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 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.
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
Abesh Thakur
Co-Founder and CEO of Two Big Ears Ltd
Abesh spent two years in a Fortune 500 company as a Mainframe developer, before deciding to quit and pursue a Masters degree in Acoustics and Music Technology from the prestigious University of Edinburgh. Post completion of his degree, he co-founded Two Big Ears, with the goal of creating easy to use and effective audio toolkits, which would help developers create more immersive experience without having to worry about the Maths behind all the audio magic. He takes a deep interest in all things tech and progressive deathcore bands, and utilises his spare time in teaching Maths to Primary and Secondary school kids.
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About Two Big Ears Ltd: Two Big Ears is a Scottish company specialising in creating efficient audio toolkits for game and virtual reality developers.
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.
Chris Mitchell
CEO & Founder of Audio Analytic
Dr Chris Mitchell founded Audio Analytic following the completion of his self-funded PhD in sound information systems and signal processing. Chris received a prestigious Kauffman/NCGE Fellowship to investigate the commercial implications of his research, through which he received training at Harvard Business School and worked with Cisco Systems in San Jose, US. Subsequently, Chris attended the Ignite programme at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, funded by the East of England Development Agency. He is an internationally published author, an associate lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University’s Design and Technology Department, and holder of multiple patents.
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About Audio Analytic: Audio Analytic creates exceptional human experiences through giving consumer technology a greater sense of hearing.
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
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About NumberEight: On-device AI software to predict user context using mobile sensors
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.
Ken Roberts
CEO & Founder of AudioTelligence
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About AudioTelligence: AudioTelligence delivers real-time audio processing technology for the enhancement of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.
Adam Blair
Founder of PUMP Audio
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About PUMP Audio: PUMP Audio is to Dance Music what Beats were to Hip Hop. We make some *seriously* good headphones.
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.
Richard Blackwell
Co-Founder & CEO of Quinn Blackwell Media Ltd
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About Quinn Blackwell Media Ltd: A New Audiovisual Platform for Audiobooks & eBooks
Gav Richards
CTO / Co-Founder of Aiir
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About Aiir: The complete platform for audio content creators.
Benjamin Durrenberger
Founder of Signum Audio
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About Signum Audio: Developers of cutting-edge audio software that delivers an incredibly user-friendly experience and superior sound quality.
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.
George Penny
Co-Founder of Yappie
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About Yappie: Yappie is a smartphone application that enables users to socialize with friends using audio messages.
Kyran Dale
Founder of StrongSteam
A jobbing programmer, ex research-scientist, recreational hacker, independent researcher, occasional entrepreneur, cross-country runner and improving jazz pianist. I live most of the year in sunny (as Paris) Brighton, UK. During 15 odd years as a research scientist I hacked a lot of code, learned a lot of libraries and settled on some favourite tools. These days I find Python, Javascript and a little C++ goes a long way to solving most problems out there. I specialize in fast-prototyping and feasibility studies, with an algorithmic bent but am happy to just build cool things. Data-visualisation for the web is my current passion, using a toolchain composed of Python libraries like Scrapy, Pandas, Flask etc. and Javascript big-hitter visualisation libraries, primarily D3.
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About ShowMeDo, StrongSteam: StrongSteam is an app store of artificial intelligence and data mining APIs to pull information out of images, video, and audio.
April Willis
Founder of Word 4 Word Transcription
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About Word 4 Word Transcription: Word 4 Word Transcription is an audio transcription company.
April Willis
Founder of Word 4 Word Transcription
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About Word 4 Word Transcription: Word 4 Word Transcription is an audio transcription company.
