Overview
- KfW’s annual Gründungsmonitor, published Tuesday, counted 690,000 people starting businesses in 2025 in its representative survey.
- About 483,000 started as a side business, or 70% of all starts, and 21% of them plan to switch to full-time within a year.
- Younger people led the shift, with 40% of founders under 30 and the average founder age dipping to 34.2 years.
- More than one-fifth of young founders moved straight from university into self-employment, pointing to a growing campus-to-startup path.
- KfW links the rise to income needs and media role models yet notes overall founding remains far below 2002’s roughly 1.5 million.