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 United Kingdom based Founder operating in the Chemical 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.
Alexander Guslisty
Founder, CEO of BIG Atom
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About BIG Atom: Recycling company on a mission to end polymer waste. They develop, build and operate new generation infrastructure for processing waste.
Richard Palmer
Founder of D3O
Richard Palmer is the Founder at D3O
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About D3O: D3O is a specialist provider of impact protection solutions & materials.
Jolyon Tidmarsh
Co-Founder and Technology Director of Keit
Jolyon has significant experience in establishing technology based start-up businesses and managing technical projects, with previous successes in the fields of online drinks quality measurement, and bio-fuels. With a degree in Applied Physics, Jolyon has a technical background in designing optical systems in the infra-red with particular applications in spectroscopy, telecommunications and optical fibre sensing.
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About Keit: Keit’s microFTS® design is a Fourier Transform Infrared spectrometer that is smaller, lighter and more rugged than any current system.
Ferdinando Randisi
Co Founder & CTO of FabricNano
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About FabricNano: FabricNano is a cell-free biomanufacturing company that develops a DNA-based flow reactor to unlock the future of biochemistry.
Grant Aarons
Co-Founder & CEO of FabricNano
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About FabricNano: FabricNano is a cell-free biomanufacturing company that develops a DNA-based flow reactor to unlock the future of biochemistry.
Andrew Hall-Ponselè
Founder and Director of Operations of Biotangents
Andy designed the Leapfrog Assembly™ technology upon which Biotangents was founded and led the successful project to apply it to the biosynthesis of high-value terpenoids. He now leads operations at Biotangents and is part of an ambitious team that has secured and fulfilled multiple contracts to perform DNA manipulation work for industrial and academic customers. Andy has been involved in synthetic biology since 2008 when, as a student under Professor Chris French, he led the University of Edinburgh iGEM team to a gold medal. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where he used metabolic engineering approaches to provide new insights into the control of metabolism in plants. On his return to Edinburgh, Andy worked as a Senior Scientist in a University of Edinburgh-based start-up, delivering collaborative projects as varied as synthetic promoter design and polysaccharide biosynthesis.
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About Biotangents: Biotangents develop pen-side diagnostic devices to detect infectious diseases in livestock quickly.
Lina Gasiūnaitė
Founder and Director of Science of Biotangents
As the Director of Science at Biotangents, Lina is leading delivery of Moduleic Sensing™ for the diagnosis of infectious diseases in livestock. Lina completed her undergraduate studies in Molecular Biology at Vilnius University and holds an MSc in Biotechnology from the University of Edinburgh. As part of her dissertation, she incorporated standardisation into a proprietary combinatorial DNA assembly technology, making it compatible with the widely used BioBrick™ standard. Lina also acted as an advisor to the University of Edinburgh’s 2013 gold medal-winning iGEM team. After graduation, Lina continued to work in DNA manipulation and metabolic engineering of bacteria, delivering varied projects with local SMEs and multinational partners.
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About Biotangents: Biotangents develop pen-side diagnostic devices to detect infectious diseases in livestock quickly.
Erik Smyth
Founder and Director of Insignia Technologies
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About Insignia Technologies: Insignia Technologies develops smart pigments and ink-based sensing technologies for the food packaging industry.
Hugo Macedo
CEO & Founder of Smart Separations Ltd
Hugo is the founder and CEO of Smart Separations Ltd. He has over 11 years of experience in entrepreneurship which helped him founding this start-up company that has developed a proprietary filter that can be tailored to suit many different applications in the poorly explored but very large microfiltration market, from biotechnology to food & drink processing. Throughout his PhD in Biomedical Engineering, Hugo was constantly challenged with new and diverse tasks, in a multidisciplinary environment, where he breathed skills from chemical engineering to stem cell technology, including membrane technology, hydrodynamics, stem cell culture and bioprocessing, human blood production, amongst many others. This provided him with the right tools to create the first “3D hollow fibre bioreactor for the production of human red blood cells” – a system design that he patented. This work was featured in different magazines, including the cover page of The Chemical Engineer (TCE) in 2011, selected as one of “Ten life-changing ideas under research at UK universities” by the Research Councils UK and shortlisted for the highly prestigious IChemE Awards in 2011. Hugo currently holds 2 patents and is passionate for innovation leading to improve people’s quality of life – a vision that he has shared with Smart Separation
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About Smart Separations Ltd: Smart Separations is a limited company based in London UK that has patented an innovative microfiltration technology.
Mike Schmidt
Founder and President of SoClean
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About SoClean: SoClean Inc. is the creator of the world’s first automated CPAP cleaner and sanitizer.
