside considerable strength.

Sweden has 3,136 VC-backed startups in the Dealroom global Country Startup Ecosystem Profiles dataset used for the S2C ranking.

Within that same dataset, Sweden has 74 companies exceeding $100 million in annual revenue, 56 unicorn outcomes and approximately $278 billion in combined enterprise value.

The number I find most interesting is 74.

Spotify and Klarna are easy to remember. A country repeatedly producing substantial companies tells us more about the system around those famous names.

People acquire experience inside successful businesses and take it elsewhere. Some become founders. Others become investors, executives or board members. They have already seen what happens when a company moves into several markets, hires quickly, reorganises, makes expensive mistakes and has to change management practices because the organisation has outgrown them.

This experience is difficult to manufacture through an accelerator programme.

Sweden also accounts for roughly 54% of Nordic unicorns and $1 billion-plus exits, according to Dealroom’s Nordics Startup Report 2026.

Something is being repeated there.

For Denmark, the more useful question may be: what makes successful company creation repeatable?

Israel produces another pattern.

Dealroom identifies around 4,604 VC-backed companies, 101 businesses with annual revenue above $100 million and 131 unicorn outcomes. Combined ecosystem enterprise value is approximately $598 billion.

Its domestic market is small. Many technology businesses have to think internationally early because the home market cannot carry the scale they are seeking.

That can change the questions founders ask.

Where are the customers? Where should commercial operations sit? Where is the next round of capital likely to come from? Which market gives the company enough room to become large?

Internationalisation becomes part of company construction rather than something discussed after domestic success.

The scale is difficult to compare with anything else.

Dealroom currently tracks around 105,400 VC-backed US startups, 1,652 companies exceeding $100 million in annual revenue and 2,325 unicorn outcomes. Their combined enterprise value is approximately $30.7 trillion.

The United States leads S2C because it combines efficiency with extraordinary depth.

A small country can produce an excellent ratio from a few dozen successful companies. The American system has produced more than 1,600 companies above our commercial threshold.

There are founders, engineers, investors and senior executives who have already participated in several generations of company building. Capital is available across more stages. Large domestic customers can buy from young companies. Acquisitions return capital and people to the system.

The advantage compounds over time. That is much harder to reproduce than an incubator.

China comes second in our preliminary ranking.

Dealroom identifies approximately 20,300 VC-backed companies, 269 businesses above $100 million in annual revenue and 510 unicorn outcomes. Their combined enterprise value is around $5.8 trillion.

The Chinese model should be read in its own context. Its domestic market, industrial base, relationship between government and private capital, manufacturing capacity and access to supply chains create a different environment for company growth.

This matters for S2C because we do not want to discover a statistical correlation and quietly turn it into a universal prescription.

What helps a software company scale in Stockholm may have little relevance to an industrial technology company in Shenzhen.

The purpose of the index is to find patterns worth investigating.

Dealroom’s Nordics Startup Report 2026, published in June, estimated that Nordic VC-backed startups had created approximately $561 billion in enterprise value and produced 105 unicorns and $1 billion-plus exits.

That figure belongs to the June report. Dealroom’s live regional and country pages may show later values as the underlying company database changes, so we do not substitute those live revisions into the historical report figure.

Capital becomes more interesting when we look at the stage at which it arrives.

The same report found that around 47% of Nordic VC went into later-stage rounds, compared with approximately 69% in the Bay Area. Foreign investors participated in 62% of Nordic VC rounds in 2025 and supplied around 66% of the capital.

I would ask why the dependency becomes so large as Nordic companies grow.

Perhaps part of the European scaling discussion has concentrated too heavily on creating more ventures and too little on what happens when the successful ones need €50 million, €100 million or €500 million to compete internationally.

That is where a startup policy begins to encounter company reality.

Capital will not explain everything.

Management deserves a place in this research.

The founder who creates a company at the beginning may need to become a very different CEO five years later. Some people make that transition extraordinarily well. Some recognise their limitations and build strong management around themselves. Others continue running a hundred-person organisation as if ten people were still sitting around the same table.

This affects decisions, hiring, sales, governance and eventually capital.

It is also difficult to measure. That does not make it unimportant.

The OECD’s 2026 work identifies managerial capability among the factors associated with successful scaling. For S2C, I want to take that further. We need to understand whether successful ecosystems contain people who already know how to build the organisation that comes after the startup.

There is a difference between knowing how to start and knowing how to scale.

There are several things here that I would not have predicted before doing the calculation.

The first is Denmark at number five.

The second is the strength of Israel and Sweden once company outcomes are considered relative to the size of their funded startup populations.

The third is Argentina. Its position is influenced strongly by a high amount of enterprise value relative to a small VC-backed company base. A few exceptional companies can have a large effect in a smaller ecosystem.

That is useful information, but it is also a warning. Efficiency and depth are different.

The United Kingdom ranks sixth despite having 267 companies above $100 million in annual revenue, far more than Sweden’s 74. Its lower S2C position comes partly from measuring outcomes relative to a much larger startup base.

Would I therefore tell a founder that Britain offers a weaker company-building environment than Denmark? No.

The index is telling me where to investigate.

Britain offers depth. Denmark appears unusually efficient. Sweden combines strong efficiency with greater repetition. Israel combines international orientation with exceptional high-value outcomes. America combines almost everything at enormous scale.

Those differences are more interesting than declaring a winner.

Brazil ranks twentieth in this version of S2C.

I would be particularly cautious with that result.

Brazil has around 212 million people and a domestic market large enough for companies to become substantial before international expansion becomes necessary. Dealroom currently estimates approximately $234 billion in combined startup enterprise value, 33 unicorn outcomes and 21 companies above $100 million annual revenue.

A Danish company and a Brazilian company do not face the same geographic problem.

The Danish founder encounters the limits of the domestic market quickly. Internationalisation becomes a necessity.

A Brazilian founder can spend years building within Brazil and still address a market larger than many regions of Europe.

Our next methodology therefore needs to understand where revenue comes from, rather than merely how much revenue exists.

That is exactly the sort of problem I want the index to reveal.

This first S2C edition measures observable outcomes.

The next stage is harder and, I think, more useful.

We want to follow company cohorts. Take startups founded between 2010 and 2015 and ask what happened to them ten years later.

How many survived? How many reached €10 million, €50 million and €100 million in revenue? How many entered international markets? How much external capital did they require to get there? How many founders remained CEOs? How many successful founders and executives went on to build another company? What happened after an acquisition? Where did the companies that looked promising at Series A disappear?

Some of these answers will be difficult to collect consistently across countries. We will say so when they are.

I would rather have an incomplete answer that we understand than a precise-looking number whose meaning disappears when somebody examines the methodology.