A crop of ‘breakthrough’ social enterprises are emerging. They are growing fast, securing investment and partners, and reaching millions of people. Of course they do not prove that all social enterprises scale, but they certainly show that they can.Five years ago, some had an assumption, some a question: start-ups are great for innovation, but do we need to rely on large and multinational companies to reach scale? Emerging evidence suggests ‘probably not’. Data today does not prove the opposite – that SMEs are better than multinationals for scale – but it does challenge those initial assumptions.