Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top London based CEO’ operating in the Brand Marketing space. If you think a CEO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Dhruv Ghulati
Co-Founder and CEO of Factmata
Dhruv holds a Distinction in Computer Science and Machine Learning from University College London, and a 1st Class BSc in Economics from the LSE. He was a product manager and co-founder of two London based machine intelligence startups, and is an Entrepreneur First alum and Forbes 30 Under 30 leader in Technology. He wrote his thesis in cost-sensitive classification and distant supervision for statistical claim detection.
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About Factmata: Factmata is an artificial intelligence company for automated content understanding..
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Alex Vratskides
Co-Founder & CEO of Persado
Alex Vratskides is the CEO of Persado, which he co-founded in 2012. Previously, Alex co-founded Upstream in 2001 and served as the company’s CEO between 2004 and 2012. During his tenure, the company grew to become a global leader in mobile marketing, with mobile operator clients in more than 40 countries. Alex was responsible for setting Upstream’s strategic direction and spearheading its international sales expansion and product innovation. Prior to founding Upstream, Alex worked as a management consultant at OC&C/McKenna Group, based out of Boston. He is the first angel investor for Luluvise, where he is also a board member, and serves on the board of advisors of Seyyer. Alex holds a BS in Applied Mathematics from Columbia University and a Masters of Engineering in Operations Research from Cornell University.
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About Persado: Persado Marketing Language Cloud delivers AI-generated language that resonates the most with any audience, segment or individual.
Paul Gouge
CEO and Co-founder of Playdemic
Paul is responible for setting Playdemic’s strategy and driving the vision. He also signs the cheques!
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About Playdemic: Playdemic is a gaming company that develops social games for mass market audiences.
Damon Reeve
CEO of The Ozone Project
Damon Reeve works as a CEO Of The Ozone Project. He is a former CEO at Authenticated Digital and Hereford Technologies respectively. He has 10 years of experience in the Internet and advertising industries across Europe, the United States, and Australia. Before launching Unanimis, Damon ran his own brand and interactive marketing consultancy after being Head of Marketing for Excite UK. Damon is also a co-founder of OpenX and remains on the Board as a non-executive Director.
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About The Ozone Project: The Ozone Project is a transparent and brand-safe platform offering advertisers direct access to an audience for programmatic advertising.
Karen Peett
EA to Global COO & EMEA CEO of IPG Mediabrands
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About IPG Mediabrands: IPG Mediabrands is committed to driving automated buying, pay-for-performance, and digital innovation solutions.
Mark Read
CEO of WPP
Mark Read is the CEO at WPP Digital. Mark was appointed a director in March 2005. He is chief executive of WPP Digital, and was previously WPP’s Director of Strategy.Mark is a director of CHI&Partners. Mark worked at WPP between 1989 and 1995 in both parent company and operating company roles.Prior to rejoining WPP in 2002, Mark was a principal at the consultancy firm of Booz-Allen & Hamilton and founded and developed the company WebRewards in the UK. Mark is a trustee of the Natural History Museum Development Trust.
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About WPP: WPP creates transformative ideas and outcomes for its clients through an integrated offer of communications, commerce, and technology.
Askar Bulegenov
Founder & CEO of Grocemania
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About Grocemania: On-demand grocery delivery platform. Find and shop from any local grocery store and get your order in minutes!
Blaise Bellville
Founder & CEO of Boiler Room
Boiler Room founder Blaise Bellville created a new underground music network quite literally from a utility room. Blaise left school at 18 and founded many businesses before starting the worldwide phenomenon that is Boiler Room, which reaches over 72 million music fans every month worldwide. Beginning as a club promoter and DJ, Blaise’s first business to gain national recognition was All Age Concerts. Founded when he was 25, it kicked off an under-age gig movement across the country, even creating a festival for 10,000 in Victoria Park at the movement’s peak in 2010. In the same era, he created online magazine Read Platform, which was written by and run for teenagers. It was while running his, surrounded by other London music obsessives that Boiler Room was born. Bellville enlisted Thristian Richards, who worked for Soul Jazz and Gilles Peterson and Femi Adeyemi, founder of online radio station NTS and organised a weekly hang out/ session – broadcast from a webcam and Ustream to the world from the utility room in the warehouse it was run out of. The session run by the electronic music scene, for the electronic scene quickly drew big name guests. Jamie XX, SBKRT and Hudson Mohawke all turned up for early session to DJ and hang out. Though Read Platform was drawing 300,000 unique users, Boiler Room soon mushroomed passed it in popularity. Since 2010 it has gone global, with a growing and significant fan base in Latin America, partnership with Japan’s biggest streaming provider, key broadcast hubs in Berlin, New York and Los Angeles and the dedication of the most hard core, committed music fans on the planet.
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About Boiler Room: Boiler Room is an online platform that enables its users to live stream and archive musical shows.
Jude Ower
Founder & CEO of PlayMob
Jude Ower is changing the world through game play. She has spent 10 years working within games, creating educational, training and awareness games across a range of organisations from corporate, government and education. Jude is now concentrating on social and mobile games, and how engaging mass audience of game players can make a world changing difference.
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About Department for International Trade, PlayMob: Playmob is the gaming engagement platform for brands with purpose.
Sharmadean Reid
Chief Executive Officer of The Stack World
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About The Stack World, The Stack World: The Stack World is a news, events and connections company.
David Kershaw
Co-Founder ,CEO & Exec Director of M&C Saatchi
David Kershaw is a founding director of M&C Saatchi. He joined Saatchi & Saatchi in 1982 after obtaining an MBA at London Business School. He became managing director in 1990 and was made chairman and chief executive of the UK agency in 1994.
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About M&C Saatchi: M&C Saatchi Group is a creative company that connects specialist expertise, fuelled by data and technology.
Karin Cabili
Founder & CEO of Dropit Shopping
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About Dropit Shopping: Dropit provides a digital handsfree shopping solution for malls and central shopping districts, delivering bags from store to door.
Michael Islip
CEO, UK of Digitas
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About Digitas: DigitasLBi operates as a marketing and technology agency that transforms businesses for the digital age.
Nick Sykes
Global CEO of FutureBrand
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About FutureBrand: FutureBrand seamlessly combines expertise in brand strategy, identity, digital, retail, environmental, product and service design.
Jenny Tsai
Founder & CEO of Wearisma
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About Wearisma: Wearisma is a premium influencer marketing solution for brands, agencies & influencers.
Lindsay Trombley
Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Wovn
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About Wovn: Wovn provides fashion brands with real-time predictive insights to better predict demand, reduces waste, and increasing sales.
Marc Hammoud
CEO of The Swiss Quality
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About The Swiss Quality: The Swiss Quality provides business consulting, coaching, training, branding, planning, delivering, and writing services.
Matthew de la Hey
CEO & Co-Founder of inploi
Matthew is co-founder & CEO of inploi, a recruitment marketing platform built to connect great employers with the future of the workforce. With employer branding at its heart, inploi empowers companies to speak to candidates as consumers of workplaces, helping them to tell their stories with captivating videos, images, and written content in order to engage active and passive candidates. When actively hiring, inploi’s software is a powerful recruitment tool incorporating job post creation and distribution, applicant tracking, CV-parsing, candidate-job matching, proactive talent search, video profiles, instant messaging, video calling, file sharing, programmatic job advertising and more. For jobseekers, inploi provides a beautiful professional presence making it easy to access career-related information, apply for job opportunities, and connect and communicate with employers, and with each other. Matthew is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar and a two-time Weidenfeld Scholar.
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About inploi: inploi is the future of talent engagement and job discovery.
Patrick Charlton
Co-Founder & CEO of Buzz Radar
Patrick is a social marketing and digital specialist, with a track record of creating a wide range of award-winning campaigns and projects for some of the world’s most exciting brands. He is co-founder of Buzz Radar, an industry leader in capturing and visualising real-time data. Buzz Radar makes live data of all types collaborative, easy to understand and shareable for everyone. He works with some of the world’s largest events, brands and retail spaces, including Twitter, Samsung, Nike, Google, adidas, Intel, Skype, Marks And Spencer, IBM, Red Bull and Adobe, helping them create a culture of listening and marketing in the moment. Over his career, Patrick has been lucky enough to lead major-ground breaking projects on multiple global social engagement campaigns, providing leadership, strategy, production savvy, creative direction and client management in a fast-paced, demanding environment with an online audience in the tens of millions.
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About Buzz Radar: Buzz Radar is an industry leader in making data, insightful, accessible and actionable
Robin Shenfield
CEO of The Mill
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About The Mill: Their passion is for great ideas, beautifully executed, that engage audiences irrespective of platform, device or venue.
Louise Ainsworth
CEO – EMEA, Media Division of Kantar
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About Kantar: Kantar is the data investment management division of WPP, is a global insight, information, and consultancy network.
Chris O’Donoghue
Chief Executive Officer of Mongoose Sports & Entertainment
Chris has spent the last 15 years living the mongoose way – running and finding deals within sports marketing and sponsorship. He has driven key client sponsorships with the likes of Rolex, Heineken, Sony, Aberdeen Asset Management and Thomson Reuters through a variety of different disciplines including Sailing, Golf, Cycling, Triathlon and Expeditions. Chris’ main passion is tennis and while his backhand needs a fair amount of work, he has secured and managed some of the sport’s biggest sponsorship programmes, including being responsible for the sponsorship assets for the WTA globally, the Masters Tennis at the Royal Albert Hall and The Hurlingham Classic. Since moving from Waterford, Ireland to the UK 13 years ago, Chris’ Irish accent has progressively diluted. His sea legs continue to be terrible but his time to run 5k is improving.
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About Mongoose Sports & Entertainment: Mongoose Sports & Entertainment is a specialist agency in sports and entertainment.
Andrew Jennings
Founder & CEO of Berry White
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About Berry White: Berrywhite is a brand of natural organic fruit juice drinks.
Edil Ajibaev
Founder, CEO of picVpic
Edil Ajibaev, the founder of several international startups, has made a significant impact in the tech industry with his AI-based clothing search engine. This innovative tool, leading in product search quality, has accumulated the world’s largest fashion product database, boasting 14 million products.
Edil’s company has pioneered a hybrid system of machine learning, visual search, and manual labelling. This system identifies prevalent fashion phrases and semantically integrates them into a Knowledge Graph, offering superior search quality in the fashion domain.
Edil’s entrepreneurial prowess has been recognized globally, with 7 international startup competition wins in cities such as London, San Francisco, New York, Kyiv, Almaty, Singapore, and Brussels.
In addition to his primary ventures, Edil has co-founded and advised several technology companies, helping them launch and achieve commercial success. He is also an active board member of various startups and organizations shaping the tech ecosystem.
Edil has authored several industry-related articles and is a passionate speaker on Entrepreneurship, Artificial Intelligence, and Leadership. In 2023, he received an award for the most significant contribution to the IT sector at the largest CA IT conference, supported by the US government.
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About picVpic: picVpic offers a search engine that enables its users to compare and rank products from various online stores.
Joe Levi
CEO & Co-founder of Noise Media
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About Noise Media: Noise Media is an award winning social-first media agency that helps brands scale to universal heights.
Phil Owers
Chief Executive Officer of Papirfly
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About Papirfly: Papirfly protects and activates global brands and enables brand compliant design outputs from non-agency team members.
Chris Sahota
CEO and Founder of Ciesco
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About Ciesco: Corporate finance advisors to technology-enabled media and marketing businesses
Rishi Kapoor
Founder and CEO of Webosaurus
Rishi Kapoor is the founder and CEO of Webosaurus. He is the previous Head of Performance Marketing for Monster UK/IE. He has over 15 years of experience in performance based online advertising and recently has taken up a new role where he is focussed on aligning the recruitment sector to the mainstream consumer advertising sector by making recruiting ROI more transparent & accessible. He has also been actively involved with the Internet Advertising Bureau(IAB) helping formulate the best practices for the online lead generation & performance marketing sector. His B2C specialisation is helping him transform talent acquisition strategy for leading gig economy and forward thinking brands. Close
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About Monster, Webosaurus: Webosaurus is a full service performance marketing agency that transform lead acquisition.
James Copeland-Eccles
CEO and Marketing Director of smartvideo
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About smartvideo: Smart Video is a specialist online video marketing and technology company.
Adam Hainsworth
Chief Executive Officer of be the brand
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About be the brand: be the brand is a marketing solution that streamlines the storage, creation, approval and delivery of marketing campaigns and key assets.
Simon Baskind
Founder & CEO of The Branding Team
Simon Baskind is the Founder and CEO of The Branding Team.
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About The Branding Team: The Branding Team is a retail company that supplies printed promotional merchandise and branded products.
Anne Oesemann
CEO & Founder of Stellar Media – Global Media Experts
Anne has sound knowledge in all levels of advertising and marketing. She is passionate about marketing strategies, social media and the international media landscape and has a strong grasp of new technologies and market trends and is able to formulate strategies using these skills. Previously, she has worked for the leading media owners The Telegraph Media Group (TMG) and Gruner & Jahr International Media Sales, where she worked on cross media campaigns for brands like Prada, Versace, Michael Kors, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Carmignac and different tourism boards amongst others. Earlier in her career, Anne worked in the Marketing and PR departments of Marc O’Polo, Philipp Plein and several Fashion Startups.
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About Stellar Media – Global Media Experts: International Media Consultancy Firm
Kaitlin Zhang
Chief Executive Officer of Oval Branding
Kaitlin Zhang is an award-winning personal branding consultant, helping entrepreneurs, executives and celebrities manage their online reputation. Kaitlin founded Oval Branding in 2016 serving corporate and personal clients in the USA, UK, Canada and China. She blogs about personal branding, corporate branding, digital marketing and reputation management on her website www.ovalbranding.com. She is also the host of the podcast “Personal Branding Success in 10 Minutes”.
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About Oval Branding: Branding Consultancy, Corporate Branding, Personal Branding, Online Reputation Management, Digital Marketing
Remi Majekodunmi
FOUNDER/CEO of PinEventz
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About PinEventz: PinEventz offers a platform for Event organisers not to just promote or sell tickets but to continue the conversation where its stop.
