Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash
More people are starting businesses than ever before. Fewer of them are ready to do so.
Every year, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) surveys hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of economies to produce the most comprehensive portrait of entrepreneurship on the planet. The 2025–2026 edition does not disappoint — but it is also, in places, deeply sobering. For anyone who cares about first-time founders, the findings tell a clear and urgent story: more people than ever are stepping into entrepreneurship, and the systems designed to support them are failing to keep pace.
Youth entrepreneurship is expanding — in 33 of 48 economies, adults under 35 are more likely to be starting a business than their older counterparts. In Germany and the United Kingdom, over half of all new entrepreneurs are under 35. In Angola, Brazil, and Thailand, founders are embracing artificial intelligence faster than their counterparts in Stockholm or Warsaw. Purpose-driven motivations are rising.
And yet the foundations beneath this surge are conspicuously weak. Entrepreneurial education at school level is the lowest-rated support condition in the majority of economies studied. Fear of failure is suppressing participation on a scale that dwarfs most policy interventions. The dominant reason people cite for starting a business, across nearly every income group, is not opportunity — it is the scarcity of alternatives.
Entrepreneurship, in short, is becoming both more popular and more precarious. What follows is an attempt to understand why — and what it would take to close the gap.
Young Founders Are Showing Up — The World Just Is Not Ready for Them
Youth entrepreneurship is expanding across developed and emerging economies alike
One of the most significant data points in the entire report is this: in 33 out of 48 economies, adults aged 18–34 are more likely to be starting or running a business than those aged 35–64. In Germany, Cyprus, and Slovenia, young adults are twice as likely to be engaged in early-stage entrepreneurship as older adults. In 10 economies — including the United Kingdom and Germany — over half of all new entrepreneurs are under 35.
This is not simply a feature of young, fast-growing middle-income economies such as Angola or India, where youthful populations naturally skew the numbers. It is happening in some of the world’s most mature, developed economies. A new generation is stepping forward, and they are doing so at scale.
The support system at the foundation is the weakest link globally
Here is where the data turns uncomfortable. Despite this surge in young entrepreneurial activity, entrepreneurial education at school level is rated the lowest-scoring of all 13 Entrepreneurial Framework Conditions — the measures GEM uses to assess how well an economy actually supports people in starting and growing businesses — in 33 out of 53 economies. The GEM report describes this as “undermining long-term entrepreneurial capacity at its very foundation.”
Only four out of 53 economies meet or exceed sufficiency across all 13 conditions. The world, in other words, is not producing entrepreneurially prepared young people — it is producing young people who start businesses in spite of their education, not because of it. The gap between who is founding and what they have been equipped with is vast, and it is structural.
At Edventures, this is the gap we were built to address. When the most foundational layer of the ecosystem is consistently its weakest pillar, accessible and personalised coaching is not a nice-to-have — it is a critical infrastructure need. We explore what this gap looks like in practice in our piece on young founder hurdles and how to turn them into advantages.
Fear of Failure Is Holding Back Millions of Potential Founders
Two in five opportunity-aware adults will not take the leap
The GEM report identifies fear of failure as “one of the most powerful brakes on entrepreneurial participation” globally. In the majority of participating economies, at least two in five adults who already recognise a good business opportunity are nevertheless deterred from acting on it. They can see the door. They just will not walk through it.
For first-time founders, this fear is at its most acute. Without prior experience to draw on, without a mentor in their corner, and often without access to credible guidance, the perceived cost of getting it wrong can feel paralysing. The GEM data confirms this is not a personal weakness — it is a global pattern, replicated across cultures, income levels, and geographies.
Failure, framed correctly, becomes fuel
There is an important nuance in the data that offers genuine hope. While fear of failure deters entry into entrepreneurship, the lived experience of having exited a business does not. Adults who have already closed or exited a venture are measurably more likely to intend to start again. The report is explicit: failure, in practice, often strengthens rather than extinguishes entrepreneurial intent.
The implication is clear. What holds people back is not the reality of failure — it is the anticipation of it, compounded by a lack of support to help them reframe risk as a learning process. This is precisely the work of great coaching: helping founders move from paralysis to informed action, one considered step at a time. For a closer look at why a growing generation is choosing to embrace that risk anyway, read our breakdown of why Gen Z is quitting corporate life to start businesses — and why it’s working.
The Entrepreneurship–AI Divide Is Growing — and Emerging Economies Are Leading the Race
Founders in the Global South are embracing AI with urgency and conviction
The conventional narrative around AI and entrepreneurship assumes that the most digitally advanced economies are leading adoption. The GEM data disrupts that assumption in a striking way.
When asked whether they expect AI to become very important to their business, it is entrepreneurs in Angola, Brazil, Thailand, Costa Rica, Chile, and the UAE who show the highest levels of confidence and expectation. These are not the world’s wealthiest or most technologically mature economies — and yet their founders are leaning into AI with the greatest conviction.
This reflects something that field researchers and practitioners working across the Global South have long observed: entrepreneurs in rapidly growing economies are not waiting for permission or infrastructure parity. They are adopting tools that work, with urgency, because the stakes are higher and the margins for error are thinner. When you cannot afford to waste six months moving in the wrong direction, a tool that helps you validate faster, think more clearly, and avoid known pitfalls is not a luxury — it is a competitive necessity.
The AI awareness gap is a structural risk for entrepreneurial ecosystems
The GEM report frames this starkly: in 19 out of 48 economies, fewer than one in three new entrepreneurs expect AI to become very important to their business. This uneven adoption risks creating a “two-tier entrepreneurial economy — one digitally empowered, the other left structurally behind.” The consequences are not just individual — they are systemic. Economies whose founders fail to integrate AI tools early will find their innovation capacity diminishing relative to those that do.
For Edventures, this finding validates a strategic decision we made early on: to build for a global founder, not a regional one. The first-time founders in Brazil, India, Thailand, and across the African continent are not waiting for Silicon Valley or Stockholm to solve their problems. They are actively seeking tools that can help them move faster, think more clearly, and build with less wasted effort. We examine why generic AI tools fall short for this audience — and what purpose-built alternatives offer instead — in our article on why purpose-built AI matters for first-time founders.
More Founders Are Being Pushed Into Entrepreneurship — Ready or Not
Necessity is now one of the dominant drivers of new venture creation globally
The GEM report asks new entrepreneurs across 48 economies why they started their business. The findings challenge several comfortable assumptions. Across nearly all income groups, the motivation “to earn a living because jobs are scarce” remains the most consistently prevalent driver — with over seven in ten participating economies reporting majority agreement year on year.
This is not simply a story about developing economies where formal employment is limited. In six upper-income economies — including the United States, Canada, and the Gulf states — more than two in three new entrepreneurs agreed with this motivation. Across Latin America and significant parts of Africa and Asia, the proportion is even higher.
What this tells us is that for a substantial and growing share of first-time founders, entrepreneurship is not a free choice made from a position of security and preparation. It is a response to economic pressure, labour market instability, and the closing of other doors. These are founders who did not necessarily plan to start a company — they arrived at it because the alternative felt worse. That context shapes everything about what they need from a support system.
Young founders are caught between purpose and survival
This finding connects with one of the report’s subtler but most important observations about young entrepreneurs specifically. While 51% of early-stage entrepreneurs globally say they are motivated by a desire to “make a difference in the world,” and 84% say they always consider social or environmental implications in their decisions, it is older entrepreneurs who are more consistently able to act on these values in practice.
Younger founders hold the purpose — but they are under acute financial pressure that forces survival to take priority over impact. They are not less idealistic. They are more financially constrained, more likely to be necessity-driven, and more likely to be building without a safety net. The tension between wanting to create something meaningful and simply needing the venture to generate income is one of the defining emotional experiences of the early founder journey.
This is the tension that most entrepreneurship programmes fail to address honestly. They teach the tools of business building, but they rarely help young founders navigate the psychological and practical reality of building under pressure. At Edventures, we believe that acknowledging this tension — and coaching founders through it, rather than past it — is the only way to help them build ventures that are both sustainable and meaningful. Our complete guide for first-time entrepreneurs walks through the practical steps to building something viable without losing sight of your why.
The System Is Failing First-Time Founders — But That Can Change
The GEM 2025–2026 report is, above all, a portrait of a world in transition. Entrepreneurship is becoming younger, more global, more purpose-driven, and more necessity-shaped. At the same time, the infrastructure that should be supporting this wave of new founders — education, coaching, finance, AI access — remains patchy, unequal, and in some dimensions actively deteriorating.
The founders showing up today, particularly across the Global South and among the under-35 age group, deserve better than a system that was never designed for them. They deserve personalised coaching that meets them where they are — at the idea stage, before the first big mistake, in the language they speak, at the moment they need it most. They deserve access to AI tools that reduce the cost of learning by doing. And they deserve a support infrastructure that treats entrepreneurship as a skill to be developed, not a talent you either have or you do not.
That is the mission Edventures is committed to. Not because it is a market opportunity — though it is — but because the data is clear, the need is real, and the founders are already out there, building anyway. Our job is to make sure they do not have to do it alone.
We are building the world’s first AI-powered platform for personalised entrepreneurship coaching, designed for first-time founders worldwide. Test out our MVP at alpha.edventures.ai.