Kota Ranked #9 in Sifted's 2026 UK & Ireland Leaderboard

We're not a company that chases rankings. But this one is worth talking about.

Kota has been ranked #9 in the 2026 Sifted 100 Leaderboard for the UK & Ireland - one of the most credible benchmarks of business performance for startups and scale-ups in the region. The Sifted Leaderboard ranks companies on pure fundamentals: revenue growth, team growth, and overall momentum. No style points, no hype. Just performance.

Coming in the top 10, alongside some genuinely category-defining companies, is something we're proud of - and something I wanted to reflect on properly.

How we got here

What makes this meaningful to me isn't the number. It's how we got there.

Kota isn't an AI-native play. We're a B2B fintech company that set out to fix something that had been broken for a long time: employee benefits for SMEs and fast-growing companies - a market that incumbents have underserved for decades. Clunky platforms, opaque pricing, a one-size-fits-all model that never really fit. We have built the rails for something radically better for both employers and employees.

The growth is a direct result of that. We work with some of the world's fastest-growing companies, and when your customers are scaling fast, you scale with them. That relationship - being genuinely useful to businesses at a critical stage - is what drives us.

Looking back is easy - but what’s next?

The Sifted ranking captures where we've been. What excites me more is where we're going.

We're now building AI into our products in a meaningful way - not as a marketing narrative, but in ways that genuinely change what Kota can do for HR and finance teams. Removing friction, surfacing insight, giving time back to the people who need it most. That work is underway, and the results are starting to show.

The market we're operating in is large, and has been largely untouched by technology. Over 65,000 people now access their benefits through Kota, and we're still in the early stages of what this platform can become. Coming 9th on the Sifted Leaderboard is a moment to recognise the team and feel good about the progress - and then get back to work.

In the meantime, thank you to the Kota team, and to every customer who's grown alongside us. This one's for you.

See the full 2026 Sifted Leaderboard for the UK & Ireland