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 CTO’ operating in the Media and Entertainment space. If you think a CTO’ 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.
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Matthew Postgate
Chief Technology and Product Officer of BBC
As Chief Technology Officer, Matthew Postgate is responsible for the corporation’s Technology & Systems. In addition, Matthew is a director of Youview Ltd; a joint venture between the BBC, ITV, C4, Channel Five, BT, Talk Talk and Arqiva that is developing a next-generation hybrid television platform. Prior to his current role within the organisation Matthew was Controller, Research & Development. He was part of the management team that launched BBC iPlayer and was in charge of BBC mobile where he was responsible for building the corporation’s world leading mobile services. Before joining the BBC, Matthew worked as a telecommunication consultant, was the director of an internet infrastructure start-up and worked at a digital strategy agency for clients including the Royal Mail, BT, Lloyds TSB, Visa and Qinetiq.
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About BBC: BBC is a large-scale broadcasting corporation that offers content to inform, educate, and entertain people.
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Morgan Sowden
Co-Founder & CTO of paydesk
Currently a product-focused CTO at Lendinvest, a VC backed fin-tech disruptor in the mortgage-lending space. Formerly the CTO at the Octopus Group, where I co-founded and built octopuslabs.com, octopuschoice.com and octopuscash.com; built the Octopus digital design team from scratch, as well as their product and (distributed) engineering teams; and initiated the group transformation from waterfall to agile. I am also co-founder and CTO of paydesk.co, a B2B media platform with 6000+ journalists in 165+ countries. Prior to Paydesk, I was interim CEO and CTO of birthdayalarm.com, a very profitable online greeting card site with 55+ million active members. I’ve also been: Entrepreneur in Residence at Monkey Inferno, a San Francisco based startup accelerator; a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded (and sold) two other web businesses, including an early social network (2003); and a board member / NED. Mostly though, I am DJ and love Techno. Search for me on Mixcloud.
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About Facebook AI, paydesk: On-demand workforce platform disrupting the recruitment industry one sector at a time. Starting with media and doing it with payments
Jiameng Gao
CTO and Co-founder of Papercup
Jiameng Gao is CTO and Co-founder at Papercup.ai. Jiameng has an MPhil in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Processing and an MEng in Information Engineering from the University of Cambridge. He was previously the first employee at Calipsa.
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About Papercup: Papercup translates videos using AI by generating voices that sound like the original speaker
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James King
Co-Founder & CTO of Encore Technologies
An avid pianist and our CTO, James is rarely seen away from a keyboard of some kind.
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About Encore Technologies: Encore is an online network of musicians that enables them to access many performance opportunities in the music community around them.
Roderick Hodgson
CTO of Simon Says
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About Simon Says: ‘Figma for video editing’ — collaborative, browser-based video editing for video pros, enabled by AI
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Ben Roeder
CTO of Sohonet
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About Sohonet: Sohonet operates the largest private network for Media & Entertainment in the world, linking over 400 leading studios and creatives.
Chris Watts
CTO / Co-Founder of NumberEight
Chris is the co-founder and CTO of NumberEight, a London-based AI company that detects user context from smartphone sensors and uses it to build audiences of behaviourally similar users. He is an ex-IBMer, where he researched air pollution sensors and has multiple patents to his name. He holds computer science degrees from Southampton and Cambridge and brings the know-how to achieve the theory of context detection in the real world.
Chris’ team has since produced patent-pending inventions, including efficient techniques for smartphones to process high-frequency data without significant battery impact, the ability to make personal devices work together to adapt to context and mood, and the process of defining groups of people with similar interests using anonymised sensor data.
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About NumberEight: NumberEight solves mobile addressability at scale by giving new life to untapped 1st party data. The company empowers app developers, ad partners, and advertisers to explore the power of mobex (mobile context) to connect with their users in a relevant, impactful, and most importantly, a private way. They do this through our best-in-class mobile AI software, which predicts the live context of a user (e.g. running, commuting) from sensors present in the device, and then packages them neatly into ID-less behavioural audiences (e.g. joggers, frequent shoppers). All computation happens on-device, thus producing a privacy-by-design solution that guarantees a higher regulatory immunity.
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Jon Beer
CTO and Co-Founder of Zapnito
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About Zapnito: Zapnito is the SaaS online community platform for intelligence-driven organizations.
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Joel Hopwood
Chief Technology Officer of Shopper Media Group
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About Shopper Media Group: Shopper Media Group specializes in commerce marketing activation, connecting retailers and brands with shoppers at the point of purchase.
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Stephen Worn
CTO & Managing Director of DatacenterDynamics
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About DatacenterDynamics: DatacenterDynamics is a full service B2B information provider tailored to professionals that design, build, and operate data centers.
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Richard Davis
CTO of Colony
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About Colony: Colony is global video streaming platform connecting content owners to engaged audiences.
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Adam Sewell
Chief Technology Officer of Metropolis International
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About Metropolis International: Metropolis International is a fast growing group, established in 1994.
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David Tait
CTO of ThinkLiberté
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About ThinkLiberté: ThinkLiberté is a social news service – always be informed