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 Life Science 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.
Valentina Milanova
Founder and CEO of Daye
Valentina previously worked with Techstars as a Business Development Associate. She is currently looking after the AI portfolio at Founders Factory – launching 200 businesses in the next five years! Before entering the startup and VC worlds, Valentina studied law and worked as a technology correspondent for large international publications.
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About Daye: Daye creates category-defining products and services that set a new standard for medical research and scientific innovation.
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Benjamina Bollag
Founder & CEO of HigherSteaks
Benjamina is the CEO of London-based food tech start-up Higher Steaks, which she founded in 2017. Previously, Benjamina co-founded a London-based B2B electronics company selling to FTSE500 companies. Benjamina has also worked at Israeli 3D printing company, Stratasys, at the digital marketing division of PepsiCo’s joint venture with Strauss and was the lead developer an ed-tech startup. Benjamina holds a Master of Chemical Engineering from the Imperial College, where she completed a project focusing on the design of a peptide plant, conducting a lab-based research on synthesis and liquid exfoliation of graphitic carbon nitride
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About HigherSteaks, Zestful: HigherSteaks is about providing with that juicy, tender, and delicious meat they love but without harming their health, planet, and animals.
George Goldsmith
Executive Chairman, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of COMPASS Pathways
George is a serial entrepreneur with significant experience in pharmaceutical regulation. George’s early training and experience was a multi-disciplinary blending of cognitive psychology, clinical psychology and computer science.His first company, The Human Interface Group, was a pioneer in collaborative software and acquired by Lotus Development. George led the Lotus Institute and developed software and services to support high-performance, distributed teamwork. George then created TomorrowLab, which provided strategic guidance to internet businesses in the late 1990s. At the same time, he became a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company’s leadership, and eventually joined McKinsey as CEO of TomorrowLab@McKinsey. Subsequently, as a member of the Young Presidents Organisation (YPO) and its International Board of Directors, George founded YPO Networks. In 2002, George founded Tapestry Networks, an organisation committed to improving leadership performance and governance effectiveness in regulated sectors. He still serves as Tapestry Networks’ Non-Executive Chairman. George also serves on the board of directors for AnaBios, a company redefining drug discovery. He and his wife, Ekaterina Malievskaia MD, live in London.
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About COMPASS Pathways: Compass Pathways is a mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health.
Henrik Hagemann
CEO and Co-Founder of Puraffinity
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About Puraffinity, Tech London Advocates: Puraffinity develops precision materials to target chemicals, with an initial focus on PFAS in water
Maria Chatzou Dunford
CEO and Co-Founder of Lifebit
Dr. Maria Chatzou, CEO of Lifebit, is a biotech innovator and a proud geek, expert in bioinformatics, medical informatics and high performance computing. She is also a passionate entrepreneur and has founded two companies, Innovation Forum Barcelona and Techstars-backed Lifebit. Prior to Lifebit, she was a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, in Barcelona, where she was designing and deploying tools and methods that facilitate the analysis of Big Biomedical Data, allow for biological discoveries, and promote personalised medicine. She was part of the developing team of Nextflow, a programming framework that is revolutionising the computational analysis of genomic data and setting the foundations for personalised medicine computational analyses. Maria is also a frequent industry speaker and has spoken in many international conferences on the subjects of docker containers, genomics workflows, the computational challenges of personalised medicine, AI and HPC in genomics, women in leadership, entrepreneurship, science ventures, among many other topics.
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About Lifebit: Lifebit CloudOS is the intelligent genomics platform that is the industry standard for unified, secure research over distributed big data.
Niall Dunne
CEO of Polymateria
Niall Dunne is the Chief Executive Officer of Polymateria.
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About Polymateria: Polymateria is a London-based startup advancing science to help nature deal with plastic pollution.
Robert Habib
Chief Executive Officer of MiNA Therapeutics
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About MiNA Therapeutics: MiNA Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing therapeutic medicines to harness gene activation mechanisms.
Abdullah Sabyah
Founder and CEO of Rightangled
A scientist-entrepreneur and a healthcare professional, also a member of the British Heart Foundation Alliance, a member of the Clinical Pharmacogenomics Implementation Consortium in the US, and the inventor of a patent pending-technology for nucleic acid testing on a lateral flow assay (the patent is for a technology to detect DNA sequences in real-time).
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About Rightangled: Medtech specialised in Genetics, Blood and infection testing. Service is delivers through a platform that connects users with specialists.
Nick von Christierson
CEO & Co-Founder of Woven Science
Nick von Christierson is the CEO and Co-Founder at Woven Science.
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About Baby Bundle, Woven Science: Woven Science backs and builds best-in-class companies in the mental wellness space with a focus on psychedelic therapeutics.
Dhivya Venkat
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Esya
Dhivya Venkat is the Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Esya. University of Cambridge Degree NameGeneral ManagementField Of StudySuccessful Negotiation Strategies Dates attended or expected graduation2009
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About Esya: Esya is a biotech company that measures, monitors, assist drug development, and pre-assess patient cohorts for treatment.
Johannes Solzbach
CEO & Co-Founder of Clustermarket
Johannes Solzbach has been Chief Executive Officer and Director at Clustermarket LTD.
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About Clustermarket: One lab management platform that brings people, equipment and data together – no matter where they are.
Rasmus Hansen
Co-founder & CEO of Airfinity
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About Airfinity: Airfinity is a science information and analytics company
Kitty Liao
Founder & CEO of Ideabatic
Royal Academy of Engineering 2018 Enterprise Fellow, Ambassador at THE Port Association, Switzerland. Ten years experience in multi-disciplinary system design and R&D, including low temperature systems, superconducting cavity diagnostics systems and design for low-resource settings.
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About Ideabatic: Ideabatic is solving the most challenging humanitarian problems by delivering innovative solutions and devices.
Harry Hatzakis
CEO of Biotronics3D
Harry Hatzakis is a Founder & CEO at Biotronics3D.
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About Biotronics3D: Biotronics3D develops and markets innovative software applications for the diagnostic imaging industry.
Vivian Chan
CEO and Co-Founder of Sparrho
Vivian completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, after spending a year working in a venture fund in Australia. Vivian has twice been invited to address EU ministers, alongside other speakers including Bill Gates, about the importance of Open Data for innovation, and was selected by Management Today as one of the 35 Women Under 35 in 2015. Vivian is a former President & Chairman of Cambridge University Technology Enterprise Club (CUTEC), and was part of the inaugural Entrepreneur First cohort in 2012.
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About Sparrho: Sparrho lead the world in democratising science using augmented intelligence.
Robert Thong
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Multiomic Health
Robert has made the art of consulting his life’s work. As Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Unleash, he applies a wealth of experience to his personal mission: creating world-beating organisations. A supportive advisor to senior executives, Robert combines experienced know-how with an open mindset, delivering results that keep his clients coming back for more. Moving to the UK from Malaysia as a super-smart, teenage maths whiz, Robert started his career as an actuary. Finding business more interesting than statistical models, it wasn’t long before he decided to pursue the MBA that would introduce him to the world of management consulting. Initially focusing on analytical strategy development and operations improvement across various industries, Robert was soon drawn towards managing strategic change in R&D-driven organisations. Robert’s deep understanding of the inner workings of the pharmaceutical industry combined with his appreciation of a senior executive’s daily pressures, is a rare find indeed. He has not only been the pharmaceutical practice head in major consultancies, held P&L accountability and board positions, Robert has also spent much of his time on the ground understanding the real-life issues facing clients in laboratories, factories, pharmacies and physician offices. Coming from an analytical background himself, Robert had to learn in practice about the importance of managing change and engaging people to ensure lasting results, and was inspired to help clients do the same. Robert is dedicated to his clients winning long-term. After founding a boutique consultancy focused on the management practices of small-to-mid sized outfits competing with Big Pharmas, he decided to follow his true calling: guiding leaders and organisations of all types and sizes to success through people-driven strategy execution.
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About Multiomic Health, Selvedge Venture: Multiomic Health is building a precision therapeutics discovery platform for metabolic syndrome diseases
Ashmita Das
Co-founder and CEO of Kolabtree
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About Kolabtree: Find & hire experts, top postdocs & PhDs, as research collaborators for your academic or business projects.Speed up your research work!
Matt Wilson
CEO of Umedeor
Matt Wilson serves as the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at uMed.
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About Ampersand & Ampersand, Umedeor: uMed enables healthcare providers to run patient research more efficiently through automating the clinical studies process
