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 Founder operating in the Hardware 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.
Samantha Payne
Co Founder & COO of Open Bionics
Samantha Payne is the co founder of Open Bionics; a robotics company developing assistive devices that enhance the human body. The company has won multiple awards for Engineering and Innovation including two British Engineering Excellence Awards and the James Dyson award for innovative design. Open Bionics works with companies like Disney to children with limb differences into bionic superheroes. They were the first company to bring affordable multi-grip bionic hands to the National Health Service in the UK.
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About Open Bionics: Open Bionics is a robotics company creating affordable 3D-printed bionic hands for amputees, researchers and makers.
John Rudin
Founder, CTO, and COO of Folium Optics
John studied Engineering at Durham University, and Optics at Reading University. After working as a product design engineer he joined Hewlett Packard and helped found their UK based displays research group. In 2013 he and Steve Kitson set up Folium Optics to further the commercialisation of colourful, low power plastic displays.
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About Folium Optics: Folium Optics was founded in November 2013 by Steve Kitson and John Rudin.
Ray McConnell
Founder/CTO of Blu Wireless
Ray brings over 25 years of experience with high performance, low power parallel processor technology. Starting his career with INMOS, he went on to found his first in a series of startups, Division plc, 20 years ago. At his second startup, Ray architected a multi-threaded graphics GP-GPU processor and has developed low-power, scaled heterogeneous maths accelerator SoCs and large imaging supercomputers. He has extensive knowledge of heterogeneous acceleration, compilers and software architectures and their applicability to the ‘difficult’ processing challenges in gigabit signal processing. He brings a broad range entrepreneurial startup experience, taking Division, PixelFusion and Clearspeed to IPO. Ray has 26 US and UK patents granted or filed and holds a computer science and cybernetics degree from the University of Kent.
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About Blu Wireless: Blu Wireless Technology is a silicon IP company developing wireless technology with a faster transmission rate.
Vassilis Seferidis
Co-Founder & CEO of Zeetta Networks
Vassilis has more than 25 years of experience in the Telecom and Consumer Electronics (CE) industries mainly in Strategic Business Planning and Development roles. Before co-founding Zeetta Networks, Vassilis was VP of European Business Development for Samsung Electronics responsible for driving revenue growth and strategic development of the company’s Consumer Electronics business in Europe. Prior to Samsung, he held senior management positions with British Telecom, Toshiba Information Systems, Philips Electronics, and British Standards Institute. During 2006-2009 he was the CTO of QIO Systems Inc., a pioneer in wearable electronics based in New York City. Vassilis holds a BSc and MSc from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, a PhD in Electronic Systems Engineering from Essex University and an MBA from Cass Business School, University of London. In 2011 he was included in Euro50, a list of Europe’s 50 most influential people in Broadband &Telecoms industries.
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About Zeetta Networks: Zeetta Networks simplifies the monitoring, management and automation of complex ICT networks
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
