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 CTO’ operating in the Digital Media 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.
Paul Egan
Chief Incubation Officer & Chief Technology Officer of Founders Factory
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About Founders Factory: Founders Factory is a global corporate-backed venture studio and accelerator.
Joe Lyske
Chief Technology Officer of Triller
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About Triller: Triller is an AI-powered music video app that enables anyone to make professional videos, effortlessly.
Mat Clayton
Co-Founder and CTO of Mixcloud
Mat Clayton is a specialist in social media and web 2.0 development projects. He has developed a range of successful Facebook applications, including Sponsor Me, and the Sony commisioned Become Rambo, which was awarded best Viral Application by the Facebook Developer Garage London, in association with Sun Microsystems. Mat is now a co-founder of Mixcloud and heads up the technical development of the site. Mat has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Cambridge, specialising in Electrical and Information Sciences. He was sponsored throughout his BA by Qinetiq and by the Institute of Engineering and Technology, of which he is still a member. Mat has worked on a variety of systems and control projects, ranging from biometric monitoring for Electronic Arts to Zigbee based wireless data capture systems for the oil industry. In his spare time, Mat enjoys playing squash and rock climbing.
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About Mixcloud, Wakari: Mixcloud is an online long-form audio platform providing content such as radio shows, podcasts and DJ mixes.
Rusty Johnson
Co-Founder & CTO of SharpCloud Software
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About SharpCloud Software: Data visualization software that transforms business data into engaging visual stories, helping you make smarter strategic decisions.
John Kundert
CTO of Financial Times
John Kundert is CTO of Financial Times Ltd. He continues to drive for excellence based on principles of purpose, ownership, empowerment, belonging and culture. Alongside this, he is has a passion for data having spent most of career in this space. In his previous FT role as director of platforms, he was instrumental in establishing the FT’s data platform, which forms the backbone of an award-winning set of data capabilities.
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About Financial Times: Financial Times is a business news organization providing essential news, comments, data, and analysis for the global business community.
Heather Utech
CTO of DMG Media
Heather Utech is CTO at DMG Media.
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About DMG Media: DMG media is a consumer media company engaged in print and online newspaper publishing.
Chris Scott
CTO of Zephr
Chris Scott serves as chief technology officer at Blaize.io, a mass scale decision engine for subscription experiences.
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About Zephr: Zephr is a technology platform for media companies to grow their subscription revenue.
Aaron McKee
CTO of Blis
Aaron McKee is a seasoned technology executive with a history of building products at the intersection of big data and machine learning.With 25 years of professional experience in the technology sector, and almost a decade as an executive, he’s helped companies, teams, and products across every stage of maturity and across a range of industries.He helped break web server performance records at Intel and launched the first modern local search product at Ask.com. As CTO of Struq, a performance advertising technology company later acquired by Quantcast, he was one of the first to bring a deep use of machine learning to dynamic content personalization and programmatic advertising. Aaron has also served as CTO of both Skimlinks and Job Today, both sector-leading consumer and business-facing marketplace companies. Outside of work, Aaron spends as much free time as possible with his family – a wife and two young sons – traveling, eating, and generally being a nerd. He graduated with distinction from the University of California, Berkeley with a dual degree in Computer Science and Psychology and has split his career across both Silicon Valley and Europe.
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About Blis: Blis is the leading privacy-first, location-powered programmatic advertising partner.
Philippe Levieux
CTO of Traces
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About infltr – for infinite filters, Traces: Traces lets you share digital messages anywhere in the world. To get messages, you have to be in the right place at the right time.
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
Andy Fielder
Chief Technology Officer of BigHand
Andy Fielder was appointed as CTO in January 2013. Andy has over 26 years of experience leading development teams and developing software on numerous technical platforms. Andy is an agile advocate, coaching and mentoring teams to adopt the mind sets and practices that enable them to continuously deliver market leading products. Prior to BigHand Andy, was Head of Software Development at NetNames, an international role managing teams in Copenhagen, Cambridge and London. Before this Andy managed the Web and iSeries teams at Edexcel a Pearson company. At BigHand Andy is responsible for strategy, software development, product management, services and infrastructure enabling the delivery of world class technology. Andy is a Certified Scrum Master and has a BTEC National Diploma in Business and Finance from Harlow College.
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About BigChange, BigHand: BigHand develops voice productivity software solutions for legal, healthcare, property, and financial companies.
Isambard Poulson
CTO of Huq Industries
Founder of Huq Industries.
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About Huq Industries: Huq is building the world’s largest consumer research network, helping businesses understand their offline markets with digital precision.
Graham Dean
Chief Technology Officer of RealityMine
Graham’s role is to ensure that RealityMine’s technology strategy meets the business needs. Graham was the first engineer to join the company in 2012, and helped build some of the first apps and server code. He now leads the R&D efforts to ensure RealityMine remains the technology leader in the industry. Graham notes, “We have to work fast at RealityMine to keep pace with the ever changing mobile and technology landscape. But this helps keep skills sharp, gives variety to the work, and ultimately keeps things interesting and challenging.”
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About RealityMine: RealityMine is a tech leader in high quality passive research, enabling clients to reveal unique insights from real life consumer behaviour.
Fabrice Gagneux
Group CTO of Digitalbox
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About Digitalbox, Interscroller: Digitalbox have created a ‘push media’ publishing model able to deliver large, high quality audiences in a brand-safe environment.
Selva Ganesan
Co-founder, CTO of DigitalAssetSafe LLC
Selva Ganesan is Engineering Manager at F5 Networks.
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About DigitalAssetSafe LLC, F5, FileSpin.io: DigitalAssetSafe is a cloud-based archive for professional and serious amateur photographers and videographers. Secure Archival Made Easy.
Anwar Almojarkesh
CEO/CTO & Founder of Braci
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About Braci: Braci is a sound recognition application that analyzes unusual sound from the environment and alerts its users.
James Wilberforce-Andrews
CTO co-founder of Tailored.to
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About Tailored.to: Tailored is a personal shopping assistant matching in-market prospects to advertisers. We power personalised marketing at scale.
Katie Nykanen
CTO of Adstream
Katie is the 2019 winner of Women in IT’s CTO of the Year award recognising the work her team have done transforming Adstream internally into a leading player in the Adtech space optimising Cloud, Devops Practices, CI:CD and the latest Tech. She is passionate about getting the best from People and Technology to produce products which deliver real value to Businesses across Industries. Taking pride in a deep business and technical knowledge she believes leading a successful team is down to being a great role model, advocating flexibility and actively encouraging growth and development across the team.
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About Adstream: Adstream is an advertising content management and cross-media distribution technology platform. Changing the way advertisers track content.
Gianluca Angelici
CTO of Adgistics
Entrepreneur and expert of marketing related technologies. MSc in computer engineering, specialised in Artificial Intelligence applied to Web data. I’m particularly interested in how technologies impact and change organisations. Investigating about it I wrote the book “The Liquid Corporation”. I’m currently CTO and Board Member of Adgistics.
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About Adgistics: Adgistics is a specialist Digital Asset Management solutions provider for world-class brands.
Freddie Witherden
CTO of newsflo
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About newsflo: Media monitoring shouldn’t be a chore. With newsflo, it’s easy to keep track of coverage at all levels of your institution.
Anthony Steed
CTO of animal systems
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About animal systems, Chirp: Making things to make things with
Vassilis Dontas
CTO of Feedespy
Vassilis Dontas has worked in a variety of private companies having the role of the manager of the IT team. Six years ago he founded SoftBOT Ltd and co-founded Feedespy. He is the CTO of Feedespy and together with his team in SoftBOT they developed Feedespy’s website and captured the whole idea of easy-to-read and easy-to-use service. He identified opportunities and risks in delivering Feedespy’s services as a web-based company, including identification of competitive services, opportunities for innovation and assessment of marketplace obstacles and technical hurdles to the Feedespy’s success. He identified technology trends and evaluated appropriate technology platforms for delivering the Feedespy.com website. Also, he suggested the future evolution of Feedespy.com and identified as well as prioritized initiatives by setting timetables for the development and deployment of all of Feedespy’s web-based services.
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About Feedespy, SoftBot: Feedespy offers the opportunity to its members to receive news which are tailored to their interests.
Simon Starr
CTO & Founder of Cahootify
Simon Starr is a developer, technical consultant and investor who specialises in advising web startups and helping them to build and launch their products.
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About Cahootify: Just make it. Cahootify is the project portfolio and team-forming platform for filmmakers, producers and actors.
James Stewart
Partner and CTO of Public Digital
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About Public Digital: Public Digital is a digital transformation consultancy that helps organizations adapt to the internet.
