The 37 coolest startup CEOs in UK tech

Weave.ai has not made any product announcements yet but earlier reports indicate that it was working towards transforming the mobile experience using artificial intelligence (AI), contextual search, and deeplinking, learning from users as it goes and offering them information and services from the other apps on a phone.

CEO Rodolfo Rosini previously cofounded AI company Storybricks, which used AI in video games. He was also the CEO of security company Cellcrypt.

Total amount raised: $118,000 (£80,000)

Headcount: 5

Twitter: @rodolfor

Roland Lamb’s startup ROLI wants to revolutionise the piano.

It’s behind the “Seaboard” — a new kind of musical instrument that looks superficially similar to an electric keyboard, but with far more control and customisability.

The former philosophy student’s company launched its third instrument — the Rise 49 — in January 2016, and it has bagged $20 million (£14 million) in VC money, with backers including Index Ventures and Balderton Capital.

ROLI has multiple design awards under its belt — most recently the “Best of Innovation” award at CES in Las Vegas this year.

Total amount raised: $20 million (£14 million)

Headcount: 81

Twitter: @RolandLamb

Yeomans is CEO of London startup Yavli, which first started its life as a software company that served sponsored content to millennial audiences. Around two years ago, the company pivoted in response to the huge rise in consumers using ad blocking software.

Yavli’s software allows publishers to specifically target their ad blocker audiences with sponsored content. Last year, the company claimed to have more than 100 publishers on board.

Headcount: 8

Twitter: @tyeo86

Oxford grad Hiroki Takeuchi was so convinced of the idea for GoCardless that he and cofounder Matt Robinson decamped to Silicon Valley’s legendary accelerator Y Combinator to get it off the ground. The startup uses smart technology to make it much easier for businesses to accept and process direct debits.

GoCardless’s clients include TripAdvisor, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and Box. The company is currently in the process of raising a big new round of funding, as well as expanding across Europe.

Total amount raised: $11.8 million (£8.1 million)

Headcount: 69

Twitter: @hirokitakeuchi

Former equities trader Jason Trost founded Smarkets in 2008. The site is a peer-to-peer online betting exchange that lets traders agree odds on everything from sports to politics.

Smarkets charges a base rate of 2% on transactions, which Trost says is 60% cheaper than competitor Betfair's base rate. The Sunday Times reports that Smarkets attracted over £200 million in trades in 2013.

Trost told Business Insider that his site did £10 million in revenue in 2015, and is processing around £140 million per month through the site.

Read Business Insider UK’s full interview with Jason Trost »

Total amount raised: $2.7 million (£1.9 million)

Headcount: 55

Twitter: @jasontrost

Jason Kingsley is an unconventional CEO.

For starters, he’s a knight. And not just the run-of-the-mill, honoured-by-the-Queen-for-services-to-industry knight. Kingsley is a real knight. He’s a keen jouster, breeds warhorses, and spends tens of thousands on custom suits of armour.

When he’s not on horseback, he’s running Rebellion, an Oxford-based gaming company he cofounded with his brother in 1992.

Its main focus is video games, creating titles for a variety of platforms, but also has smaller operations in other areas, including book publishing and comic books. It owns 2000AD, the comic anthology responsible for the famous dystopian Judge Dredd series.

Kingsley is also on the board of TIGA, a games industry body, and Rebellion plans to launch its first virtual reality game this year — a remake of classic arcade tank-shooter “Battlezone.”

Read Business Insider UK’s full profile of Jason Kingsley and Rebellion Games »

Headcount: 214

Twitter: @RebellionJason

The downside to crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo is that you don’t get any stake in the eventual company your investment helps build. When these companies cash out, it can sometimes leave an bitter taste in supporters’ mouths, as was the case for some backers of VR headset Oculus when it sold to Facebook.

That’s not the case with Seedrs, a London-based equity crowdfunding platform.

Users invest (as little as £10), and in return, they get a share of the company. It’s clearly an attractive prospect: The company recently recently announced that £100 million has been invested through its platform.

It was cofounded by Jeff Lynn, a former corporate lawyer, who serves as CEO. In June 2015, tennis pro Andy Murray joined as an advisor.

Headcount: 46

Twitter: @jeffseedrs

Blockchain is a London-based bitcoin startup, with cofounder Peter Smith in the role of CEO and Nic Cary, another cofounder, acting as its public face.

It was launched in 2011, and offers a number of bitcoin services, including a tool for exploring transactions on the blockchain (the public ledger of all bitcoin transactions), and a wallet for holding bitcoin.

In October 2014, it raised $30 million (£20.7 million) in VC funding, which was then the largest ever raise for a bitcoin startup.

Back in July 2015, Peter Smith was chosen to accompanying British Prime Minister David Cameron on a trade mission in South-East Asia along with a host of other more conventional companies. Nic Cary is a regular on the conference circuit, speaking publicly on behalf of Blockchain about the possibilities that bitcoin offers.

Total amount raised: $30 million (£20.7 million)

Headcount: 38

Twitter: @OneMorePeter, @niccary

Adzuna, a search engine for classified listings, lets people discover jobs, cars, and houses online. The company's job- and housing-market data is reportedly used by Prime Minister David Cameron to monitor the UK economy.

The company brought in £2 million in investment in 2015 using crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. 500 investors brought the company over its £1.5 million target. Monro also signed a letter urging David Cameron not to cut immigration to the UK’s tech sector.

Monro launched Adzuna in 2011, having previously worked as COO of property-listing site Zoopla, managing director of online listing site Gumtree, and a senior manager at eBay.

Total amount raised: $9.3 million (£6.4 million)

Headcount: 39

Twitter: @dougall

George Spencer, in his late twenties, is CEO of a proptech startup — Rentify, which provides tools for landlords to manage properties, as well as other rental-focused services. The company takes a cut of a property’s rent in return for managing everything to do with it.

Created in 2011 (and formally launching in 2012), it’s backed by London venture capital firm Balderton Capital, and raised £5.5 million last year.

Total amount raised: $16.5 million (£11.4 million)

Headcount: 60

Twitter: @probablygeorge

Alexandra Chong is the founder of Lulu, the app that lets women review and rate the men they date. She started the company in London in 2010. The site launched with $1 million in investment from VC firms Passion Capital and PROfounders Capital. But it changed focus in 2013 to expand to the US and embrace the college culture there that had helped Tinder grow.

It was announced in June 2015 that Lulu would re-enter the UK market, and that followed Chong’s star-studded wedding which was attended by Google cofounder Sergey Brin and actress Kate Winslet.

Lulu announced in February 2016 that it had been acquired by dating app Badoo, and Chong became the president of that company.

Read Business Insider UK’s full interview with Alexandra Chong »

Total amount raised: $3.5 million (£2.4 million)

Headcount: 13

Twitter: @AlexandraCChong

Miniclip is a British gaming company that often flies under the radar.

It’s 14 years old — practically ancient by startup standards — and got started building browser games before moving to platforms like iOS and Android with the rise of the app economy.

Robert Small, its founder, serves as CEO.

His company hit a number of milestones in 2015. It passed half a billion downloads; Agar.io, one of its most popular titles, was Googled more times in 2015 than “Fallout 4”; and most significantly, Chinese gaming company Tencent bought a majority stake in the company in February.

Headcount: 155

Oxford graduate Husayn Kassai quit his job at Merrill Lynch in 2012 after just a week to focus on building a startup he'd cofounded at university.

That startup was background checking service Onfido, which has now raised over $5 million (£3.5 million) from a wide range of investors, including Spotify backers Wellington Partners and lastminute.com cofounder Brent Hoberman. It is now considered one of Britain's smartest companies.

Onfido — which now employs 72 people across offices in London, San Francisco, and Lisbon — boasts over 625 paying customers, including recruiter Morgan McKinley and Hays, and newspapers like The Daily Mail and the Evening Standard.

Read Business Insider UK’s interview with Hussayn Kassia about how he left investment banking to do a startup here »

Total amount raised: $5.3 million (£3.6 million)

Headcount: 72

Twitter: @HusaynKassai

Chris Morton is the cofounder and CEO of Lyst, a fashion ecommerce platform that allows people to shop from over 10,000 designers and stores in one place.

Lyst, founded in London in 2010, raised $40 million (£28 million) in April with money coming from well-known investors like Accel, Balderton, and DFJ.

Since launching, Lyst has expanded its platform, where users reportedly spend an average of $400 (£277) per order, to over 150 countries.

Total amount raised: $60 million (£41 million)

Headcount: 144

Twitter: @chrismorton

Emily Brooke is the founder and CEO of Blaze, a London startup that has built a laser bike light that can help save cyclists lives.

Blaze's “Laserlight” is designed to improve rider safety by projecting a green laser image five to six metres in front of the cyclist, thereby making them more visible to drivers, pedestrians, and other cyclists.

Brooke, who took part in the first ever Entrepreneur First startup building programme, scored a major win for Blaze in December when it was announced that Santander planned to fit every “Boris bike” in London with a Blaze Laserlight. The deal is said to be worth close to £1 million.

Total amount raised: $500,000 (£345,000)

Headcount: 9

Twitter: @buzzbrooke

Luke Lang and Darren Westlake are the cofounders of Crowdcube, Britain’s biggest crowdfunding website. Over £138 million has been invested over the platform into businesses like burrito chain Chillango and Camden Town Brewery.

Old school City of London stockbroker Numis invested £6 million in the company last July and the pair are working together to do the world’s first crowdfunded initial public offering.

Headcount: 76

Twitter: @lukelang, @dazwest

Kate Unsworth is the CEO and cofounder of Vinaya (formerly Kovert Designs), a London-based fashion startup that makes connected jewellery, including rings and necklaces that buzz when you receive a WhatsApp message or email, for example.

Vinaya raised a $3 million (£2 million) seed round in November with Passion Capital’s Eileen Burbidge leading the round and Bebo’s Michael Birch also taking part.

Vinaya said it was going to use the funding to set up a “research lab” in Shoreditch that would provide insights on brain/human habits that could be used in its product design process.

Read Business Insider UK’s review of a Vinaya ring »

Total amount raised: $3 million (£2 million)

Headcount: 24

Twitter: @kateuns

Kieran O’Neill is the CEO of Thread, which helps customers make sense of the world of fashion by matching them up with their own personal stylist through its platform. The stylist learns about users and suggests clothes that they think would suit them. Users can then purchase the items through the site. Thread is free to use, but the company takes a cut of any purchases that you make.

It was announced in August that Thread had raised $8 million (£5.5 million) from investors including Balderton Capital, Google DeepMind cofounders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, and former Saks Fifth Avenue president Andrew Jennings.

CEO Kieran O'Neill started his first online business in 2003 when he founded video streaming website HolyLemon.com while studying for his GCSE. He eventually sold the site for $1.25 million (£814,000).

Read Business Insider UK’s feature testing out Thread for ourselves »

Total amount raised: $10.5 million (£7.3 million)

Headcount: 18

Twitter: @KieranO

Greg Marsh cofounded home swapping service onefinestay in 2009. Marsh, who is CEO of the company, had a busy year in 2015, raising large amounts of funding and bringing in a top hotel executive.

onefinestay, which allows people to stay in expensive, serviced houses in cities around the world raised $40 million (£25.4 million) in June from a range of well-known investors. Marsh also hired InterContinental’s chief finance officer, Tom Singer, in a bid to beef up his management team.

Total amount raised: $80.9 million (£55.8 million)

Headcount: 304

Twitter: @gregmarsh

The Tab is a network of student news websites run by editorial teams across the UK and US. It started off as a Cambridge student newspaper, founded in 2009 as the university's first online-only paper. It made headlines after The Sun fell for its April Fool's joke about BNP leader Nick Griffin and for its "Rear of the Year" competition.

The company announced that it had raised $3 million (£2 million) from Balderton Capital in December, and the money is going towards the expansion of its US site as well as its new general interest site that’s not about a specific university.

Editor-in-chief Jack Rivlin told The Guardian that The Tab’s had 3.2 million unique visitors in November 2015.

Total amount raised: $3 million (£2 million)

Headcount: 48

Twitter: @marangosgilks, @jackrivlin

Blomfield is the CEO and cofounder of Mondo, a new London fintech startup that’s building a branchless bank using its debit card and accompanying app. Mondo cards are controlled through the app, and show users information about the purchases they make.

Mondo hasn’t fully launched yet, but it has released a version of its card to alpha testers (you can see how we got on with it here).

Before founding Mondo, Blomfield was a cofounder of another London fintech startup: GoCardless. He left the company in 2013, and started Mondo in 2015.

Total amount raised: $10.4 million (£7.2 million)

Headcount: 14

Twitter: @t_blom

Everledger is a startup that wants to make diamond theft a thing of the past.

It uses the blockchain — the ledger of all bitcoin transactions — to make a public record that valuable diamonds can be registered to, recording their unique characteristics. This should make it harder to pawn stolen diamonds, and help cut down on fraud.

The company was created by the Australian Leanne Kemp in 2015, and took part in the Barclays Techstars accelerator in June.

Nearly 900,000 diamonds have been registered to Everledger’s platform already, and another 900,000 are queued up. Later down the line, it intends to start registering other luxury goods.

Read Business Insider UK’s profile of Leanne Kemp and Everledger »

Total amount raised: $118,000 (£81,000)

Headcount: 3

Twitter: @leanne_kemp

Somali-born Ismail Ahmed worked for the UN to help crackdown on money laundering before setting up WorldRemit in 2010. The startup offers an app that lets migrants send money back to family in places like Africa, India, and Latin America, known as remittance.

The company was valued at $500 million (£345 million) in a $100 million (£69 million) funding round last year, led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), which has also backed the likes of Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix. WorldRemit recently secured a further $45 million (£31 million) line of credit to fund growth and is processing 400,000 transactions a month.

Total amount raised: $147 million (£101 million)

Headcount: 163

Mustafa Suleyman and Demis Hassabis cofounded DeepMind with Shane Legg in 2011, before selling it to Google in 2014 for £400 million.

In January, the pair of artificial intelligence (AI) experts pitched their AlphaGo agent against the European champion of board game Go and won. They’re planning to take on the world champion in March.

Over the course of the last year, both Hassabis and Suleyman have acknowledged the potential impact AI could have on humanity. To ensure they get their message across, they have attended several conferences and given talks about the ethics of AI.

Headcount: 150

Twitter: @mustafasuleymn, @demishassabis

Rob Whitehead (CTO) and Herman Narula (CEO) are the two-man founder team behind Improbable, a London startup that wants to be the “Google of simulation.”

The duo went to the University of Cambridge together, and in 2012 founded Improbable, which builds software that can power sophisticated simulations done by others. It provides the engine to do the heavy lifting, so you can get on with the business of actually modelling whatever it is you want to model.

The company’s original focus was on gaming — massive multiplayer game-worlds — but it has applications in science, research, defence, and more.

It landed a $20 million (£14 million) in venture capital funding from well-respected US firm Andreessen Horowitz in 2015 — its second ever investment in the UK.

In November 2015, it officially launched SpatialOS, its operating system. Alongside the launch, it announced an ambitious flagship project — a virtual city run in collaboration with academics to answer questions about modern urban life. “We’re going to have an oracle for an entire city,” Narula told Business Insider. “We’ll be able to answer questions like ‘what happens when we introduce autonomous vehicles,’ or look at interactions between different things that have just been [previously] impossible.”

Read Business Insider UK’s November 2015 interview with Herman Narula »

Total amount raised: $22 million (£15 million)

Headcount: 81

Twitter: @RJFWhite, @HermanNarula

Former Googler Azmat Yusuf founded Citymapper in 2011 as a guide for Londoners to navigate the city's bus network. The app evolved into a multimodal travel platform and today it is used by millions of people worldwide.

In January, Citymapper raised $40 million (£28 million) from Index Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and a number of angel investors.

Citymapper is now available in 31 cities, including Hong Kong, Sydney, New York, Istanbul, Brussels, Tokyo, and San Francisco.

Total amount raised: $50 million (£34 million)

Headcount: 34

Twitter: @azmingo

Silva is the former government technology advisor who was part of the team that created the Tech City UK initiative. He worked closely with George Osborne since 2006, and oversaw the growth of the UK's startup scene, playing a key role in the government's relationship with the growing tech cluster.

Silva left government in 2013, and went to work for VC fund Index Ventures. But he quickly decided to launch his own project, and created East London coworking space Second Home.

It was announced in January that Second Home had raised £7.5 million from investors including Yuri Milner, Tencent chairman Martin Lau, and venture capital firm Index Ventures, and that it would use the money to expand to Lisbon.

Silva is also planning to double the size of Second Home, and his plans include a “huge indoor lake.”

Total amount raised: $10.7 million (£7.4 million)

Headcount: 9

Twitter: @silva

Gareth Williams is the CEO and cofounder of Skyscanner, the Edinburgh-based company behind one of the world’s most popular flight comparison sites.

Williams led the Edinburgh company through a £128 million funding round in January, valuing it at over a billion dollars. He also opened Skyscanner’s first London office at the end of 2015, which is home to a team of engineers, led by former Amazon executive Bryan Dove.

Skyscanner also has offices in Shenzhen, Beijing, Barcelona, Glasgow, Miami, Singapore, and Sofia. During 2015, the company grew the size of its workforce to approximately 800 people.

Total amount raised: $197 million (£136 million)

Headcount: 740

José Neves launched Farfetch in 2008 as a way to marry boutique fashion retailers with customers, many of whom likely didn’t know the products existed. The company has taken over $190 million (£130 million) in funding and is now worth over $1 billion (£690 million), making it a "Unicorn."

The company’s investors include Conde Nast and Index Ventures. It's headquartered in London but has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Guimarães, Porto, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo.

The average users spend over $600 (£400) on Farfetch in a single session and the company is doing over $160 million (£110 million) in revenue per year.

Total amount raised: $194.5 million (£135 million)

Headcount: 909

Twitter: @Farfetch_jose

Button and Wood, Unruly co-CEOs, sold their video ad tech company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in September last year for $90 million (£62.4 million) in cash, plus up to a further $86 million (£59.6 million) if the London-based startup meets its performance targets.

Unruly specializes in serving and analysing video advertising and brand videos that appear outside the confines of YouTube and Facebook. Its technology allows marketers to buy “native” video ad formats using automated technologies and track their performance across social. The company also offers an analytics tool that predicts whether videos are likely to viral.

Unruly posted a 35% increase in revenue year-on-year to $45.9 million (£28.7 million) in 2014.

Read Business Insider UK’s interview with Sarah Wood from September 2015, shortly after Unruly was acquired by News Corp »

Total amount raised: $25 million (£17.4 million)

Headcount: 224

Twitter: @scottbutton, @sarahfwood

Jon Reynolds started SwiftKey straight out of Cambridge University. The mission, according to Reynolds, is “to make it easy for everyone to create and communicate on mobile.” The app, which is available on iPhone and Android, is used by more than 300 million people and relies heavily on artificial intelligence to predict what, exactly, the user is trying to say.

Microsoft was interested and acquired SwiftKey for $250 million (£175 million) in early 2016. The team will be incorporated into the company, meaning that Reynolds is now an employee of Microsoft who will work on AI, an area that Microsoft is intensely focused on.

Total amount raised: $21.6 million (£15 million)

Headcount: 148

Twitter: @thejonreynolds

Sean Murray is the CEO of Hello Games, a Guildford company that is building one of the most ambitious video games ever made. “No Man’s Sky” is an attempt to create an entire universe in an online video game environment, which will contain 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets.

It’s a project of epic scale, and Hello Games has started to show off its progress. Stars like Kanye West, Steven Spielberg, and Elon Musk have all been given demonstrations of the game in 2015.

And the game now has an official launch date: June 2016.

Headcount: 16

Twitter: @NoMansSky

Nigel Eccles is the founder and CEO of Edinburgh-based FanDuel, which is a fantasy sports platform that allows people in North America to create one-day fantasy teams and enter them into leagues with cash prizes.

High-profile investors such as Google Capital, Time Warner Investments and Turner Sports backed FanDuel last summer in a $275 million (£176 million) round, which brought total investment in the company up to $361 million (£234 million).

FanDuel is perhaps the only British unicorn company not to offer its product to people in Britain. But that could be about to change as Eccles has hinted at the possibility of launching FanDuel in the UK for Premier League fans in the near future.

Total amount raised: $361 million (£250 million)

Headcount: 438

Twitter: @nigeleccles

You have, of course, heard of “Candy Crush.” You can’t not. It’s the insanely popular candy-swiping mobile app made by King Digital Entertainment.

Riccardo Zacconi is the man at the wheel at King, and he’s had a very good year: In November 2015, Activision Blizzard (the gaming megacompany behind “Call of Duty,” “Starcraft,”” World of Warcraft,” and more) acquired King for a massive $5.9 billion (£4.1 billion).

Zacconi, who is Italian and lives in London, cofounded King in 2003, and is its CEO. At the time of the acquisition, the company boasted 330 million monthly active users.

Headcount: 1,600

Samir Desai is the founder of peer-to-peer business loan platform Funding Circle. The platform lets savers lend directly to businesses and over £1 billion has been lent over the platform since it launched in 2010. The company was valued at $1 billion (£690 million) last year.

Former management consultant Desai moved to the role of Global CEO last year to oversee expansion into new markets and in October Funding Circle entered Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands with the acquisition of Zencap. Desai had the idea for the business while working on a project at Northern Rock.

Total amount raised: $273 million (£190 million)

Headcount: 266

Twitter: @samirdesai01

Kristo Kaarmann and Taavet Hinrikus are the Estonian co-founders of low cost online international money transfer service TransferWise. The pair’s marketing savvy has helped turn the startup into one of the few London companies valued at $1 billion (£690 million) after attracting a $58 million (£40 million) investment last year from top Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Other investors include Sir Richard Branson and Paypal founder Peter Thiel. Before TransferWise, Hinrikus was Skype’s first employee. TransferWise went global in 2015 and has already passed the $1 billion transferred mark in the US.

Read Business Insider UK's interview with TransferWise's cofounders »

Total amount raised: $90 million (£62 million)

Headcount: 364

Twitter: @kaarmann, @taavet

William Shu launched his restaurant food delivery company in London in 2012 after realising it was hard to get good quality food delivered to your home or office.

The former investment banker has subsequently expanded Deliveroo to more than 30 UK cities and over 20 international cities. The growth has been fuelled with $200 million (£138 million) in venture capital funding, half of which was raised last November.

Shu has managed to attract popular London restaurants such as Dishoom, Ping Pong, and Dirty Burger to Deliveroo, where they can access an even larger customer base in exchange for approximately 30% of every transaction.

Read Business Insider UK’s interview with Will Shu about how Deliveroo plans to expand »

Total amount raised: $200 million (£138 million)

Headcount: 583

Twitter: @WillShu203