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 Employment 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.
Tony Jamous
CEO and Co-Founder of Oyster®
Tony Jamous is a tech entrepreneur and angel investor. He has made over 15 direct investments in global technology companies with a focus on developer tools, platforms models, impact, FinTech and HR Tech. Five of his companies have realized an exit to-date. Tony is currently building the future of work through his new venture Oyster, a distributed talent enablement platform that allows growing companies to tap into the global talent pool and offer their remote workers around the world a great employment experience. Priori to Oyster, Tony co-founded and led Nexmo, a leader in CPAAS (Communication Platform As A Service) acquired by Vonage in 2016. Tony started his career in 2004 in the cloud, communication and mobile industries. At mBlox and Boku, Tony opened up global messaging and payment services. Tony holds a Masters in Computer Science from Grenoble Institute of Technology in France and an MBA from the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, with a focus on leadership development and organization behavior.
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About Oyster®: Oyster is a Distributed HR platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for talented teammates regardless of location.
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Sergiu Matei
Founder of Index
Sergiu Matei is the founder of Index, the London-based platform helping enterprises like Vodafone and Twilio find and hire world-class remote software developers, and be globally compliant from the get-go. Before launching Index, Sergiu founded Travod, the translation marketplace providing 2,000+ brands such as Amazon and Swissport with locally hired translators in 100+ countries in every continent across the globe.
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About Index, Index.dev: Index helps companies and organizations hire remote software developers and teams.
Doug Monro
Co-Founder and CEO of Adzuna
Doug was most recently COO of property portal Zoopla. From 2008 he led the growth of the team from 5 to 75 people and the site to number 2 in UK property with 5M visitors a month, organically and through acquisitions. Previously he was MD of Gumtree.com, the UK’s largest classified ads site, where he built the team and business through a fun growth ramp after acquisition by eBay in 2005. Prior to Gumtree, Doug worked for eBay UK, Bain & Company, Unilever and also as an entrepreneur. Doug has a BA in English from Cambridge, an MBA from Kellogg, and hates to admit he is a qualified accountant.
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About Adzuna: Adzuna is a smart search engine for job ads.
Theo Pape
Founder, CEO of DRONEWORK
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About DRONEWORK, Flickreel: DRONEWORK is a drone mission matching platform for professional drone operators.
Jan Lynn-Matern
Founder and Partner of Emerge Education
I am a Founder and Partner at Emerge Education. Emerge Education is a European seed investor focused on companies that bridge the skills gap. Emerge specialises in providing its portfolio companies with access to market insights, partners and customers through its unique industry network. We have a particular focus on investing in challenger universities, bootcamps, workforce re-training programmes, and companies that help universities scale online.
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About Emerge Education: The only fund backed by the world’s leading education entrepreneurs
Ben Dixon
Co-Founder & CTO of Sona
Ben is a senior developer focused on web application development. He primarily creates Ruby on Rails and Android applications. He also has experience in front-end development in both Backbone and Angular JS as well as infrastructure management with Chef and Docker. He’s the author of Reliably Deploying Rails Applications (http://www.deployingrailsbook.com/) which covers how to deploy medium-sized Rails Applications in an easy, scalable fashion, and spoke at Railsconf 2014 on this topic. He also spoke at Railsconf 2015 on how Docker can be tightly integrated with Rails to do far more interesting things than just deployment. He is currently CTO of Sona, the unified frontend for the frontline workforce.
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About Sona: Sona is the employee app for tomorrow’s workforce.
Oli Johnson
Co-Founder of Sona
Oli Johnson is a Co-founder of Sona.
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About Sona: Sona is the employee app for tomorrow’s workforce.
Saurav Chopra
Co-Founder of Perkbox
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About Perkbox: Perkbox is a global benefits and rewards platform that helps companies care for, connect with and celebrate their employees.
Lee Carlin
Co-Founder and Head of Talent & Experience of The Intern Group
International Education Entrepreneur. Passionate about accessibility & inclusion. I am a customer-focused individual who has experience in bootstrapping an international education start-up to £10m+ revenue, helping to create life-changing experiences for over 10,000 global students to date. I am based between London & Latin America.
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About The Intern Group: The Intern Group is an EdTech company that connects global talent with opportunity
David Lloyd
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Office of The Intern Group
A British national, David studied at University College London and the London School of Economics. He previously lived in Argentina where he completed an internship at Rolex, perfected his Spanish and fell in love with the continent. Before setting up The Intern Group he was a fixed income salesman on the Iberian desk for Merrill Lynch in London. He left Merrill to pursue his true dream – to promote international opportunities and give others fantastic experiences like he had along with advantages that last.
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About Magma Partners, The Intern Group: The Intern Group is an EdTech company that connects global talent with opportunity
Raj Mendhir
CEO and Co-Founder of Wintern
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About Wintern: Wintern is an Assessment Centre service provider and Leadership Education organisation.
Mike James
Co-Founder of Wintern
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About Wintern: Wintern is an Assessment Centre service provider and Leadership Education organisation.
Mike James
Co-Founder of Wintern
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About Wintern: Wintern is an Assessment Centre service provider and Leadership Education organisation.
Nick Groves
Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer of Orka Technology Group
Nick Groves is the Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Orka Technology Group.
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About Orka Technology Group: Orka Technology Group develops solutions that help hourly workers with sourcing, on-boarding, and getting paid for work.
Mark Elwig
Co-Founder and Commercial Director of Staff Heroes
Proven Commercial leader with a track record of driving growth through technology sales with Enterprise customers across multiple sectors including Hospitality, Retail, Travel and Entertainment. Experienced go-to market strategist and sales leader. Deal brokering at a global level. International experience within EMEA and US. Focus, drive and great people skills having lead several sales, business development and client account teams for both Fortune 500 and start-up organisations. Experience in setting up and building out sales and marketing teams from scratch and most recently co-founding and running the commercial arm of an innovative staffing marketplace start-up, operating within the Hospitality sector in the UK. Specialties: Business development, Sales, business strategy, account management, client services, licensing, white label, B2B partnerships, European & Global sales, SaaS software sales, launching a start-up.
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About eBay Advertising, mydeco, Staff Heroes: Staff Heroes is an on demand & AI technology marketplace reinventing the world of work, connecting businesses and workers more efficiently.
Robert Walters
CEO and Founder of Robert Walters
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About Robert Walters: Robert Walters is a global, specialist professional recruitment consultancy.
Xenios Thrasyvoulou
Founder & CEO of PeoplePerHour
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About PeoplePerHour: PeoplePerHour is a marketplace connecting small businesses and freelancers.
Seb Hall
Founder of Cloud Employee
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About Cloud Employee: Cloud Employee is an Innovative Offshore IT staffing Provider helping Startups Grow
Gregory Asmolov
Co-Founder of PitchMe
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About King’s College London, PitchMe: PitchMe is a skills-based talent marketplace introducing multilayered profiling of skills and innovative matching algorithms.
Jennifer Johansson
Founder & CEO of Placed App
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About Placed App: Placed is a mobile-first recruitment platform helping the high labour churn, service industries access permanent staff.
Hugo Rodger-Brown
Co-Founder & CTO of YunoJuno
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About YunoJuno: Online platform connecting freelancers and clients in the creative and technology sectors
Paris Stylianides
Co-Founder. head of Strategy and Growth of Jobcha
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About Jobcha: JOBCHA is a smarter job search using machine learning algorythms.
Miguel Heinonen
Founder & CEO of Heirizon
Miguel is in charge of overall operations and strategy at Heirizon, where he manages the growth as a brand and the expansion of the company. Miguel graduated from Johnson & Wales University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Entrepreneurship, and received his MBA in Global Business Administration.
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About Heirizon: Heirizon is a leading job board that aggregates jobs within 7 miles of your desired location. The platform helps users find jobs in a visual process as well as shows the companies hiring in real-time.
Matthew de la Hey
CEO & Co-Founder of inploi
Matthew is co-founder & CEO of inploi, a recruitment marketing platform built to connect great employers with the future of the workforce. With employer branding at its heart, inploi empowers companies to speak to candidates as consumers of workplaces, helping them to tell their stories with captivating videos, images, and written content in order to engage active and passive candidates. When actively hiring, inploi’s software is a powerful recruitment tool incorporating job post creation and distribution, applicant tracking, CV-parsing, candidate-job matching, proactive talent search, video profiles, instant messaging, video calling, file sharing, programmatic job advertising and more. For jobseekers, inploi provides a beautiful professional presence making it easy to access career-related information, apply for job opportunities, and connect and communicate with employers, and with each other. Matthew is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar and a two-time Weidenfeld Scholar.
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About inploi: inploi is the future of talent engagement and job discovery.
Laura Degiovanni
CEO and Founder of TiiQu
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About TiiQu: TiiQu is a trust mechanism derived by immutable verifiable sources about one’s ID, Work, Knowledge, Performances
Gary McKay
Co-Founder & MD of APPII
Gary is the co-founder and managing director of APPII, a blockchain start up revolutionising CV verification and employee background checking. APPII was founded in early 2016 and is based in London. He has more than 20 years’ experience across many different industries including financial services, media, staffing and recruiting, and management consulting. All of his roles have centred around using his technology experience and knowledge to transform businesses and disrupt business models. Born is Scotland, Gary studied Building Surveying at the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture, before moving to Australia for 18 years where he studied at the UNSW Business School and was awarded a Master of Business and Technology.
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About APPII: Using blockchain technology to quickly and simply verify identities, backgrounds (such as criminal history) and career history (CV / Resume)
Matt Rantell
CEO & Founder of The Square
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About The Square: The Square is an award winning workforce management platform & hiring marketplace for construction businesses.
Kondwani Mwangulube
Founder of Myjobo.com
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About Myjobo.com: Myjobo.com is Malawi’s leading online site for jobs, recruitment and careers. It covers both the formal and informal employment marketplace.
Geoffrey Banda
Co-Founder & Director of Myjobo.com
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About Myjobo.com: Myjobo.com is Malawi’s leading online site for jobs, recruitment and careers. It covers both the formal and informal employment marketplace.
Nicholas Barton
Founder & CEO of The Barton Partnership
Nicholas founded The Barton Partnership in late 2007 and has succeeded in building a niche executive recruitment firm with an enviable reputation within the Strategy, Transformation and M&A arena. From a standing start, he has built a team of professionals renowned not only for their talent acquisition skills but also their subject matter expertise with offices in London, Europe, New York and Asia. Throughout his career he has specialised in, and successfully executed, on over 250 senior retained and contingent assignments across Commerce, Financial Services and Professional Services both in the UK and Internationally.
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About The Barton Partnership: The Barton Partnership is a niche Executive Recruitment firm providing permanent and interim solutions in strategy, transformation, and M&A.
Christopher Platts
Co-Founder & CEO of ThriveMap
Chris Platts is CEO of ThriveMap, a provider of personalised, pre-employment assessment software for volume hiring.
A former recruiter, Chris has experienced the problem of relying on intuition when making hiring decisions. ThriveMap helps companies to redeuce attrition and improve hiring decisions via realistic work simulations that take candidates through a digital “day in the life” experience of a job. Prior to starting ThriveMap, Chris was CEO of TalentRocket a culture-first talent marketplace.
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About ThriveMap: Personalised pre-employment assessments for volume hiring
Magdalena Slowinska Janowitz
Co-Founder/CEO of Includeon
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About Includeon: An accessible platform matching remote jobs with disabled e-workers, creating a happy online workplace and a more inclusive society.
Agnieszka Łyniewska
Founder of NIKWELI
Agnieszka Łyniewska is the founder of Nikweli. As a founder sha brings drive, contacts, and business development knowledge.She is a former World Banker in Tanzania. She is an associate at Associate at McKinsey & Company. She earned her MBA at London Business School . Brings drive, contacts and business development knowledge.
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About NIKWELI: NIKWELI is a mobile-to-web job matching platform that connects employers and job seekers for the service sector positions.
Bhavin Ranchod
Co Founder of Interviewstars
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About Interviewstars: We coach interview candidates
Anish Patel
Co-Founder of Interviewstars
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About Interviewstars: We coach interview candidates
Ahmed Shamso
Founder and CEO of SchoolX
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About SchoolX: SchoolX is an online platform that facilitates the education process for out-of-school children in vulnerable areas.
