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 London based Founder operating in the Life Science 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.
Valentina Milanova
Founder and CEO of Daye
Valentina previously worked with Techstars as a Business Development Associate. She is currently looking after the AI portfolio at Founders Factory – launching 200 businesses in the next five years! Before entering the startup and VC worlds, Valentina studied law and worked as a technology correspondent for large international publications.
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About Daye: Daye creates category-defining products and services that set a new standard for medical research and scientific innovation.
Kevin Johnson
Co-Founder & Partner of Medicxi Ventures
Prior to co-founding Medicxi Ventures, Kevin was a partner with Index Ventures for 12 years, having joined the firm’s life sciences team in 2003. Kevin spearheaded Index’very first experimental asset-centric investment, in PanGenetics, which was later acquired by Abbott Pharmaceuticals. He was formerly on the board of directors of Versartis (Nasdaq: VSAR) and is currently involved with include Acutus and Levicept among others. Prior to joining Index, Kevin was with Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT), where he was appointed Head of Research in 1994 and, in 1997, Research Director and Chief Technology Officer. He led the development of CAT’s platform technologies and their application in the discovery of a number of human antibodies, two of which are now on the market: Humira (Abbott Pharmaceuticals) and Benlysta (GlaxoSmithKline). Kevin was part of the management team that floated CAT on the London Stock Exchange; it was subsequently acquired by AstraZeneca.Kevin received a BSc in Molecular Biology from Edinburgh University and a PhD in Pathology from Cambridge University.
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About Medicxi Ventures, PanGenetics: Medicxi is a life sciences-focused investment firm.
Benjamina Bollag
Founder & CEO of HigherSteaks
Benjamina is the CEO of London-based food tech start-up Higher Steaks, which she founded in 2017. Previously, Benjamina co-founded a London-based B2B electronics company selling to FTSE500 companies. Benjamina has also worked at Israeli 3D printing company, Stratasys, at the digital marketing division of PepsiCo’s joint venture with Strauss and was the lead developer an ed-tech startup. Benjamina holds a Master of Chemical Engineering from the Imperial College, where she completed a project focusing on the design of a peptide plant, conducting a lab-based research on synthesis and liquid exfoliation of graphitic carbon nitride
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About HigherSteaks, Zestful: HigherSteaks is about providing with that juicy, tender, and delicious meat they love but without harming their health, planet, and animals.
George Goldsmith
Executive Chairman, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of COMPASS Pathways
George is a serial entrepreneur with significant experience in pharmaceutical regulation. George’s early training and experience was a multi-disciplinary blending of cognitive psychology, clinical psychology and computer science.His first company, The Human Interface Group, was a pioneer in collaborative software and acquired by Lotus Development. George led the Lotus Institute and developed software and services to support high-performance, distributed teamwork. George then created TomorrowLab, which provided strategic guidance to internet businesses in the late 1990s. At the same time, he became a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company’s leadership, and eventually joined McKinsey as CEO of TomorrowLab@McKinsey. Subsequently, as a member of the Young Presidents Organisation (YPO) and its International Board of Directors, George founded YPO Networks. In 2002, George founded Tapestry Networks, an organisation committed to improving leadership performance and governance effectiveness in regulated sectors. He still serves as Tapestry Networks’ Non-Executive Chairman. George also serves on the board of directors for AnaBios, a company redefining drug discovery. He and his wife, Ekaterina Malievskaia MD, live in London.
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About COMPASS Pathways: Compass Pathways is a mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health.
Ekaterina Malievskaia
Chief Innovation Officer & Co-Founder of COMPASS Pathways
Ekaterina received her medical degree from St Petersburg Medical Academy in St Petersburg, Russia. After her Internal Medicine residency training, she completed an Environmental Medicine Fellowship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and received her MSc in Public Health from New York University Medical School. She worked in private practice, academic medicine and public health for more than 15 years in the greater New York area. She was a Clinical Instructor of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as well as a Research Professor at City University of New York. After moving to London in 2011, Ekaterina worked in global health and medical philanthropy, focusing on improving outcomes in maternal and child health. She founded COMPASS Pathways with her husband George Goldsmith in 2016, having experienced at first hand the challenges in accessing evidence-based and effective mental health care for a family member.
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About COMPASS Pathways: Compass Pathways is a mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health.
Gabriella Santosa
Co-Founder and CSO of Puraffinity
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About Puraffinity: Puraffinity develops precision materials to target chemicals, with an initial focus on PFAS in water
Henrik Hagemann
CEO and Co-Founder of Puraffinity
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About Puraffinity, Tech London Advocates: Puraffinity develops precision materials to target chemicals, with an initial focus on PFAS in water
Maria Chatzou Dunford
CEO and Co-Founder of Lifebit
Dr. Maria Chatzou, CEO of Lifebit, is a biotech innovator and a proud geek, expert in bioinformatics, medical informatics and high performance computing. She is also a passionate entrepreneur and has founded two companies, Innovation Forum Barcelona and Techstars-backed Lifebit. Prior to Lifebit, she was a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, in Barcelona, where she was designing and deploying tools and methods that facilitate the analysis of Big Biomedical Data, allow for biological discoveries, and promote personalised medicine. She was part of the developing team of Nextflow, a programming framework that is revolutionising the computational analysis of genomic data and setting the foundations for personalised medicine computational analyses. Maria is also a frequent industry speaker and has spoken in many international conferences on the subjects of docker containers, genomics workflows, the computational challenges of personalised medicine, AI and HPC in genomics, women in leadership, entrepreneurship, science ventures, among many other topics.
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About Lifebit: Lifebit CloudOS is the intelligent genomics platform that is the industry standard for unified, secure research over distributed big data.
Pablo Prieto Barja
CTO and Co-Founder of Lifebit
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About Lifebit: Lifebit CloudOS is the intelligent genomics platform that is the industry standard for unified, secure research over distributed big data.
Jonathan Sieff
Co-Founder of Polymateria
Jonathan Sieff is the Co-Founder of Polymateria.
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About Polymateria: Polymateria is a London-based startup advancing science to help nature deal with plastic pollution.
Lee Davy-Martin
Co-Founder of Polymateria
Lee Davy-Martin is the Co-Founder of Polymateria.
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About Polymateria: Polymateria is a London-based startup advancing science to help nature deal with plastic pollution.
Abdullah Sabyah
Founder and CEO of Rightangled
A scientist-entrepreneur and a healthcare professional, also a member of the British Heart Foundation Alliance, a member of the Clinical Pharmacogenomics Implementation Consortium in the US, and the inventor of a patent pending-technology for nucleic acid testing on a lateral flow assay (the patent is for a technology to detect DNA sequences in real-time).
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About Rightangled: Medtech specialised in Genetics, Blood and infection testing. Service is delivers through a platform that connects users with specialists.
Nick von Christierson
CEO & Co-Founder of Woven Science
Nick von Christierson is the CEO and Co-Founder at Woven Science.
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About Baby Bundle, Woven Science: Woven Science backs and builds best-in-class companies in the mental wellness space with a focus on psychedelic therapeutics.
Dhivya Venkat
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Esya
Dhivya Venkat is the Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Esya. University of Cambridge Degree NameGeneral ManagementField Of StudySuccessful Negotiation Strategies Dates attended or expected graduation2009
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About Esya: Esya is a biotech company that measures, monitors, assist drug development, and pre-assess patient cohorts for treatment.
Sergey Young
Founder of Longevity Vision Fund
Sergey Young is the Founder of Longevity Vision Fund.
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About Longevity Vision Fund, Peak State Ventures: Longevity Vision Fund invests in technologies that have the potential to disrupt life sciences and extend healthy lifespan.
Johannes Solzbach
CEO & Co-Founder of Clustermarket
Johannes Solzbach has been Chief Executive Officer and Director at Clustermarket LTD.
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About Clustermarket: One lab management platform that brings people, equipment and data together – no matter where they are.
Sacha Carton
Co-Founder & COO of Airfinity
Sacha is co-founder & COO at Airfinity – a science information and analytics company. He is a data, tech and media entrepreneur who previously co-founded ad pepper media (FRA: APM), Adbrain (sold to NSDQ: TTD), Scala Ventures and advisory firm Ogmenta and has been an investor, advisor and director in multiple media, data, adtech, PE and M&A companies in Europe and the US.
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About Airfinity, Scala Ventures: Airfinity is a science information and analytics company
Kitty Liao
Founder & CEO of Ideabatic
Royal Academy of Engineering 2018 Enterprise Fellow, Ambassador at THE Port Association, Switzerland. Ten years experience in multi-disciplinary system design and R&D, including low temperature systems, superconducting cavity diagnostics systems and design for low-resource settings.
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About Ideabatic: Ideabatic is solving the most challenging humanitarian problems by delivering innovative solutions and devices.
Marko Djukic
Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Ingenii
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About : Ingenii is a data engineering platform that provides access to a growing library of data engineering tools and templates.
Vivian Chan
CEO and Co-Founder of Sparrho
Vivian completed her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, after spending a year working in a venture fund in Australia. Vivian has twice been invited to address EU ministers, alongside other speakers including Bill Gates, about the importance of Open Data for innovation, and was selected by Management Today as one of the 35 Women Under 35 in 2015. Vivian is a former President & Chairman of Cambridge University Technology Enterprise Club (CUTEC), and was part of the inaugural Entrepreneur First cohort in 2012.
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About Sparrho: Sparrho lead the world in democratising science using augmented intelligence.
Sophia Karagiannis
Scientific Founder of Epsilogen
Sophia is a Reader in translational cancer immunology at KCL and a globally-recognised expert on the use of IgE antibodies to fight cancer. She co-founded and Chairs the Task Force on AllergoOncology and her group collaborates closely with the CRUK Centre for Drug Development. She holds a PhD from King’s College London.
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About Epsilogen: Epsilogen is a developer of an immuno-oncology company intended to develop immunoglobulin antibodies to treat cancer.
Cameron Shaw
Founder and COO of Virax Biolabs
Cameron Shaw is the founder and Chief Operations Officer at Virax Biolabs.
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About Virax Biolabs: Virax Biolabs is an innovative Biotechnology company focused on the prevention, detection and diagnosis of viral diseases
Charles Ball
Co-Founder and Commercial Manager of Chronomics
Charles Ball is the Co-Founder and Commercial Manager at Chronomics.
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About Chronomics: Tech-bio company, providing access to a ‘bio-infrastructure’ to simplify and speed-up the use of biomarkers to improve everyday decisions.
Toby Call
Co-Founder of Chronomics
Toby Call is the Co-Founder of Chronomics.
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About Chronomics: Tech-bio company, providing access to a ‘bio-infrastructure’ to simplify and speed-up the use of biomarkers to improve everyday decisions.
Daniel Elías Martín Herranz
Co-Founder and CSO of Chronomics
Daniel Elías Martín Herranz is the Co-Founder and CSO at Chronomics.
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About Chronomics: Tech-bio company, providing access to a ‘bio-infrastructure’ to simplify and speed-up the use of biomarkers to improve everyday decisions.
Michael O’Neill
Co-Founder and Director R&D of Inflection Biosciences
Michael O’Neill has more than 20 years’ experience working in the pharmaceutical industry. He was a Senior Research Scientist and Portfolio Manager at Eli Lilly for much of this time where he was responsible for developing project plans for the selection of projects and for their progression from discovery through to important development milestones. He established his own consulting business, Eolas, to help early stage companies to organize their research along commercial lines, becoming accomplished at building highly streamlined development plans. He has built consortia of commercial and academic groups to apply for major EU grants. Previously Dr. O’Neill was Head of Laboratory at Almirall and a Research Neuroscientist at Merck. He has authored over 80 papers, book chapters, patents and abstracts and is Honorary Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. He holds a BA Psychology from UCC and a PhD from QUB Belfast.
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About Inflection Biosciences: Inflection Biosciences is a company that develops small-molecule therapeutics for the treatment of cancer.
Natalie Jonk
Founder of Crowd.Science
Founder at Crowd.Science
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About Crowd.Science: Crowd.Science is a crowdfunding platform that supports scientists build a community of funders for their research.
Philipp Boeing
Co-Founder of Bento lab
Philipp Böing is a Co-Founder at Bento Lab.
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About Bento lab: Bento·lab is a powerful, personal laboratory that enables scientists, artists.
Bethan Wolfenden
Co-Founder of Bento lab
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About Bento lab: Bento·lab is a powerful, personal laboratory that enables scientists, artists.
Joanne Taylor
Founder of Life Science Leaders
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About Life Science Leaders: Life Science Leaders is an executive search company that specializes in the life science and medical industries.
Jan Berghe
Managing Director & Co-Founder of Novalis Biotechnology Incubation
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About Novalis Biotechnology Incubation: Novalis Biotech Incubation is an early-stage vc fund that invests in biotechnology and life sciences related companies.
Yen Choo
Founder of Plasticell
Yen Choo is a Founder at Plasticell.
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About Plasticell: Plasticell offers a cell-based screening technology for the discovery of small molecule drugs that regenerate cells of the body.
