Despite a less-than-desirable economic landscape, the UK tech community is showing a steely resolve if the current haul of new patents is anything to go by. Little wonder then, that the UK rates 4th in the world in terms of tech investment, with venture capital, private equity and traditional funders still lining up to commit funds to the right projects.
While London, and more recently, the south-east, has dominated the startup scene, there are encouraging signs of increased activity across the broader region, particularly in the north-west.
In anticipation of GEW UK, we take a look at 10 startups that are at the forefront of innovative disruption, most notably from the ambit of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). They are listed here in alphabetical order.
Attest
Founded in mid-2015 by Jeremy King and Tony Hunter, Attest is a London startup that has built a tech-driven market research platform to enable companies to get market research and insights quicker and more often. Attest aims to bring a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach to market research, giving businesses live access to a pool of respondents to conduct market research in real-time.
Beamery
Founded in London by brothers Abakar and Sultan Murad Saidov and their friend Mike Paterson, Beamery is a talent operating system that combines elements of customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing software with artificial intelligence. The entire talent journey is unified on one platform that turns recruiting from a reactive to a proactive function focused on continuous relationship-building with top candidates.
Blue Vision Labs
Blue Vision Labs is a collaborative Augmented Reality (AR) company that is enabling the next generation of AR and robotics, working on cutting-edge products in robotics, computer vision, and self-driving cars. The five co-founders met seven years ago as a group of entrepreneurial friends, and the company has since grown into a team of engineers and researchers from Oxford, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
Bulb
Bulb is a green energy supplier that gives consumers a choice of energy they haven’t had before. The company was founded in 2015 by Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka and are now the UK’s fastest-growing energy supplier, providing 100% renewable electricity and 10% green gas to more than 1,000,000 members across the UK.
CognitionX
The CognitionX mission is to drive the acceleration and responsible deployment of AI by providing an advice platform that matches questions to domain experts in real-time. Founded by Charlie Muirhead and Tabitha Goldstaub, the basic version of the product is entirely free, while an enterprise version that creates a custom-built internal expert network for clients is available as a paid-for subscription.
Igloo Energy
Southampton-based Igloo is a smart home energy service that supplies gas and electricity to domestic customers on standard credit meters. Founded in 2015, Igloo provides one tariff for all customers and uses data on each home to deliver personalised energy insights for each customer. Founded in 2016 by Duncan Ellis, Henry Brown and Matthew Clemow, the startup has a current customer base over 26,000. Igloo placed second in Startups.co.uk’s Startups 100 list for 2019.
LabGenius
Biotech startup LabGenius is the first biopharmaceutical company to develop next-generation protein therapeutics using a machine learning-driven evolution engine (EVA). As the world’s first autonomous scientist, EVA uses AI to predict which mutations have the right biological design and, using a bank of liquid handling robots, continuously runs its own experiments, learning and evolving as it determines the results.
Medopad
Named a ‘$1 billion unicorn in the making’ by KPMG, Medopad is a London-based health tech company. Founded by Dan Vahdat and Rich Khatib, Medopad produces applications that integrate health data from existing hospital databases, as well as patient wearables and other mobile devices, and securely transmits it for use by doctors. Medopad’s pricing structure takes the form of an annual software as a service (SaaS) license fee in the UK.
Revolut
Fintech startup Revolut is a digital banking alternative for instant payment notifications: free international money transfers and global fee-free spending. Founded in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, Revolut now has more than 5m customers throughout the UK and Europe, largely thanks to its attractive spending options abroad and appeal to younger users.
Senseye
A cloud-based software for predictive maintenance, Senseye helps manufacturers avoid downtime and save money by automatically forecasting machine failure without the need for expert manual analysis. Its intelligent machine-learning algorithms allow it to be used on any machine from any manufacturer, taking information from existing Industrial IoT sensors and platforms to automatically diagnose failures, and provide the remaining useful life of machinery.
While this list is not in the least exhaustive, these companies caught our attention because they all seem to be resourceful and punching well above their weight.
As an active participant in the SME community – having been voted recently as one of the UK’s top 25 SME Culture Leaders – Definition is proud to be associated with Global Entrepreneurship Week 2019.