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 Cambridgeshire based CEO’ operating in the Software 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.
Alex Kendall
Co-Founder & CEO of Wayve
Alex Kendall is the co-founder & CEO at Wayve.
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About Wayve: Wayve uses end-to-end deep learning to develop artificial intelligence capable of complex driving.
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Ali Alauoubiy
Co-founder & CEO of ProdX.ai
Ali shapes the strategies that harness big data to solve daily problems. His focus is firmly on technology, platform capabilities and business growth. He has 18 years of experience in leading technology, delivery functions and business transformation across a range of sectors including financial service, travel, private equity and professional service. Ali has a Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from the University of Birmingham. And is currently completing the General Management Program (GMP) at Harvard Business School. A transformational leader experienced in managing large scale transformation initiatives, emerging technologies, complexity reduction/simplification, globally distributed diverse teams, strategic business growth, turnaround, restructuring, and operation management. With a broad International career experience across the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Africa and North America. – Cross-functional leadership, management and coaching multi-cultural, and distributed (including remote) teams, including setting clear and measurable goals aligned to strategy and fostering collaboration across diverse teams – Leading complex enterprise and digital transformations (including Agile Delivery and DevOps, Change Management, Culture Change, AI and Machine Learning and Cloud Migration). – Delivering multi-million-dollar budget software integration and transformation projects in a broad range of sectors (Private Equity, eTrading, wealth & asset management, aviation and, professional services). – Effective internal and external stakeholder management experience across business units. – Previous work experience at Dresdner Kleinwort (2004-2008), financial.com (2008-2010), Mubasher Financial Group (2010-2012), National Net Ventures (2012-2014), Credit Suisse (2014-2015), Emirates Airline (2015-2017) and ESW Capital (2017-2019).
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About ProdX.ai: Bring transparency and objectivity to the workplace by empowering individuals to achieve more, powered by A.I. insights and coaching.
Simon Galbraith
Founder & CEO of Redgate Software
Simon is the joint founder and CEO of Redgate Software. Over the past 15 years, Simon has been part of Redgate’s growth from a 2 person firm operating out of a spare room to today’s 300 person outfit with hundreds of thousands of users. Although Simon’s responsibilities are primarily strategic, his background is technical with qualifications including a PhD in physics from Cambridge University and former employment with Shell and ThornEMI.
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About Redgate Software: Redgate is the leading provider of software for professionals working on the Microsoft data platform.
Lyric Jain
Founder & CEO of Logically
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About Logically: Logically develops the latest in AI technologies to combat information overload, misinformation, fake news & other types of harmful content.
Peter Dabrowa
CEO of Wonde
CEO at Wonde.
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About Bay Tree PR, Koala, Wonde: Wonde provides third party applications access to secure school data.
Konstantin Kiselev
CEO of Conundrum
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About Conundrum: Conundrum is a platform helps factories to solve the tasks of predictive maintenance.
Mohamed Elmasry
CEO & Co-Founder of Tactful
Mohamed Elmasry is a person with “think, plan, act & accomplish” mentality who has a proven experience in motivating people to work towards challenging goals. I have been in the business world for several years running and growing businesses. I excelled in the fields of project management, business development, engineering management, and building strategic business relationships. My passion goes to distributive innovation, managing products development, defining processes and methodologies, also sustaining engineering and business activities.
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About Arm Holdings, Tactful: Unified Cognitive Customer Experience Platform
Eben Upton
Chief Executive Officer of Raspberry Pi Foundation
Eben Upton is a founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and serves as the CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading), its commercial arm. In an earlier life, he founded two successful mobile games and middleware companies, Ideaworks 3d (now Marmalade) and Podfun, held the post of Director of Studies for Computer Science at St John’s College, Cambridge, and wrote the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary with his father, Professor Clive Upton. He holds a BA, a PhD and an MBA from the University of Cambridge.
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About Raspberry Pi Foundation, Raspberry Pi Foundation: Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity that develops a credit card-sized computer that can be plugged into a TV and keyboard.
Matthew Cleevely
CEO & Chairman of 10to8
Matthew founded 10to8 with a few friends to help simplify managing bookings and make the world a little bit more organised. He helps out where needed across the business in strategy, accounting, finance, compliance, fund raising and people. Outside of 10to8 he works with wide range of high growth businesses to help them achieve their goals. He’s also got an MEng in Engineering from Oxford and MPhil in Economics from Cambridge
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About 10to8: 10to8 is a powerful appointment scheduling software that is GDPR & CCPA ready, offers HIPAA tools, and is ISO 27001 certified.
Darran Milne
Co-Founder & CEO of VividQ
Dr Darran Milne – Chief Executive Officer, PhD (University of St Andrews & Max Plank Institute) Mathematician and Theoretical Physicist by training, with a PhD in quantum information theory from the University of St Andrews and the Max Plank Institute in Erlangen. Having started his career as a quantitative analyst at a large financial software house, he soon began to direct product development initiatives, and manage client implementation projects as a Scrum Master. As one of the co-founders of VividQ and its CTO, he directed the original research and development efforts of the team that evolved into the currently offered products. In his role as a CEO, he has been responsible for leading and execution of the company’s technology and commercial strategies.
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About VividQ: VividQ powers the revolution in digital display with Computer-Generated Holography.
Chris Mitchell
CEO & Founder of Audio Analytic
Dr Chris Mitchell founded Audio Analytic following the completion of his self-funded PhD in sound information systems and signal processing. Chris received a prestigious Kauffman/NCGE Fellowship to investigate the commercial implications of his research, through which he received training at Harvard Business School and worked with Cisco Systems in San Jose, US. Subsequently, Chris attended the Ignite programme at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, funded by the East of England Development Agency. He is an internationally published author, an associate lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University’s Design and Technology Department, and holder of multiple patents.
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About Audio Analytic: Audio Analytic creates exceptional human experiences through giving consumer technology a greater sense of hearing.
Justin Ott
CEO of Spark EV Technology
CEO at Spark EV Technology.
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About Spark EV Technology: Spark develops and supplies personalised journey prediction and map display software products for electric vehicles.
Ramsey Faragher
Founder & CEO of Focal Point Positioning
Ramsey Faragher is the CEO and CTO at Focal Point Positioning. He is a world-leading expert in GNSS-denied positioning and is pioneering the development of game-changing new technologies to set new standards in indoor positioning and autonomous positioning systems. He holds a first class degree in Physics and a PhD in opportunistic radio positioning, both from the University of Cambridge. Ramsey is also a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation, and a Bye Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. Previously he was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where he developed the first online SLAM-based indoor positioning system for smartphones. Prior to this he was a Principal Scientist at the BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre where he developed the award-winning and patented NAVSOP opportunistic positioning suite and other GNSS-denied tracking technologies.
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About Focal Point Positioning: Focal Point has developed next generation navigation and positioning software for smartphones, wearables and autonomous vehicles.
Shravane Balabasqer
Founder | CEO of Carbon Analytics
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About Carbon Analytics: A granular asset focused carbon intelligence & offsetting platform for active industrial decarbonisation across the value chain.
Adam Durant
Founder & CEO of SATAVIA
Adam Durant is CEO and Founder of Satavia. Prior to founding SATAVIA, Dr. Durant worked as a professional scientist and held posts at the University of Cambridge and Norwegian Institute for Air Research. Dr. Durant has grown Satavia to achieve global recognition in the Tällt Ventures Disrupt 100 list in 2017 and was selected to participate in the 2017 SVC2UK CEO Summit held at Buckingham Palace. In addition, he has taken SATAVIA to the finals of Pitch@Palace 6.0; Mass Challenge 2016; and Copernicus Masters 2016. He has also won over £1.5m grant funding since 2015 from Innovate UK, Aerospace Technology Institute, and the European Space Agency for Satavia.
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About SATAVIA: SATAVIA simplifies decision-making for smarter, greener aviation
Toby Norman
Co-Founder & CEO of Simprints
Toby Norman, CEO and Co-Founder of Simprints. Gates Scholar and PhD in Management from the University of Cambridge, BA in Biology from Harvard. Toby has worked >10 years with frontline workers across Africa, Asia, and Central America on initiatives to improve global health and development through technology. Toby is a 2018 GLG Fellow, 2017 Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year, and 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 Entrepreneur.
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About Simprints: Simprints is a nonprofit company building technology to increase effectiveness in how the world fights global poverty.
Nicolaas Matthijs
CEO, Founder of Fronteer LTD
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About Fronteer LTD: Creating awesome Educational Technology experiences
Nicolaas Matthijs
CEO, Founder of Fronteer LTD
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About Fronteer LTD: Creating awesome Educational Technology experiences
Colin Bray
CEO of 1Spatial
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About 1Spatial: 1Spatial provides the software solutions and services that manage the world’s largest spatial big data.
Colin Bray
CEO of 1Spatial
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About 1Spatial: 1Spatial provides the software solutions and services that manage the world’s largest spatial big data.
Tim Cheeseright
Chief Executive Officer of Torx Software
Tim Cheeseright is the director of product at Cresset Biomolecular Discovery.
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About Cresset, Torx Software: Torx Software is a platform for small molecule discovery chemistry.
Adam Greenwood-Byrne
CEO of RealVNC
Adam was appointed CEO in March 2018 after successfully building RealVNC’s intellectual property licensing (OEM) business and transforming their end-user proposition to a SaaS model. Leading the business into Livingbridge’s 2021 investment has left RealVNC poised for its next stage of growth.
With a background in Mathematics and Computer Science, and a career spent growing IT companies from the ground up, Adam bridges the technical and commercial interests of the business. Seeing his role as building a world-class team that works together in harmony to deliver an excellent service, this has been an important attribute.
Over his career, he has helped charities, non-profits, start-ups, scale-ups and corporates alike to deploy technology that maximises efficiency and effectiveness. His passion for RealVNC as a productivity solution that’s relevant in every industry sector, at every organisation size, is only amplified by its long history of reducing carbon emissions and creating workplace equity by enabling people to reduce their personal travel and work wherever works.
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About RealVNC: Accelerate your business with secure remote desktop access and support for a connected world.
Piers Wombwell
CEO of Ekioh
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About Ekioh: Ekioh develops cutting-edge browsers, including Flow, its new multithreaded browser.
Alex Smeets
CEO, Cambridge Funding Solutions of Pintrack Ltd
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About : Pintrack Ltd is a tech company focused on software development.
Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Founder & CEO of Patients Know Best
Mohammad is founder and CEO of Patients Know Best and has over 15 years of experience in medical software. He trained as a physician at the University of Cambridge; worked as a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health; and was a management consultant to US hospitals at The Advisory Board Company. He is the author of seven books, including Personal health records: A guide for clinicians and Streamlining Hospital-Patient Communication: Developing High Impact Patient Portals. He is also an honourary senior research associate at UCL medical school for his research on patient-controlled medical records. In 2012 he was elected an Ashoka Fellow as a social entrepreneur for the contributions he has made to patient care.
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About Patients Know Best: Patients Know Best provide hospitals with personal health records software so that their patients can better manage their health.
Ben Pellegrini
Chief Executive Officer of Intellegens
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About Intellegens: Cambridge spin out using Deep Learning to train on big, incomplete data. Currently working in drug discovery and material design.
Misha Kapushesky
Chief Executive Officer of Genestack
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About Genestack: Genestack provides customers in the pharma, biotech and healthcare sectors with multi-omics data management and integration solutions.
Sadiq Jaffer
CEO of Opsian
Sadiq holds a PhD in Autonomous Robotics and has for years consulted for multi-national companies designing and implementing highly scalable intelligent platforms. His experience has included deep learning systems, embedded platforms, desktop and mobile games development.
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About Opsian: Opsian performance reports give you line-level granularity – giving you actionable information to eliminate bottlenecks.
Sithamparanathan Sabesan
Founder and CEO of PervasID
Sithamparanathan Sabesan read a BEng (Hons) Electronic Engineering at Sheffield University in 2004, where he scored the highest marks in his year, and was awarded the Sir William Siemens Medal for being among the UK’s top 18 science and technology students. Sabesan worked on RFID since beginning his PhD on the subject of ‘Passive RFID real time sensing system for intelligent infrastructure’ at Cambridge University in 2007 and was elected to a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge University in 2011. Prior to his PhD, he worked at ARM as an Electronic Engineer. Sabesan is a recipient of the 2011 Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Entrepreneurs Award and the 2011 UK ICT Pioneers of Connected World award. In 2014 he was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship, and most recently he was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year award, as well as the Sir George Macfarlane Medal 2016 for excellence in the early stage of the career. He is a Fellow of the ERA Foundation.
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About PervasID: PervasID is developing a high reliability
Antony Rix
CEO of Granta Innovation
An entrepreneur with an engineering background, Antony has spent over 20 years working in telecommunications, wireless technology, medical devices and product development. He started his career at a major telecoms research laboratory, then co-founded Psytechnics, a spin-out commercialising network quality assessment and monitoring technology. He then spent more than a decade at TTP, the leading technology and product development consultancy, before joining 8power as co-founder and CEO. He is currently founder and CEO at Lucida Medical, developing AI for cancer screening using MRI.
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About Lucida Medical: Research, consulting and development of AI and ML applications in business and healthcare
John McInerney
Founder and CEO of Amperfii
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About Amperfii: Amperfii offers a data enablement platform that helps companies drive better business outcomes.
Ken Roberts
CEO & Founder of AudioTelligence
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About AudioTelligence: AudioTelligence delivers real-time audio processing technology for the enhancement of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.
Josh Harris
Founder & CEO of Doc2
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About Doc2: Allowing SMEs to create, send and eSign their contracts in seconds.
Adam Bishop
CEO of SchemeServe
Adam will try to convince you he invented Software-as-a-Service. He’s been running web based software companies since 15 when still at grammar school and over the years in between migrating (Oxford >> Cambridge >> Italy) has programmed most things: real-time Forex and futures trading systems, 3D games, medical software, music production apps… He passes his (precious) spare time penning classical music, trading Bitcoin and reading Wikipedia. He wants SchemeServe to be perfect.
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About CityTech, SchemeServe: SchemeServe is a cloud based insurance software, including simple scheme management, online billing and beautiful MI reports.
Nizar Romdan
CEO & Co-founder of Virtual Arts Ltd.
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About Virtual Arts Ltd.: We are building a leading state of the art Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality Technology and interactive content company.
Garry Lowther
Chief Executive Officer of TriSys
Garry graduated in 1985 and has spent his entire career working with information technology, having worked in both the private and public sectors, including finance, telecoms, insurance, media. Garry founded TriSys in 1992 to build sophisticated software for business. Garry is passionate about new technology in particular software development with recent focus on cloud computing in the mobile space, and has built solid working relationships with both customers, partners and suppliers.
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About TriSys: TriSys Business Software has been providing CRM solutions to the recruitment industry.
Jerry Pett
Co-Founder & CEO of Thymometrics
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About Thymometrics: Always-On & Pulse Employee Engagement Surveys and Employee Feedback Solutions
Richard Hobson
CEO and Founder of Herdsy
Richard Hobson holds a B.A. in Finance & DBS(IT) from the Michael Smurfit School of Business. He has a diverse skillset as he is both a Software Developer and an Accountant who has worked in these roles for IBM and Aviva. Under Richard’s leadership, Herdsy has grown from a kitchen table business to one that has won international awards and was a finalist in 2018 for Cambridge Agtech Company of the year.
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About Herdsy: Herdsy automates and analyses farm animal data and converts it into valuable profit decisions for farmers.
