How to scale a business – lessons from 200 start-ups

For years, the dominant question in building a resilient, sustainable and prosperous future was whether we had the right solutions.

That question has largely been answered. The core technologies needed to sustain resilient economies within planetary boundaries largely exist. And in sector after sector, the costs have come down significantly.

The challenge is now deployment, which means getting proven solutions through the pilot stage and into the operational core of businesses, cities and supply chains.

To measure the impact and understand what helps purpose-driven early-stage start-ups make that leap, UpLink, the World Economic Forum’s early-stage innovation initiative, surveyed more than 200 of them and convened over 60 dialogues during 2025 with start-ups, investors, corporates and policy-makers.

Four clear lessons have emerged that tell us what it actually takes to move a solution from proof of concept to real adoption.

Geopolitical upheaval, climate volatility and supply chain disruption are no longer risks to plan for, they are conditions every leader is managing right now. Nearly 75% of chief executives are already localizing part of their production to offset volatility, critical mineral scarcity or disrupted energy routes. Food, water and energy reliability have moved from long-term strategic concerns to urgent operational pressures.

The constraint is rarely the absence of solutions, but the institutional conditions needed to adopt them. The World Economic Forum's water infrastructure playbook puts it plainly when it says that the solutions to close a €6.5 trillion global infrastructure gap exist, but coordinated leadership and aligned investment to deploy them do not. This pattern repeats across sectors.

But Shayp, an UpLink Venture, shows how change can happen when that coordination falls into place. The Brussel-based company builds IoT-enabled water monitoring that creates a real-time digital twin of a building’s water use, detecting leaks as small as 4 litres per hour. In 2025, Shayp signed a 10-year partnership with Microsoft to deploy across 625 schools and public buildings across Europe, contributing to Microsoft’s commitment to become water positive by 2030.

Purpose-driven start-ups tend to be built around specific, urgent problems rather than broad market opportunities. This makes them focused, flexible and more likely to stay the course when commercially driven players move on. And 79% of start-ups in UpLink’s network community name strategic partnerships as their top priority, ranked above product development, visibility and even fundraising.

The traditional model for scaling innovation is well understood: A start-up proves its technology, finds an institutional buyer and closes a deal. That model still works, but in sectors where problems are systemic and the cost of failure is high, it is running into limits.

Institutional buyers face real exposure when adopting solutions that have not yet been validated at scale in their sector and context. Procurement failures are visible, regulatory risk is real and reputational stakes are high. So, they wait, and nothing changes.

Pre-competitive collaboration changes that dynamic. When multiple actors co-design deployment standards and share accountability, no single institution carries the full risk of going first. Structured alliances built around shared challenges are among the most effective ways to move innovation from demonstration into use.

Across Uplink’s 2024 and 2025 surveys, start-ups consistently identify large multinationals and corporate partners as their most wanted connections. They are seeking partners who will contribute to lowering the cost and risk of adoption by providing market infrastructure, regulatory relationships, procurement channels and operational credibility.

The market that purpose-driven, early-stage start-ups are selling into has changed. Corporate sustainability is entering a more demanding phase, defined less by sustainability ambition and more by financial realism. Impact investing is moving in the same direction, with a 2026 analysis describing the move from moral imperatives to financial materiality as fully underway. Asset managers and institutional buyers are now evaluating sustainability through its measurable effect on cash flows, valuations and cost of capital.

The start-ups in the Uplink community have largely absorbed this shift. Only 6% ranked impact measurement and SDG alignment as a top three support need – the lowest of any category.

This is not indifference to impact, but maturity. Impact is embedded in what these start-ups build. What they are working on now is translating that into the metrics that procurement decisions are actually made on, including efficiency gains, cost reduction, risk mitigation and near-term resilience.

The old proxy for credibility was how much a start-up had raised, from whom and at what valuation. That logic is shifting. Investors and buyers have watched too many well-funded start-ups stall after pilots. A funding round signals belief in its potential, but a signed contract tells you that a buyer with real stakes and real alternatives looked hard at this solution and chose to deploy it.

This distinction matters more now than it might have a few years ago. VC investments in impact start-ups fell to $33 billion in 2025, the lowest level since 2017 and down 24% from the previous year – even as broader VC investment grew by 33% on the back of AI and defence. In the sectors where many Uplink ventures operate, such as food security, water tech and environmental resilience, capital has become more selective and early commercial traction is what moves a start-up forward.

Uplink data reflects this pattern. Of the 82% of start-ups planning to raise capital in the next 12 to 18 months, 71% are targeting family offices for patient, long-horizon capital, 59% are targeting traditional VCs and 41% are targeting corporate venture capital, where market access can matter as much as the funding itself. Africa and Latin America account for over half of all geographic expansion targets. These are markets where demand for resilience-building solutions is both urgent and underserved.

Each of these lessons points to the same underlying reality: that the start-up bottleneck has moved from the lab to the market.

What start-ups need from the ecosystem around them – corporate partners, investors and policy-makers – is more infrastructure for deployment. This means better mechanisms for pre-competitive collaboration, more patient and strategic capital, and faster pathways from pilot to procurement.

The solutions exist. Now the priority should be creating the conditions the start-ups developing these solutions need to scale.