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 Audio 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.
Will Harris
Co-Founder of Entale Media
Wil Harris is a journalist and serial entrepreneur with a proven track record of building successful creative businesses, most recently in the field of online video and publishing. After a misguided stint studying Law at Oxford, in 2005 Wil co-founded Bit-Tech.net, an online blog for computer hardware and gaming geeks. By March 2007, the site was read by over 1 million avid PC enthusiasts worldwide each month, carried advertising from every major PC enthusiast brand, and had earned an enviable reputation as a global leader in its field. In 2008, Wil co-founded ChannelFlip Media, then UK’s leading producer of made-for-web video. As CEO, Wil led ChannelFlip’s growth to over 12m+ subscribers across a network of 150+ YouTube channels. ChannelFlip worked with some of the top creative talent on the web, including Charlie McDonnell, Jonty Picking and Lee Hardcastle, as well as some of television’s top talent, including Richard Hammond, David Mitchell, Warwick Davis and David Hasselhoff. ChanelFlip was acquired by the Shine Group in 2012 and is now part of EndemolShine. In 2014, he became the Head of Digital for Condé Nast, UK. Currently, Harris is CEO and of Entale Maedia, a new media startup that produces a technology platform to revolutionise the production, discovery and listening experience of podcasts and other audio content. He also co-founder Entale Media.
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About Entale Media, Hotwolf: Entale offers an AI-powered platform that provides an immersive podcasting experience.
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Taras Polischuk
Co-Founder & COO of Dorm
Taras Polischuk is the Co-Founder and COO at Dorm.
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About Dorm, Forbes, PomaBrush: Dorm is an audio learning app that aggregates and curates the world’s podcasting content.
Ranbir Arora
Co-Founder, CEO of Dorm
Ranbir Arora is the CEO and Co-Founder at Dorm.
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About Dorm: Dorm is an audio learning app that aggregates and curates the world’s podcasting content.
Ben Drury
Co-Founder and CEO of Yoto
Ben began his career in 1996 as a founder of dotmusic.com, an internal venture at United News and Media which attracted over 1.8m unique users per month (in 1999). In 2000 Ben was recruited by BT Group to head up the broadband music efforts at their ISP BT Openworld where he successfully launched a major music channel. Following the partnership between BT and Yahoo! to form BT Yahoo! in 2003, Ben engineered the sale of dotmusic to Yahoo! for approx. £3.3m. Ben then founded 7digital with James Kane in 2004 with the vision of creating a digital media marketplace. 7digital operates services that bring together suppliers and consumers of digital media. In September 2008 7digital.com was the first company in Europe to launch DRM-free MP3 downloads with all four major record labels. In September 2009 HMV Group acquired a 50% equity stake in 7digital with an investment of £7.7m. Ben was named by Growing Business magazine as a Young Gun 2006 – the award for leading entrepreneurs under 35. In 2007, 7digital was awarded the prestigious Red Herring Top 100 Europe Award as one of the most promising technology companies in Europe.
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About Pimoroni, Yoto: Yoto – The screen-free audio platform for kids.
Victor Frumkin
Co-Founder of Bookmate
Cofounder at Instreamatic.ai, the Voice AI platform powering voice-enabled advertising. CoFounder, Board member at Bookmate.com, the mobile story-on-go subscription service providing fun&convenient access to ebook, audiobook, other long-form content.
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About Bookmate: Bookmate is mobile story-on-the-go subscription service providing convenient access to ebooks, audiobooks and other long-form content
Daniel Couchman Kendall
Managing Director & Founder of Mission Based Media
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About Mission Based Media: Mission Based Media creates and produces audio content that depends on the organization’s goals.
Patrick Bergel
Co Founder of Chirp
Making things sing. Research Associate at UCL, Founder + Partner @animalsystems, Lord Creator @chirp_io. Looking forward to meeting you.
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About animal systems: Chirp uses existing speakers and microphones to enable frictionless M2M communication to seamlessly and securely transfer data via sound.
Andy Agar
Co-Founder and CEO of Music TCHR
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About Music TCHR: Music TCHR is a platform that focuses on music, teaching, songwriting, live events, and the marketplace.
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.
Abhishek Sen
CEO / Co-Founder of NumberEight
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About NumberEight: On-device AI software to predict user context using mobile sensors
Alex Hunter
Founder & CEO of Rushmore.fm
Alex Hunter is an angel investor and company incubator.
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About Ignite Accelerator, Rushmore.fm: We want to bring artists and music fans closer together.
David Greenberg
CEO & Founder of Eave
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About Eave: Eave (formerly EarTex) is a startup developing the next generation of hearing protection and communication technology.
John Atherton
Director & Founder of Sonalytic
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About Sonalytic: Sonalytic develops a content identification approach that enables us to connect creators and rights-holders to monetization opportunities.
