From start-up to scale-up

For almost 150 years, KPMG has worked with Irish entrepreneurs, founders and family businesses as they navigated growth, expansion and transformation.

Today, this commitment extends beyond advisory services through initiatives such as KPMG's Global Tech Innovator competition and our strategic collaboration with global academic organisations such as Cambridge Judge Business School, which has further informed how we support Irish companies to scale internationally

While the context has evolved dramatically, from family-owned enterprises to AI-enabled scale-ups, the challenge of translating ambition into sustained growth remains.

Three years of KPMG Enterprise Barometer research in Ireland now offers a valuable opportunity to step back and examine that challenge through a longer lens. The findings suggest that Ireland's entrepreneurs are more ambitious than ever. The question is whether the ecosystem surrounding them is evolving quickly enough to help them realise that ambition.

Conor McCarthy

Partner, Head of People and Change

KPMG in Ireland

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Anna Scally

Partner, Global Head of Technology, Media, and Telecommunications

KPMG in Ireland

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Niall Savage

Partner, Head of Private Enterprise, National Chairperson of Audit Committee Institute

KPMG in Ireland

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Christopher Brown

Partner, Head of Strategy

KPMG in Ireland

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A pattern worth pausing on

In 2023, we launched the KPMG Enterprise Barometer, in partnership with RED C Research, to better understand the outlook, priorities and challenges of Ireland's entrepreneurial business community. Three years on, a clear pattern has emerged.

Irish entrepreneurs are increasingly confident about growth, yet the conditions required to support scaling are not improving at the same pace. Confidence is rising. Ambition is growing. But many of the barriers to scaling remain stubbornly familiar.

Enterprise Ireland understands this challenge well. Reflecting on our 2025 findings, Enterprise Ireland CEO Jenny Melia noted that understanding how best to support indigenous enterprises to grow and scale has never been more important.

Three years of Enterprise Barometer data suggest that the issue is not a shortage of ambition. Rather, it is how we collectively create the conditions that allow that ambition to translate into sustainable growth.

The three-year arc

2023: Naming the constraints

The first Enterprise Barometer established the baseline. While 55% of respondents expected turnover growth, 60% reported difficulties recruiting the right talent and 45% believed the tax regime disadvantaged recruitment and retention.

Concerns regarding capital formation and entrepreneur incentives also featured strongly, signalling challenges that would continue to appear in subsequent years.

2024: Optimism rises, concerns remain

By 2024, confidence had increased significantly, with 65% of businesses anticipating turnover growth and 58% pursuing expansion plans. Yet almost seven in ten respondents reported funding growth primarily from their own balance sheets.

At the same time, only one-third believed the tax system was supportive of entrepreneurship. Optimism was increasing, but many of the structural concerns remained unchanged.

2025: Confidence peaks, scaling challenges sharpen

By 2025, confidence reached its highest level, with 71% of respondents expecting growth. However, beneath this positive headline sat a less encouraging picture.

Only 24% believed sufficient financial incentives existed to support scaling, while only 25% felt government measures were effective in encouraging entrepreneurs to continue growing rather than selling their businesses. At the same time, labour costs, competition for talent and recruitment challenges continued to feature prominently.

The data points to a consistent conclusion: Irish businesses increasingly want to scale, but many continue to face the same obstacles that existed three years earlier.

The finding that matters most

If there is one finding that deserves particular attention, it is this: 83% of respondents in 2025 stated that their ambition is to build a large, enduring company rather than pursue an early exit strategy. Only 19% reported seriously considering a sale in order to de-risk.

This matters because it challenges one of the most persistent assumptions surrounding entrepreneurship. The evidence suggests Irish founders do not primarily aspire to build businesses for quick exits.

They aspire to create lasting organisations, generate employment, expand internationally and contribute to Ireland's economic future. The ambition already exists. The question is whether access to capital, talent, leadership capability and supportive policy can keep pace with that ambition.

83% of respondents in 2025 stated that their ambition is to build a large, enduring company rather than pursue an early exit strategy.

A wider evidence base tells a similar story

The Enterprise Barometer is not the only lens through which we examine these questions.

KPMG's Global Family Business Report 2026, based on insights from almost 2,000 leaders across 41 countries, identifies talent attraction as the number one people challenge facing family businesses globally.

The research also highlights the importance of governance, risk management and long-term leadership succession in sustaining growth. These findings closely mirror concerns emerging from the Irish market.

Similarly, KPMG's Global Tech Report 2026 identifies an important shift among private enterprises: organisations are moving beyond broad technology investment towards more focused innovation strategies, particularly around AI and digital transformation.

That trend is reflected in our own 2025 findings, where prioritisation of innovation increased significantly amongst Irish businesses.

Taken together, these studies suggest that the challenges facing Irish scale-ups are not unique. They are shared by founder-led businesses and entrepreneurial organisations across the world.

Global perspectives from KPMG's Private Enterprise leaders

One of the advantages of KPMG's global Private Enterprise network is our ability to observe how scaling Irish businesses navigate growth across different markets, sectors and economic environments.

While local conditions vary, the experiences of successful Irish scale-ups are remarkably consistent. Four leaders from KPMG's global Private Enterprise network identify themes that strongly reinforce the findings emerging from Ireland.

The Irish organisations that scale most successfully in North America are those that professionalise before they are forced to. Governance, leadership capability and decision-making discipline are not signs of maturity. They are enablers of growth.

Conor Moore

Global head of Private Enterprise

North America

Across North America, Conor sees ambitious founder-led businesses reaching inflection points where growth begins to outstrip founder capacity.

The organisations that successfully make the transition to scale are often those that invest early in leadership, governance and organisational capability, allowing them to sustain growth rather than react to it.

Innovation creates opportunity, but ecosystem access creates outcomes. Businesses accelerate when they can connect to the right markets, networks and expertise at the right time.

Carolina de Oliveira

Head of Private Enterprise, Latin America

Global Emerging Giants programme lead

Carolina's experience working with high-growth businesses globally highlights the importance of ecosystems. Successful scale-up programmes do more than provide learning. They create access to peer networks, market opportunities, mentors and commercial connections that accelerate growth and shorten learning cycles.

International growth is rarely constrained by ambition. More often, it is constrained by capability.

Euan West

Head of Private Enterprise

UK and EMA

Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Euan consistently sees leadership capability emerge as a critical differentiator between domestic success and international growth.

Structured development, peer learning and targeted support can accelerate an organisation's ability to enter new markets and manage greater complexity.

Irish businesses that endure in ASPAC balance entrepreneurial ambition with long-term stewardship. Growth is strongest when governance, talent and succession planning evolve alongside commercial success.

Robyn Langsford

Global head of family business

ASPAC

Robyn's work with family-owned and founder-led businesses highlights the importance of resilience alongside growth.

Organisations that achieve sustained success typically invest in people, governance and future leadership with the same commitment they bring to commercial expansion.

Given the importance of family and founder influence within Ireland's indigenous business base, this insight is particularly relevant.

The global academic perspective

Deeper perspectives on the start-up to scale-up journey extend beyond surveyed evidence and advisory support. Our work with Cambridge Judge Business School Executive Education has been additionally insightful. Cambridge Judge is globally recognised for translating cutting-edge entrepreneurship research into practical programmes that help founders and leadership teams scale businesses, access growth ecosystems and navigate the challenges of international expansion.

Since 2022, KPMG have been working with Cambridge Judge, combining their expertise with our practical business experience to help ambitious companies build the capabilities required for sustainable growth.

Together, we have contributed to initiatives that help ambitious businesses access the insights, networks and capabilities needed to accelerate growth. Examples include support for high-growth businesses through programmes such as the Emerging Giants, an initiative covering a range of university collaboration, in addition to Cambridge Judge. And our collective involvement as founding members of Skills Symphony, a cross-sector collaboration focused on strengthening leadership and workforce capability for future growth.

These initiatives reinforce the consistent lesson reflected through the Enterprise Barometer findings and the views of KPMG experts: scaling is rarely driven by funding alone. Businesses achieve sustainable growth when access to capital is complemented by leadership capability, innovation, strong networks and the right ecosystem of support.

The challenge facing most growth-stage businesses is not a lack of ambition. It is developing the leadership capability, organisational structures and strategic discipline required to scale successfully. Through our work with KPMG in the UK and Ireland, we seek to develop these capabilities before growth demands them.

Youping Han

Director of Accounts and Strategic Initiatives

Cambridge Judge Business School

What these insights mean for scaling Irish businesses

What is striking about these global perspectives is how closely they align with what Irish businesses have been telling us through the Enterprise Barometer.

When founders speak about access to talent, leadership capability, networks, capital and market opportunities, they are describing many of the same challenges faced by entrepreneurs internationally.

Likewise, when 83% of Irish entrepreneurs express a desire to build enduring organisations, they demonstrate a mindset consistent with successful entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world.

Ireland does not have an ambition problem. If anything, ambition is one of the country's greatest strengths.

The challenge is ensuring that businesses can access the leadership development, market connections, ecosystem support, governance structures and growth capital required to transform ambition into sustained international success.

What would move the needle?

Based on three years of Enterprise Barometer findings, three priorities stand out.

Capital that follows the whole journey.

Nearly seven in ten scaling businesses are still funding growth from their own balance sheets rather than external capital.

A wider range of patient, growth-stage funding options — not just at seed stage, but through the later, more capital-intensive phases of scaling — would let more businesses grow on their own terms rather than being forced into an early sale or a foreign listing to access the capital they need.
A tax environment that rewards staying and building.

Three years running, fewer than a third of respondents have viewed the tax regime as genuinely supportive of entrepreneurship, and ownership-retention measures such as Capital Gains Tax reform remain a consistent ask.

With 83% of founders telling us they want to build enduring companies rather than exit early, the policy opportunity is to remove the friction that currently makes staying the harder financial choice.
A talent and governance strategy built for indigenous business.

Competition for skilled workers from multinationals, recruitment difficulty, and rising labour costs have featured in every edition of this survey, and our global family business research points to the same challenge internationally.

Indigenous businesses cannot out-spend larger multinational employers, but targeted measures — from apprenticeship and upskilling pathways to more flexible approaches to remote and regional hiring — could help scaling companies compete on more even terms.

Strengthening governance and risk management alongside this, particularly in family-owned businesses preparing for generational transition, will matter just as much as talent itself.

Conclusion

The central message from three years of Enterprise Barometer research is both encouraging and challenging.

Irish entrepreneurs want to build. They want to grow. They want to create enduring organisations with global reach. The evidence suggests that ambition is not the constraint.

Rather, the opportunity lies in strengthening the ecosystem around ambitious businesses, ensuring that talent, leadership capability, governance, capital and policy support evolve alongside their growth aspirations.

The findings from Ireland and the experience of KPMG's global Private Enterprise leaders point in the same direction. Scaling is rarely the result of a single breakthrough. It is typically the product of sustained capability building, supported by the right ecosystem, at the right moment in a company's growth journey.

For Ireland's next generation of scaling businesses, that may be the most important lesson of all.