Every year, the Hustle Awards champion the individuals, startups, and scaleups pushing the boundaries of innovation, resilience, and impact. The 2025 shortlist showcases the most forward-thinking founders, trailblazing technologies, and inspiring stories from across the startup landscape.

Building a business is hard enough, but building a business that lasts is even harder. On average, 20% of businesses fail within their first year and 49% fail in their first five years.

Let’s stop pretending that your weekly corporate Zoom yoga is fixing burnout. Your company rolls out meditation apps, hosts mental health webinars, and maybe even throws in a mindfulness day once a quarter. All under the banner of ‘employee wellness’. Meanwhile, the calendar is still packed with back-to-back meetings, Slack never sleeps, and your team’s average workday just bled into their evening…again.

When startups map out their growth strategy, influencer marketing is often the first port of call. It’s seen as the shiny, must-do tactic that promises rapid brand awareness, new customer discovery, and double-digit growth.

Despite impressive funding rounds and bold visions, most game startups are still struggling with the same fatal flaw: they’re building for metrics, not for people.

The AI revolution is often depicted as a contest between tech giants, each pouring billions into ever-larger, general-purpose models. But while big tech dominates headlines, a quieter transformation is underway: startups with deep domain expertise are building deeply valuable, practical AI solutions that solve real problems. In a world obsessed with big names, it’s these focused, specialist teams that are quietly reshaping industries from the ground up.

Did you know that one of the world's most recognised fintech companies, Wise, has roots in Ukraine? It's a story that often goes untold: a fintech giant, founded by Estonians, but in its early days built by a dedicated team of Ukrainian engineers from Cherkasy. This is the unexpected origin story of a company that has revolutionised international money transfers.

PiLogic announces the closing of a $4 million seed round to expand its footprint in the aerospace and defence industries to upgrade rules-based systems with the power of exact AI.

Launching a startup is a thrilling endeavour – it’s the dream of building something from nothing, fuelled by passion, grit, and ingenuity. But amidst the hustle of product development, pitching, and building a brand, many founders overlook one of the most critical elements to long-term success: legal infrastructure.

With a potential recession knocking at the door of the American economy, managing cash flow is moving to the centre of the plate for small business founders and CEOs. Recessions inevitably cause a business’s payables to balloon, and with business credit already running tight across the US, the lack of free-flowing capital can create a big problem. 

“Do you want it done fast, or do you want it done right?” This old adage suggests that efficiency and speed naturally come at a trade-off with quality – a troubling thought for anyone who has ever hoped to do something both quickly and properly.

A business partnership can be one of the most rewarding ways to build something lasting and tangible by pooling skills, sharing risk, and aligning ambitions. Partnerships, however, are not without risk.

Sitting in a smoky Moroccan casino at 4am, pregnant and staring down a room of 200 men, I wasn’t just playing poker, I was proving I belonged. Every decision mattered. Every calculated risk, every moment of restraint, every read on my opponents determined whether I’d walk away victorious. That night, I won my first major tournament, and it hit me, poker isn’t just a game, it’s a crash course in business, leadership, and high-pressure decision-making.

Launching a startup is a thrilling endeavour – it’s the dream of building something from nothing, fueled by passion, grit, and ingenuity. But amidst the hustle of product development, pitching, and building a brand, many founders overlook one of the most critical elements to long-term success: legal infrastructure.

Whilst quiet quitting might be a healthy boundary-setting response to overwork, the latest workplace phenomenon, ‘quiet cracking’, describes a much more troubling deterioration of the employee-employer relationship.