Growth lists usually reward companies that raised the most money. The FEBE Growth 100, published in June, does something more demanding: to appear on it at all, a company had to be profitable.
Top of the table is Lucky Egg, a London party games brand founded in 2021, with two-year compound annual sales growth of 514.75%, sales of £16.3 million and 26 people.
What the entry criteria filter out
The qualifying rules do more work than the ranking does. To be eligible a company had to be UK-registered, independent and unquoted, with founders still involved in the business, sales between £3 million and £200 million in its latest financial year, an operating profit in that year, and no decrease in sales from the penultimate year to the latest.
The operating profit requirement is the one that changes the character of the list. It excludes the entire category of loss-making, venture-funded scale-ups that dominate most rankings of fast-growing British companies. A business here has grown quickly while covering its own costs, which is a materially different achievement from growing quickly on investor money.
The founder-involvement rule filters differently. It removes companies that have been acquired or handed to professional management, which is why this reads as a list of businesses at a particular stage rather than a list of the largest fast-growing firms.
The £200 million ceiling matters too. FEBE maintains a separate hall of fame for companies that have outgrown it, so the table is deliberately a snapshot of the middle of the journey.
The top of the list is remarkably narrow
The four fastest-growing companies are all London-based consumer brands, and three of the four were founded in the last eight years.
Lucky Egg leads on 514.75%. Mamedica, a medical cannabis clinic founded in 2021, follows on 302.38% with £21.4 million of sales and 89 staff. Mother Root, an alcohol-free drinks brand founded in 2018, is third on 272.46% with £7.2 million of sales from 13 people. PerfectTed, a matcha products brand, is fourth on 245.71%.
Two patterns stand out. The first is how small the teams are: Mother Root generates £7.2 million with thirteen people, and Lucky Egg £16.3 million with twenty-six. These are businesses that outsource manufacturing and sell through retail and online channels rather than building large operations.
The second is the categories. Party games, medical cannabis, alcohol-free drinks and matcha are all products whose growth depends on a shift in consumer behaviour rather than on a technology. None required a research breakthrough. Each required correctly identifying that a lot of people were about to want something.
What those percentages are in pounds
A compound annual growth rate is a poor way to feel the size of a business, so it is worth converting the headline figures back.
A two-year CAGR of 514.75% means sales multiplied roughly 6.1 times each year, or about 38 times across the two. Applied to Lucky Egg’s £16.3 million of latest sales, that implies a starting point somewhere around £430,000. The company went from turning over less than half a million pounds to £16.3 million in twenty-four months.
The same arithmetic gives Mother Root a starting point of roughly £520,000 on the way to £7.2 million, and Mamedica about £1.3 million on the way to £21.4 million. These are derived figures rather than reported ones, but the shape is unambiguous: every company near the top of this table was very small two years ago.
That is the honest caveat on any growth ranking. Multiplying a small number is arithmetically far easier than multiplying a large one, and a table sorted by percentage growth will always be led by companies that recently had almost no revenue. It is not a criticism of the businesses, which have done something genuinely difficult. It is a reason not to read the ordering as a ranking of quality.
The £3 million floor is what stops this becoming meaningless. A company can only appear here if it now turns over at least that much, so the growth has carried it past a real commercial threshold rather than simply looking dramatic against a rounding error. Combined with the profitability test, the criteria do most of the work that the percentages alone would not.
The one that did it without investment
The most striking entry is not at the top. Simmer, which delivers high-protein ready meals, reached £79.1 million of revenue in 2026, up from £7.3 million in 2024.
The business began with Simmy cooking meals in a university dorm kitchen and delivering them around campus by bike. His brother Jhai, a former professional footballer, and their mother Kal later joined. The company has never taken outside investment, and the brothers held full-time jobs until it reached £1 million in revenue. They have since retired both parents and paid off their mortgage.
A near elevenfold revenue increase in two years without external capital is unusual, because growth of that speed normally consumes working capital faster than trading generates it. A food business that collects from customers before or on delivery, while paying suppliers later, can fund its own expansion out of that timing gap. It is one of the few models where fast growth improves cash rather than draining it.
The disclosure most lists leave out
Buried in the methodology is a statement worth more attention than the rankings.
FEBE compiles the table using Companies House filings, Beauhurst as a primary data supplier, news reports and other public sources. Where accounts are not available at Companies House, it uses financial data provided directly by the companies. It states plainly that this applies to half of this year’s entrants.
The organisation is candid about why, and about the limits: most small companies file abbreviated accounts and choose not to publish sales figures, so the ranking does not claim to be complete. It also notes that inclusion is not an endorsement, and that the table reflects historical data rather than current performance.
That is a more honest framing than comparable lists generally offer, and it should change how a reader treats the numbers. Half of these figures have been audited into public filings. Half have been supplied by the company being ranked. Both may be perfectly accurate, but they are not the same class of evidence, and a ranking that mixes them is a guide to who is growing rather than a measurement of by how much.
It is not all consumer brands
Further down, the list broadens in a way the top four do not suggest.
AVA Electrical, a Brighton electrical design and installation firm founded in 2010, has increased turnover by more than £5 million in two years, working on projects for the University of Sussex and Twickenham Stadium among others, and has hired in a management team with decades of industry experience. Raptor, a youth and student marketing agency founded in 2015 in Shoreditch, sits at 39.
Prep Kitchen, at 70, produces more than 130,000 chef-prepared meals a week and reached £33 million of sales in 2025, helped by promotion from a network of athlete ambassadors including Anthony Joshua. Free Soul, a women’s wellbeing brand founded in 2017 by Rohini and Arjun Sofat, sits in the top ten.
An electrical contractor and a matcha brand have almost nothing in common operationally. What they share is the structure the criteria demand: independent, founder-run, profitable, and growing without having sold control.
What it says about the wider picture
A list of a hundred profitable, fast-growing private companies sits oddly beside the rest of this year’s data, in which small business confidence has been at record lows and firms report deferring investment and hiring.
Both can be true, because they describe different populations. Aggregate confidence measures the median firm, and the median firm is having a difficult year. A league table selects the extreme tail by construction. The existence of a hundred businesses compounding sales at these rates tells you nothing about the average, in the same way that every dataset this summer has split the economy the same way: real growth, narrowly held.
What the Growth 100 does show is where that growth is concentrated. Not in technology, not in exports, and not in the sectors industrial policy is built around, but in small London consumer brands selling things people have recently decided they want.
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