The headline number looks reassuring. AIM companies raised £2.7bn in 2025, a 44 per cent jump on the year before. Trading volumes improved, the index rallied sharply off its spring lows, and several new listings delivered solid early returns.
Yet read the detail of Allenby Capital’s latest AIM market update and a more uncomfortable picture emerges. This was not a broad-based renaissance. It was a recovery powered by one outsized transaction, foreign buyers, and a shrinking population of quoted companies.
In other words, AIM stabilised in 2025. It did not heal.
London’s junior market Aim stabilised last year but it is not healing, says Ian Lyall
One deal made the year look better than it was
The £2.7bn fundraising figure flatters to deceive. More than £1.1bn of that total came from a single transaction: Rosebank Industries’ reverse takeover of Electrical Components International. Strip that out and AIM’s capital-raising year looks far more modest.
That distortion matters because it highlights how thin activity still is beneath the surface. Further fundraises rose just 3 per cent year on year, and the median admission raise was only £3.6m. Most companies were still tapping the market for survival capital, not growth funding.
AIM can function on small raises, but a market dominated by one blockbuster deal is not a healthy ecosystem.
The IPO drought is easing, but only just
There were 22 new joiners in 2025. That is better than the dire post-2021 years, but still miles below the long-term average of roughly 70 admissions a year.
More telling is where those companies came from. Seven migrated from the Aquis Exchange. Two dropped down from the Main Market. AIM is increasingly a venue for re-listings and restructurings, not first-time flotations.
Performance has been mixed. The median return from 2025 admissions was a respectable 11.8 per cent, but the dispersion was extreme. Richmond Hill Resources is up 180 per cent. Several others are down more than 50 per cent. AIM remains a market of sharp elbows, not gentle averages.
The quiet crisis: more companies left than joined
The most sobering number in the report is not about fundraising or performance. It is this: AIM ended 2025 with just 619 companies.
That is down from 685 at the start of the year and far below the market’s 2007 peak. In 2025 alone, 88 companies left AIM, four times the number that joined.
Some exits were benign. Twenty-six companies were acquired. But 37 chose to delist voluntarily, nine entered administration, and several were forced out due to regulatory or adviser issues.
A market that consistently shrinks, even in a ‘recovery’ year, should worry policymakers and investors alike.
UK plc is still on sale
If there was one genuinely booming segment of AIM activity in 2025, it was takeovers.
Twenty-six AIM companies were acquired, with an average bid premium of 52 per cent. Nearly half of those buyers were overseas, and North American acquirers alone accounted for almost half of the total deal value.
The logic is brutal and simple. UK small caps are cheap. Sterling is weak. Ownership is fragmented. Boards are relatively bid-friendly. Public market valuations are not reflecting asset value.
Until UK equities rerate meaningfully, AIM will remain less a growth market and more a hunting ground.
Liquidity improved, but remains historically weak
Trading volumes did tick up. The median AIM stock traded 3.3 per cent of its market capitalisation per month in 2025, ahead of 2024 but still below the post-Covid surge of 2021.
In absolute terms, monthly trading values rose to £3.94bn, reversing several years of decline. That is progress, but context matters. In 2021, monthly trading averaged more than £8bn.
Liquidity is no longer collapsing, but it is not yet strong enough to support a vibrant primary market.
What 2025 really tells us about AIM
The most honest reading of 2025 is that AIM found a floor, not a new runway.
Capital is flowing again, but selectively. Investors are willing to back quality stories and credible management teams, but patience is thin. Dealmakers see value everywhere, but mainly because valuations are depressed. New listings can work, but only with the right pricing and narrative.
AIM survived 2025. That in itself is an achievement after several punishing years. But survival is not the same as revival.
Without a sustained rerating of UK equities, stronger domestic institutional participation, and a return of genuine growth IPOs, AIM risks becoming a market that feeds global buyers rather than compounds long-term capital.
The danger is not that AIM collapses. It is that it slowly fades, deal by deal, company by company, until the recovery looks like little more than an orderly exit.
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