The City Startup Atlas
One city at a time, mapped. Each atlas plots a city's startup clusters on an interactive district map — which companies sit where, what they sell, when each industry took root, and the founding stories behind the pins, with filters for cluster, era and story type, and fact cards along the way.
20 cities live — from Shenzhen to Miami
Shenzhen · Atlas №1 — The Hardware Capital
25 companies across 10 districts: from Shekou's 1980s joint-stock experiments (Ping An, Vanke) to Huaqiangbei's electronics bazaar, Huawei's Bantian campus, BYD's EV empire in Pingshan and Nanshan's robot wave — DJI, UBTech, Pudu and the $200M-funded humanoid lab LimX. Plus 8 fact cards, a 5-era timeline and a district cheat sheet.
Open the Shenzhen atlas →Hangzhou · Atlas №2 — The Dragon City
24 companies across 10 districts: Alibaba's lakeside-flat origin and Yuhang campus, Ant's halted $37B IPO, Binjiang's 72 km² of giants (Geely, Hikvision, Unitree), the Tonglu courier cradle — and the Six Little Dragons, from DeepSeek's trillion-dollar moment to Black Myth: Wukong.
Open the Hangzhou atlas →Bengaluru · Atlas №3 — The Talent Capital
20 companies across 10 zones: HAL's 1940 hangars and ISRO's Mars-on-a-movie-budget, Infosys's $250 start, Flipkart's two-bedroom flat and the $16B Walmart exit, Zerodha's zero-VC empire, the UPI fintech wave — plus two honest warning lights, Byju's and Dunzo, and India's first AI unicorn.
Open the Bengaluru atlas →London · Atlas №4 — The Fintech Capital
19 companies across 10 districts: Lloyd's 1686 coffee house and Reuters' pigeons, the Shoreditch neobank wars (Monzo, Wise, Checkout), Revolut's $45B Canary Wharf perch, the King's Cross AI quarter around DeepMind — and Powa's $2.7B warning light.
Open the London atlas →Austin · Atlas №5 — Silicon Hills
20 companies across 10 districts: Dell's $1,000 dorm room, Whole Foods' flood-rebuilt aisle, Samsung's $17B fab, Giga Texas and the Bastrop Musk belt — plus a record $7.19B funding year and Apptronik's humanoids walking out of UT.
Open the Austin atlas →Berlin · Atlas №6 — Poor but Sexy
18 companies across 10 districts: Siemens' 1847 workshop, the Rocket Internet clone factory and its mafia, Kreuzberg's music-software houses (Ableton, Native Instruments), the N26–Trade Republic fintech duel — and Gorillas' 22-month rocket-and-crater.
Open the Berlin atlas →Singapore · Atlas №7 — The Sovereign Startup
19 companies across 10 districts: Creative's Sound Blaster, the state-drawn one-north blueprint, Sea's $200B peak and Grab's victory over Uber, Temasek's sovereign capital, Dyson's power-station HQ — and Hyflux's 34,000-investor warning.
Open the Singapore atlas →Stockholm · Atlas №8 — The Unicorn Factory
17 companies across 10 districts: Ericsson's 1876 repair shop, Minecraft's Söder bedroom, the Spotify-vs-piracy origin story, Klarna's record 2025 IPO, the Lovable AI spring — and Northvolt, Europe's biggest startup failure, kept on the map as a warning.
Open the Stockholm atlas →Tallinn · Atlas №9 — The e-State's Startup Capital
15 companies across 10 districts: the Skype office that minted a mafia (and took its final call in 2025), Wise and Bolt's Vana-Lõuna campuses, Cybernetica's X-Road e-state, Starship's sidewalk robots, the deeptech-and-defense turn — and Planet42's hard lesson for a nation of retail investors.
Open the Tallinn atlas →Tokyo · Atlas №10 — The Sleeping Giant Wakes
21 companies across 10 districts: Sony's bombed-out 1946 workshop, Shibuya's Bit Valley and Mt. Gox's 850,000 lost Bitcoin, Mercari's drought-breaking unicorn, Sakana AI's $2.6B two-year sprint, ispace's survivable moon crashes — and the ¥10-trillion plan to wake the sleeping giant.
Open the Tokyo atlas →Seoul · Atlas №11 — The Chaebol Republic's Startup Rebellion
19 companies across 10 districts: Samsung Town and the chaebol gravity wells, Coupang's $60B New York bell, Pangyo's game-and-AI valley (Naver, Kakao, Krafton, Rebellions), Teheran-ro's fintech street — and the scars of Terra's $40B crater and the TMON summer.
Open the Seoul atlas →São Paulo · Atlas №12 — Nubank Country
15 companies across 10 districts: the 1890 coffee exchange, Faria Lima's 'Brazilian Wall Street', Nubank's purple rebellion from Pinheiros, Cubo's 12-storey startup city, Osasco's delivery giants (iFood, Mercado Livre) — and the winter that taught Faria Lima margins.
Open the São Paulo atlas →Toronto · Atlas №13 — The AI Capital That Taught Machines to See
16 companies across 10 districts: the 2012 AlexNet lab that started the deep-learning era, Cohere's King West HQ, the MaRS–Vector block, BlackBerry's Waterloo, ATI's Markham garage — and Sidewalk Labs, the smart city that died on the waterfront.
Open the Toronto atlas →Amsterdam · Atlas №14 — The Canal Ring That Invented Shares
14 companies across 10 districts: the city that invented shares in 1602, Adyen's ≈€50B canal-house fintech, Booking.com's waterfront campus, the Zuidas trading floors, Picnic's milk-floats — and VanMoof's hard hardware lesson.
Open the Amsterdam atlas →Paris · Atlas №15 — The Republic's AI Coronation
14 companies across 10 districts: the Sorbonne's eight centuries of talent, Mistral's $14B champion in the 1er, Niel's Station F–42–Free trinity, Ledger's Marais vault, the Saclay brain belt — and the Sigfox & Ynsect warning lights.
Open the Paris atlas →Zurich · Atlas №16 — The Spin-off Machine on the Lake
15 companies across 10 districts: ETH's 530-spin-off engine, Google's biggest campus outside the US, Climeworks' carbon vacuums, On's garden-hose soles, Zug's Crypto Valley — and the March 2023 weekend that ended 167 years of Credit Suisse.
Open the Zurich atlas →Sydney · Atlas №17 — The Harbour City's Software Empire
14 companies across 10 districts: the CSIRO lab that patented Wi-Fi, the Sydney team that built Google Maps, Atlassian's A$10K credit-card start, Canva's Surry Hills empire, UNSW's atom-scale quantum race — and Nuix, the float that ended in court.
Open the Sydney atlas →Munich · Atlas №18 — Germany's Deep-Tech Capital
15 companies across 10 districts: Siemens, BMW and Allianz, TUM's 52-unicorn alumni engine, Celonis and Personio, Helsing's $18B defense bet, Isar Aerospace's crash-then-orbit — and the Wirecard and Lilium collapses.
Open the Munich atlas →Dubai · Atlas №19 — The Free-Zone Launchpad
15 companies across 10 districts: the port, airline and property champions, Dubai Internet City where Careem, Souq.com and Tabby were born, DIFC's fintech hive, Kitopi's cloud kitchens — and Abraaj, the region's biggest fund collapse.
Open the Dubai atlas →Miami · Atlas №20 — The Capital Migration
15 companies across 10 districts: the cruise lines and Burger King, Citrix and Chewy in Broward, the 2021 'How can I help?' migration, Citadel's Brickell HQ, OpenStore in Wynwood — and the arena that wore FTX's name.
Open the Miami atlas →How every atlas works
Every atlas is editorial: no company pays for a pin, and inclusion is not a recommendation. Figures come from official statistics and public company information, cited in each atlas's methodology note.
Cities on the research desk
The atlas grows continuously — new cities, new pins and updated figures land on this page first.
