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 Founder operating in the Pharmaceutical space. If you think a Founder 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.
Furquan Kidwai
Founder & CEO of Dawaai
Furquan Kidwai is an entrepreneur building a pharmacy for emerging Asia. Prior to this journey, Kidwai was an investment banker for over eight years in London where, in his last role, he was the Head of CEEMEA Financing as well as a Senior Vice President in the Fixed Income business at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Before joining RBS, Mr. Kidwai worked at Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers in their London and New York offices. Mr. Kidwai has a Master’s degree in International Relations from Cambridge University. He also holds an MSc in Financial Engineering & Risk Management from Imperial College London and BEng (Hons) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Bristol.
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About Dawaai: Dawaai operates as a digital health platform with an online network of pharmacies and generic medicine.
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.
Pablo Prieto Barja
CTO and Co-Founder of Lifebit
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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.
Zhangming Niu
Founder & CEO of MindRank AI
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About MindRank AI: MindRank is a developer of an AI-enabled drug-discovery platform intended to discover and develop next generation precision medicines.
Yiannis Kiachopoulos
CEO, Co-Founder of Causaly
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About Causaly: Causaly is teaching computers to read all knowledge in Biomedicine
Artur Saudabayev
Co-Founder, CTO of Causaly
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About Causaly: Causaly is teaching computers to read all knowledge in Biomedicine
Barney Gilbert
Founder, Co-CEO of Pando
Barney Gilbert worked in the NHS as a doctor before founding Pando, a healthtech company working to connect everyone working in healthcare. Listed in the UK’s Disruption50 Index for 2019. Forbes 30 Under 30 alum.
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About NHS England, Pando: Forward is now Pando! Pando is an essential tool for teamwork and secure collaboration in health and social care.
Philip Mundy
Founder of Pando
London-based Philip Mundy is a co-founder and Joint CEO of Forward Health, a secure messaging platform for healthcare professionals. Philip has previously founded a series of successful startups including ‘proptech’ company Goodlord. Since 2018, Philip has also sat on NHS England’s Clinical Entrepreneur Programme as a mentor.
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About Beem, Goodlord, Pando: Forward is now Pando! Pando is an essential tool for teamwork and secure collaboration in health and social care.
Lydia Yarlott
Founder, People of Pando
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About Pando: Forward is now Pando! Pando is an essential tool for teamwork and secure collaboration in health and social care.
Vibhor Gupta
Director and Founder of Pangaea Data
Vibhor is an entrepreneur in residence at Nexgen Capital Ventures where he is involved in deal flow and leading creative technological opportunties within Life Sciences following his breadth of experience in industry and academia over the last 16 years. Prior to this role, Vibhor has served in various positions ranging from technical bioinformatics roles, sales (of software technology products) and executive management. Vibhor started and built the European business for Quantum Secure, which was an enterprise software solutions provider and was successfully acquired in 2015. Most recently he served as a Senior Vice President at Seven Bridges Genomics which provides cloud (SaaS) based bioinformatics solutions for the Life Sciences industry. Vibhor has also worked as a management and technology consultant for Deloitte. His academic career focused on bioinformatics, epigenetics and molecular biology studies in oncology and infectious diseases. Vibhor has access to an extensive network in the industry and was recently honoured as an advisor to two prominent organisations, HealthEx and FrontLine Genomics. He was also a Technology Lead on ASIS’s UK committee, which is the largest professional body for CSOs and CISOs in the world.
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About Pangaea Data: Pangaea Data provides a machine learning-based software solution making scientific and clinical data more meaningful.
Alex Zhavoronkov
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Insilico Medicine
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery, and biomarker development. He is also the founder and CEO of Deep Longevity, Inc, a global company developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity. Since 2015 he invented critical technologies in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) for generation of the novel molecular structures with the desired properties and generation of synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered the applications of deep learning technologies for prediction of human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. Under his leadership Insilico raised over $50 million in multiple rounds from expert investors, opened R&D centers in 6 countries and regions, and partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions. Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012 he published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers, and 2 books including “The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He serves on the editorial boards of Aging Research Reviews, Aging, Trends in Molecular Medicine, Frontiers in Genetics, and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research, Drug Discovery and AI Forum (7th annual in 2020) at Basel Life, one of Europe’s largest industry events in drug discovery. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
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About Deep Longevity, Insilico Medicine: Insilico Medicine develops an AI platform for drug development to treat cancer and age-related diseases.
Pablo Graiver
President and Founder of Antidote.me
Pablo Graiver is Co-Founder of Antidote Technologies Ltd. (a/k/a TrialReach Ltd.) and serves as its Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director. Pablo Graiver served as Vice President of Business Development, Europe of Kayak Software Corporation. He has over 12 years of entrepreneurial and management experience in the online industry. He was an early member of NetJuice, one of the largest Internet incubators in Europe; MD at Donde Comprar.com, the first e-commerce directory in Spanish; and later co-founder and Vice President of Strategy at Kelkoo, acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. Pablo Graiver set up and launched Kayak.com in Europe, and served as European Sales Director at ValueClick (NASDAQ: VCLK). He studied Biology and Business Administration at UAM in Madrid.
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About Antidote.me: Antidote is a digital health company that accelerates and improves medical research by combining technologies, data, and business models.
Agnieszka Chomka
Co-Founder and Head of R&D of BioMe Oxford
Agnieszka is an intestinal immunologist at the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology, University of Oxford. Her main research interests focus on the microbial-host interactions in the large intestine. She was awarded the prestigious Wellcome Trust scholarship at the University of Oxford to conduct her research into the role of a tissue-resident regulatory immune cell population in the gut. Agnieszka has published her results in top peer-review research journals.
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About BioMe Oxford, Globe Life Sciences: Unlocking your gut microbiome by developing a medical device for targeted and non-invasive sampling
Edward Ungar
Co-Founder & CEO of Pharmacierge
Edward Ungar is a Co-founder at Pharmacierge.
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About Pharmacierge: The free e-prescribing service chosen by Private GPs and Consultants to deliver medication to their patients nationwide
Robert Ungar
Co-Founder of Pharmacierge
Robert Ungar is a Co-Founder at Pharmacierge.
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About Pharmacierge: The free e-prescribing service chosen by Private GPs and Consultants to deliver medication to their patients nationwide
Loubna Bouarfa
Co-Founder & CEO of OKRA Technologies
Loubna has won several awards and was recognised as a leading innovator by the MIT Technology Review in 2017. Beyond her business, Loubna has recently been appointed by the European Commission as a High-Level Expert on Artificial Intelligence. She will support the EU by developing recommendations on ethical, legal and societal issues related to AI, impacting the health, safety and freedom of the wider society. On a personal level, Loubna is a strong advocate for diversity and challenging the status quo. Having lived in Morocco, moving to the Netherlands at the age of 17, and later to the UK with a young family, she realised the power of remaining outside her comfort zone.
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About OKRA Technologies: OKRA is an AI analytics company for healthcare. We combine complex data sets, you get evidence-based insights and predictions in real time.
Sacha Carton
Co-Founder & COO of Airfinity
Sacha is co-founder & COO at Airfinity – a science information and analytics company. He is a data, tech and media entrepreneur who previously co-founded ad pepper media (FRA: APM), Adbrain (sold to NSDQ: TTD), Scala Ventures and advisory firm Ogmenta and has been an investor, advisor and director in multiple media, data, adtech, PE and M&A companies in Europe and the US.
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About Airfinity, Scala Ventures: Airfinity is a science information and analytics company
Charlie Groome
Founder of Everna
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About Everna: Everna is a biotech company developing novel therapeutics.
Wayne Danter
Founder, President & CEO of Cotinga Pharmaceuticals
Dr. Wayne Danter is the President, Chief Executive Officer and a Director. Previously, he held the position of Chief Scientific Officer at COTI. Dr. Danter is the inventor of the CHEMSAS® process and one of the founders of COTI. He trained at the University of Western Ontario in Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology. Prior to founding COTI, Dr. Danter was an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario. His clinical focus, in addition to his teaching role, at the University was in General Cardiology, Cardiovascular Diseases associated with HIV a1d Cardiovascular Risk Management. Dr. Danter’s initial research focused on the medical application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to disease diagnosis and outcome prediction. The primary aspect of his research has focused on developing Hybrid AI models to pattern the relationship between molecular strudzure and biological activity. This research has resulted in a sophisticated process for decomposing complex molecules into critical elements that permit accurate molecular structure activity modeling (CHEMSAS). His research has been published in peer-reviewed publications and he has presented at numerous international meetings. Dr. Danter is a pioneer in the evolving interface between AI Technologies and pharmacotherapeutics. These AI technologies are anticipated to play a major role in 21st century drug development.
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About Cotinga Pharmaceuticals: Cotinga Pharmaceuticals discovers and develops drug therapies for diseases.
Javier Gonzalez-Zabaleta
Founder & CEO of Medimsight
Javier Gonzalez-Zabaleta was the main designer of the cloud model to bring worldwide medical imaging artificial intelligence solutions accessible to everyone. As one of the pioneers in this space, he has achieved a good experience in both market space and the technology. During last 10 years, he focused at the same time in business development, including direct communication with clinicians, and the understanding of the clinical trials market. Always open to talk, partnering and sharing knowledge. At the university, he studied computer science before made a master degree in computer vision making research in areas like multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer disease. Following his dream, empowering researchers and building super doctors, he has lived in Ponferrada, Madrid and now in London.
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About FundRx, Medimsight: Medical image triage and biomarkers analysis for precision medicine.
Duncan Hall
Founder and CEO of Triumph Research Intelligence
Duncan has over fifteen years of consultancy experience, thirteen of which have been within clinical R&D in both CRO and Pharma businesses. Duncan started Triumph in 2002 with the aim of building a global business which would be focused in improving the delivery, quality and value of clinical systems. Duncan now takes a primarily strategic role in TRI, but still performs client delivery roles where possible.
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About Triumph Research Intelligence: Triumph Research Intelligence is a risk-Based Monitoring Company.
Malcolm Weir
Founder & CEO of Heptares Therapeutics
Former Visiting Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College, London. Former Head of the Molecular Sciences Division of Glaxo Wellcome Inc. (present Glaxo Smithkline plc.) Former CEO of Inpharmatica Ltd.（present Galapagos NV). Founder and CEO of Heptares Therapeutics Ltd.
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About Heptares Therapeutics, Sosei Group: Heptares Therapeutics develops novel, small-molecule drugs for G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs).
Allison Jeynes-Ellis
Co-Founder & CEO of Avillion
Over 20 years of senior leadership experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Significant global drug development experience and successful EU and US drug approvals across a range of therapeutic areas. Leadership of global clinical development teams for Phase 3, including CRO selection and management. Strong networks within the pharma industry and relevant regulatory bodies
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About Avillion: Avillion LLP, a London, UK-based company that focuses on clinical co-development of therapeutics.
Guang Zhong Yang
Co-Founder of Smart Surgical Appliances
Guang-Zhong Yang is Founder of Smart Surgical Appliances Limited. Guang-Zhong Yang serves at Institute of Biomedical Engineering.
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About Smart Surgical Appliances: Smart Surgical Appliances is a medical device company, developing sensor-enabled surgical instrumentation.
Ara Darzi
Co-Founder of Smart Surgical Appliances
Prof. Ara Darzi, KBE MD, FRCS, FRCSI, FACS, co-founded SynaptiQ Ltd. in 2001. Prof. Darzi is the Founder of Smart Surgical Appliances Limited. He serves as the Head of Scientific Advisory Board, Director and Member of Scientific Advisory Board of SynaptiQ Ltd. He served as a Hunterian Professor of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He holds the Chair of Surgery at Imperial College School of Medicine and is also the Tutor in Minimal Access Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons in England. He is the James IV traveling fellow for 1999/2000, and is also a Council Member of the Association of Coloproctologists of Great Britain and Ireland, The Association of Endoscopic Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Society of Minimal Invasive Therapy. He is also the Chairman of the London Committee for the Modernisation of the National Health Service, which is charged with recommending how best to modernise the NHS. He was appointed as Advisor on Surgery to the Department of Health. He serves as Vice Chairperson at Sidra Medical and Research Centre. He conferred a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. His main clinical and academic interest is Minimal Invasive Therapy, including Imaging and Biological research. He has co-authored over 100 peer review publications and five books on surgery. Prof. Darzi received an honorary Knighthood in December 2002 in recognition of his service to the United Kingdom National Health Service. Prof. Darzi obtained his fellowship in Surgery from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and an M.D. degree from Trinity College, Dublin.
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About Smart Surgical Appliances, The Institute of Cancer Research: Smart Surgical Appliances is a medical device company, developing sensor-enabled surgical instrumentation.
Michael O’Neill
Co-Founder and Director R&D of Inflection Biosciences
Michael O’Neill has more than 20 years’ experience working in the pharmaceutical industry. He was a Senior Research Scientist and Portfolio Manager at Eli Lilly for much of this time where he was responsible for developing project plans for the selection of projects and for their progression from discovery through to important development milestones. He established his own consulting business, Eolas, to help early stage companies to organize their research along commercial lines, becoming accomplished at building highly streamlined development plans. He has built consortia of commercial and academic groups to apply for major EU grants. Previously Dr. O’Neill was Head of Laboratory at Almirall and a Research Neuroscientist at Merck. He has authored over 80 papers, book chapters, patents and abstracts and is Honorary Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. He holds a BA Psychology from UCC and a PhD from QUB Belfast.
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About Inflection Biosciences: Inflection Biosciences is a company that develops small-molecule therapeutics for the treatment of cancer.
Jeff Moore
Founder & CEO of Curileum Discovery Ltd
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About Curileum Discovery Ltd: Curileum Discovery Ltd is a drug target discovery company in London targeting defective stem cells underpinning serious GI diseases
STEVE HOLMES
CEO and Founder of Capella BioScience
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About Capella BioScience: Capella Bioscience engages in the discovery and development of monoclonal antibodies.
Joanne Taylor
Founder of Life Science Leaders
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About Life Science Leaders: Life Science Leaders is an executive search company that specializes in the life science and medical industries.
Hakim Yadi
CEO & Co-Founder of Closed Loop Medicine
Hakim Yadi is the CEO and Co-Founder at Closed Loop Medicine.
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About : Developing personalised digital healthcare solutions to improve outcomes for patients and clinicians
Andrew Hook
Founder & CEO of Tracepad
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About Tracepad: Tracepad develops innovative solutions for pharmaceutical provenance.
