The Fastest-Growing Companies in Northern Ireland | 2026

Possibly one of Northern Ireland’s most famous businesses is the story of the DeLorean.

Back in 1978, DeLorean struck a deal to set up shop with a factory near the Twinbrook industrial estate in Dunmurry, not far from Belfast. This move not only created a huge number of jobs for the area but also promised to churn out 30,000 DeLorean cars annually. It was a game-changer for the area, especially in the context of Belfast’s declining textile industry.

But back to the future, we’re looking at Northern Ireland’s economic landscape in 2026, in our third part of the UK’s fastest-growing companies.

Discover the Northern Irish business landscape

Before we get into the companies that made the list, let’s take a wider look and explore Northern Ireland’s business landscape overall. Currently in Northern Ireland, there are 79.0k active companies. Out of those active companies, 20.8k are headquartered in Belfast, approximately 26% of the total.

Industries and sectors

When it comes to industries in Northern Ireland, we continue to see overlap of the same three industries across all of the UK’s nations.

The top three industries for Northern Ireland currently are:
Property development and construction – 9.9%
Tradespeople and trade services – 6.3%
Restaurants, pubs, cafes and takeaways – 5.3%

Northern Ireland however is the first nation in our analysis to have Cars, motorcycles and other road vehicles at fourth place, making up 4.5% of all companies, with Automotive dealerships taking up the largest share of those companies.

Application software, which is the third most populous sector in England, and at second in Scotland, still makes it into Northern Ireland’s top five list at number five — and remains a huge industry across the UK.

Gender balance of directors

In Northern Ireland, 61% of active companies have exclusively male directors, while 12% have all-women directors, and 18% are led by director teams with an equal gender split.

Foundations and cessations

Company cessations hit an all-time high in Northern Ireland in 2025, when there were 15.5k cessations. That’s a huge 98% increase from 2024.

Looking at company foundations, numbers grew steadily from 2015 until 2024. However, foundations dropped in 2025, from 17.7k (2024) down to 11.4k. But still remain higher than they were in 2022.

Equity investment in Northern Ireland

Our annual report, The Deal, examines all equity investment into UK companies in 2025.
In 2025, Northern Ireland recorded the biggest increase in deal activity, with the number of deals rising by 13.2%. First-time deals also increased significantly, up 68.2%.

Overall, Northern Ireland accounted for 1.3% of all deals made, and 0.5% of all money invested.

Northern Ireland’s fastest-growing companies

To identify the fastest-growing companies in Northern Ireland, we’ve calculated turnover growth between each company’s two most recent financial statements.

To be included in the analysis, a company must have had comparable statements for the last two financial years, reported at least £100k in turnover in their base financial statement, and hit one of our Growth Signals.

To make our list of England, Wales, and Scotland’s fastest-growing companies, we used data from the Beauhurst platform, which was used in conjunction with research from the Sunday Times to create the Sunday Times Hundred. This ranking, published in the Sunday Times in June, ranks the UK’s fastest growing companies by sales growth over a three year period.

Northern Ireland’s fastest-growing companies

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Want to stay ahead of the curve and track Northern Ireland’s most dynamic scaleups, along with fast-growing businesses across the UK and key European markets such as Germany? Beauhurst provides the intelligence you need to identify the companies shaping the economy of tomorrow.

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