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 Bristol based Director operating in the Software space. If you think a Director 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.
Ian Waters
Senior Director, EMEA Marketing of ThousandEyes
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About ThousandEyes: ThousandEyes empowers businesses to see, understand, and improve the experience for every user and every application over any network.
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Matt Saunders
Director UA of N3TWORK
Matt Saunders is the director of user acquisition at N3TWORK.
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About N3TWORK: Creating, publishing, and scaling the very best in mobile games.
Oliver Holmes
Group Financial Director of Brightpearl
Oliver heads up the Finance team, with particular focus on fundraising, business planning and our SaaS performance metrics. Oliver began his career in the audit practice at PwC, before specialising in VC-backed SaaS businesses. He guided clean-tech startup Sefaira to a successful exit and developed Dojo Media’s monetisation strategy before joining Brightpearl in 2017. Since joining, Oliver has overseen two growth investment rounds, restructured Brightpearl’s systems and processes and established a robust forecasting and reporting framework.
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About Brightpearl: Brightpearl is the omnichannel retail management system that puts your orders, inventory, financials, POS and CRM in one place.
Katherine Ward
Chief Commercial Officer, Managing Director UK & Europe of Healthy.io
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About Healthy.io: Healthy.io converts smartphone cameras into a clinical grade medical device.
Michael Nicastro
CEO and Board of Directors of Continuity
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About Continuity, Coppermine Advisors: Continuity Control provides an on-demand portal for policy and procedure management, and audit programs for banking and finance companies.
Tomo Ohno
Managing Director of Kudan
Tomo OHNO founded Kudan back in 2011. A cross-border business developer and entrepreneur. After nearly a decade as a management consultant at Accenture Tokyo, Bangkok, Amsterdam, and London, he led the turnaround of a small UK based software company into a global player, and directed successful exit of a game licensing company. The company was successfully sold to a Japanese game console manufacturer. He also successfully set up computer game publisher Zen United. Zen United created a new industry finding game content abroad and localising and deploying into local markets. Tomo’s passion is to create business value across boundaries, adapting organisations and their business models to sell across multiple countries and deliver technical value across markets.
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About Kudan: Kudan is accelerating evolution of AR/MR/VR and automobile/drone/robot by developing computer software algorithms as Artificial Perception. Kudan went public at Tokyo stock exchange in December 2018
Gareth Williams
Founder & Non-Executive Director of YellowDog
Gareth hounds the YellowDog kennel, spearheading the vision to build a world where people do more, create more, discover more; unleashed from limited computing power. Following an MEng in Information Systems Engineering from the University of Durham, Gareth cut his canines working in software and telecoms at companies including Orange, Experian QAS, FREEDOM4 and Arieso, where he was part of the Management Team that completed the successful sale of the company to JDSU in March 2013 for $85m. One day he had a brilliant idea for using spare mobile capacity which, following a chat with someone in the animation department at the University of the West of England, gave birth to what is now YellowDog. When not coming up with brilliant ideas, he is a dad, a keen cyclist, an ardent reader, a Samaritans Listening Volunteer. He also likes ale and talking to anyone (usually together). You can email Gareth on gareth@yellowdog.co or phone +44 (0) 330 223 2499.
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About YellowDog: Helping businesses power their innovations with the most scalable cloud native scheduling and provisioning technology.
Tom Griffin
Director and Co-Founder of Ripjar
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About Ripjar: Ripjar is a data intelligence company that transforms global institutions ability to manage strategic risks.
Nigel Oakley
Product Marketing and Business Development Director of Ampliphae
As a senior executive at Ampliphae, Nigel is helping IT Directors at medium and large enterprises, to reduce the risks they face as their organisations embrace cloud computing. With the insight and wisdom gained over 40 years in the IT, Networking, Infrastructure and Cloud industry, Nigel is ideally placed to make a difference to client businesses.
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About Ampliphae: SaaS Risk Management – discover and manage the SaaS in your organisation
Reza Nejabati
Co Founder, Director of Zeetta Networks
Reza is currently a Senior Lecturer in Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, UK. Prior to moving into academia he worked in project management and network architecture roles with leading telecom vendors. Reza has over fifteen years of experience in the field of telecommunication and computer science and has been actively involved in SDN and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) standardisation. He has made important and pioneering contributions to the research fields of Optical Networking, Software Defined Networking, Network & Data Centre Infrastructure Virtualization, Grid Networking and Large Scale Future Internet Experimentation. He has co-/authored over 150 peer reviewed papers and three SDN standardisation documents.
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About University of Bristol, Zeetta Networks: Zeetta Networks simplifies the monitoring, management and automation of complex ICT networks
Rob Laurence
Director of Torwood Consulting
Rob has spent a working lifetime in IT and the last 15 years in identity. Working at GB Group, Rob was tasked with establishing a new division to design, develop and market the UK’s first purpose-built electronic identity verification service. The service became widely recognised as the market leader in age and identity verification with high street banks, building societies, share traders, mobile retailers and the gambling sector amongst several hundred clients. As MD, Rob delivered year on year triple digit growth, achieved profitability in year 3 and accounted for half the group’s revenue in year 5. As time and the identity market moved on, so did Rob to seek a new challenge. In 2012, Rob started working with a start-up, Innovate Identity. Today, Innovate Identity is regarded as a thought leader in identity, providing specialist consulting services to governments, OIX, the financial services and payments industries, to help them better understand the world of identity and adopt and make better use of technology to meet their and their customers’ needs.
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About Torwood Consulting: Torwood Consulting is a firm that specializes in IT software and services.
Paul Burton
Director of Pobi
Paul has more than 25 years’ experience in the financial services sector leading change and performance. For Abbey National plc in the early 90s, he turned an underperforming franchise performance rating from 65% to exceed it’s target in less than two years and to carry on still by becoming the top performing operation in the country. Paul moved to AXA Insurance where he was appointed National Sales Development Manager. He developed and led an award winning culture change programme to embed a world-class sales and management capability across AXA Insurance’s 3,000 plus employees, leading to 10% growth on growth in a declining market. Prior to setting up Pobi, Paul was Head of Claims Experience at AXA Insurance where he was responsible for the identification and delivery of efficiency and cost improvements whilst improving customer experience.
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About Pobi: Pobi platform provides a simple yet effective way of solving business critical challenges.
Saeid Naelini
Managing Director of AMX Solutions
Civil Engineer and Bridge Expert with 20 years experience in the industry, including computer programming. As Director, Saied is responsible for the Strategy and Operations of Infrastructure Asset Management Ltd.. Saeid oversees the international business, working in the Middle East and across Europe.
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About AMX Solutions: AMX Solutions specialized in enterprise asset management software solutions spanning a wide range of market sectors.
Dave Liddament
Director & Software Developer of Lamp Bristol
Dave Liddament is a director and developer at Lamp Bristol, a software consultancy. He’s been writing software commercially for over 15 years in many languages including C, Python, Java, and PHP. Dave is keen to pass on his knowledge. He is an organizer and regular speaker at PHP-SW. He also runs a monthly workshop covering topics including testing, CI, and Git. When not busy coding, Dave enjoys scuba diving and running.
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About Lamp Bristol: Lamp Bristol offers web development services for digital agencies.
