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 CEO’ operating in the Developer Tools space. If you think a CEO’ 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.
Simon Galbraith
Founder & CEO of Redgate Software
Simon is the joint founder and CEO of Redgate Software. Over the past 15 years, Simon has been part of Redgate’s growth from a 2 person firm operating out of a spare room to today’s 300 person outfit with hundreds of thousands of users. Although Simon’s responsibilities are primarily strategic, his background is technical with qualifications including a PhD in physics from Cambridge University and former employment with Shell and ThornEMI.
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About Redgate Software: Redgate is the leading provider of software for professionals working on the Microsoft data platform.
Alex Mifsud
Chief Executive Officer of Weavr
Before founding Ixaris Alex worked as a senior consultant in the Cambridge-based tech practice of Arthur D. Little, a global management consultancy providing technology and innovation to blue chip clients. Alex holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Malta – where he later headed the computer science departments – as well as MSc and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Edinburgh.
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About Weavr: Weavr is an online platform that creates, integrates, deploys, and runs digital payment flows.
Alexis Richardson
CEO & Co-Founder of Weaveworks
Alexis is the co-founder and CEO of Weaveworks. He is also the chairman of the TOC for CNCF, and the co-founder of the Coed:Code meetups. Previously he was at Pivotal, as head of products for Spring, RabbitMQ, Redis, Apache Tomcat and vFabric. Alexis was responsible for resetting the product direction of Spring and transitioning the vFabric business from VMware. Alexis co-founded RabbitMQ, and was CEO of the Rabbit company acquired by VMware in 2010, where he worked on numerous cloud platforms. Rumours persist that he co-founded several other software companies including Cohesive Networks, after a career as a prop trader in fixed income derivatives, and a misspent youth studying and teaching mathematical logic.
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About Metalogic, Rabbit Technologies, Weaveworks: Weaveworks simplifies operating Kubernetes workloads and provides a developer-centric operating model for cloud-native applications.
Peter Dabrowa
CEO of Wonde
CEO at Wonde.
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About Bay Tree PR, Koala, Wonde: Wonde provides third party applications access to secure school data.
Jerome de Lafargue
Co-founder & CEO of Zeroheight
Jerome de Lafargue is the Co-founder & CEO at zeroheight.
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About Zeroheight: Zeroheight is a DevOps platform that allows design teams to create up-to-date style guides and document their design system resources.
Emre Baran
CEO & co-founder of Cerbos
Emre Baran is currently an executive director in charge of engineering and product management at Qubit. Emre has been involved with information technology since 1999. He was a Senior Product Manager at Google before leaving after 4 years working on various AdWords and AdSense related products & building large scale artificial intelligence and analytics systems to scale and automate operations. Prior to Google, Emre was the co-founder and CTO of Yonja.com, Turkey’s largest social network. He also has 5 years of experience in IT consulting for telecommunications and federal & local financial systems industries in the United States. Emre holds degrees in Economics and Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA degree from INSEAD.
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About Cerbos: Cerbos is a software company that makes user permissions and authorization simple to implement and manage.
James Hadley
CEO of Immersive Labs
James Hadley i the CEO of Immersive Labs.
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About Immersive Labs: Immersive Labs develops a platform that measures and improves cybersecurity skills across businesses.
Danny Goh
CEO of Nexus FrontierTech
Danny is a serial entrepreneur and an early stage investor. He is the Co Founder and CEO of Nexus Frontier Tech, an AI research firm to make AI easy to work with organisations by using natural language processing to transform idle information into structured data, enabling them to run better, leaner, and faster. He has also co-founded Innovatube Frontier Labs (IFL), which later merged with Nexus. IFL is a technology group that operates an R&D lab in software and AI developments, invests in early-stage start-ups with 20+ portfolios, and acts as an incubator to foster the local start-up community in South East Asia. IFL has a team of researchers and engineers to develop cutting-edge deep technology to help start-ups and enterprises bolster their operational capabilities. Danny currently serves as an Entrepreneurship Expert at the Said Business School, University of Oxford and he is also an appointed Fellow at the Center for Policy and Competitiveness at the École des Ponts Business School, Paris Tech. He is an advisor and judge to several technology start-ups and accelerators including Microsoft Accelerator, Startupbootcamp IoT, and LBS Launchpad. Danny serves as a visiting lecturer at various Universities in Europe and he is a speaker at various conferences including TEDx and Fintech events.
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About Cambridge Judge Business School, Innovatube, Nexus FrontierTech, Said Business School, University of Oxford: We integrate AI solutions into existing systems, helping save time & money by employing solutions tackling inefficiency & data waste.
Baran Korkmaz
Founder, CEO of ARWAY
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About ARWAY: ARWAY is a spatial mapping platform critical to building the Metaverse.
Alan Carson
Co-Founder & CEO of Cloudsmith
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About Cloudsmith: Cloudsmith is a cloud-native DevOps warehouse built on Package Management, that secures, controls and accelerates software delivery.
Rachel Brooks
Founder & CEO of Citizen Made
Rachel Brooks is Founder & CEO at citizenmade.
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About Citizen Made: Citizen Made is the ecommerce platform for brands that want to sell their custom products online.
Craig Beddis
CEO of Hadean
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About Hadean: Deploy Cloud Native Applications Simply and Securely
Jaime Jorge
Co Founder & CEO of Codacy
Co Founder and CEO at Codacy.
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About Codacy: Codacy is an automated code review tool that helps developers save time in code reviews and manage technical debt.
Andrew Gore
CEO and Founder of Soccer Manager
Over 17 years’ experience in the games industry, working on numerous successful football titles such as FIFA before co-founding Soccer Manager with his brothers in 2004.
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About Soccer Manager: Soccer Manager, a Preston, UK-based developer of an online football game. Soccer Manager allows players to manage their favourite team.
Alexandre Omeyer
CEO of Stepsize
Alexandre Omeyer is the CEO of Stepsize. His career in the technology industry started at VC-backed startups IOVOX and then DueDil where he focused on business development. The multiple startups and projects Alex worked on with the team with whom he later co-founded Stepsize, forged him into a self-taught developer and lead him down the path of Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, how it could be used to radically simplify software development and make it accessible to all. Stepsize went through the Virgin Media x Techstars accelerator during the summer of 2016 and has since then attracted investments from some of the best Angel investors and VCs in the business.
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About Stepsize: Stepsize build devtools for teams to develop better software faster.
Sven Al Hamad
Co-Founder and CEO of Webiny
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About Webiny: Easiest way to adopt serverless.
Ian Naylor
Founder & CEO of AppInstitute
Ian Naylor is Founder & CEO at AppInstitute.
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About AppInstitute: AppInstitute is a software developer of a digital framework for small businesses to create their own mobile applications.
Asim Aslam
CEO of M3O
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About M3O: Next Generation Cloud Platform
Dimitri F Dimitriou
CEO of ImmuPharma
Dimitri F. Dimitriou has 25 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Prior to co-founding ImmuPharma, he was Senior Director, Worldwide Business Development at GlaxoSmithKline, where his responsibilities included worldwide corporate deals with pharmaceutical and biotech companies. He held a similar role in Europe for Bristol-Myers Squibb. He spent 8 years at Procter & Gamble in senior marketing, R&D and business development positions and began his career in marketing at Novartis (Sandoz) in 1987. He has a degree in biochemistry from Kings College, University of London and an MSc in pathology and toxicology from the Imperial College Medical School.
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About Dragon Finance, DyoDelta Biosciences, ImmuPharma: ImmuPharma plc is a United Kingdom-based drug discovery and development company. The Company is focused on developing drugs.
Conrad Poulson
CEO 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.
Jamie Graves
Chief Executive Officer of Uleska
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About Uleska: Uleska is an application security automation platform. We help security and development teams manage application security at scale.
Spokey Wheeler
CEO of Pharaoh Tools
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About Pharaoh Tools: Open source, PHP, full-stack DevOps tools
Deepak Prabhakara
CEO of BoxyHQ
Deepak Prabhakara is the CEO and co-founder at BoxyHQ.
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About BoxyHQ, onDMARC, Red Sift: BoxyHQ helps startups to enable enterprise features in any SaaS app with just a few lines of code.
Piotr Grudzień
CEO & Founder of Incentivai
Piotr spent years building Machine Learning products for fraud detection at Featurespace, then for Natural Language Processing applications at Microsoft. He graduated from University of Cambridge specialising in Computer and Information Engineering.
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About Incentivai: Incentivai is a tool for testing incentive structures of smart contract economies via simulation using AI agents.
Sithamparanathan Sabesan
Founder and CEO of PervasID
Sithamparanathan Sabesan read a BEng (Hons) Electronic Engineering at Sheffield University in 2004, where he scored the highest marks in his year, and was awarded the Sir William Siemens Medal for being among the UK’s top 18 science and technology students. Sabesan worked on RFID since beginning his PhD on the subject of ‘Passive RFID real time sensing system for intelligent infrastructure’ at Cambridge University in 2007 and was elected to a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge University in 2011. Prior to his PhD, he worked at ARM as an Electronic Engineer. Sabesan is a recipient of the 2011 Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Entrepreneurs Award and the 2011 UK ICT Pioneers of Connected World award. In 2014 he was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship, and most recently he was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year award, as well as the Sir George Macfarlane Medal 2016 for excellence in the early stage of the career. He is a Fellow of the ERA Foundation.
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About PervasID: PervasID is developing a high reliability
Gaetano Checinski
Founder and CEO of LoopPerfect
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About LoopPerfect: LoopPerfect’s mission is to streamline the development of C++ code, by using a just-in-time compiler.
Zaid Daba’een
CEO of DeveloperHub.io
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About DeveloperHub.io, Kadence: Create beautiful powerful developer hubs, hassle-free.
Sarah Mintey
Founder & CEO of Developing Experts
Sarah is the founder and CEO of Developing Experts.and has 20 years experience in education and the third sector. Previously she was CEO of the OPEN Youth Trust and most recently worked for Inspiration Trust as their curriculum designer.
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About Developing Experts: Bridging the gap between education and industry through our online curriculum.
Nicholas Hopper
Founder & CEO of Crozdesk
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About Crozdesk: Crozdesk is a discovery platform which connects software buyers with B2B SaaS products
Justin Halfpenny
CEO of MobileCaddy
CEO of MobileCaddy.
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About MobileCaddy: The uninterrupted delivery of business critical mobile apps for the force.com platform
Tony Russo
CEO of Polydone
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About Polydone: Polydone is a project management platform for Agile teams.
David Everett
CEO and Principal Consultant of Microexpert
David Everett is a leading authority on the security design of electronic payment systems. With a cryptographic background and extensive knowledge of the tamper resistant properties of smart cards and HSMs (Hardware Security Modules) David is able to assist clients with a deeper understanding of electronic payment systems and digital currencies. His expertise also includes novel approaches to securing data in the cloud and IOT. David is the CEO of Microexpert which provides consultancy services in electronic payment and transaction systems. The company has been advising clients on digital security for over 30 years. David is the co-founder of Tibado, a central ledger electronic cash system and prior to that was commissioned by the Royal Canadian Mint to analyse the future of electronic payments which culminated in the design of MintChip, an electronic cash system for both the physical and virtual worlds. Previously he was engaged by NatWest bank to design a fiat based digital currency system using public key cryptography that became known as Mondex. This also led to the invention of Multos, a secure multi-application Smartcard OS with a PKI based control module. David also represented the UK banks on the original research work designed to improve card verification methods. This eventually led to the chip and pin system adopted internationally today. As a consultant to eftPOS UK David undertook the security design of a national debit card system which resulted in the first significant commercial use of public key cryptography. Previously he was contracted by CHAPS, the UKs Clearing House Automated Payment Scheme as co-designer of the security scheme. As a cryptography consultant, David is particularly able to help his clients with the business and technical architecture of modern electronic payment systems, authentication, IOT security and digital currencies. Apart from his numerous lectures David also undertakes training sessions on various aspects of electronic payments and transactions.
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About Microexpert: Microexpert are an independent data security consultancy and are leading experts in the application of cryptography.
Bartek Wlodarczyk
Chief Executive Officer & President of SKY ENGINE
Bartek Włodarczyk is the Chief Executive Officer & President at Sky Engine.
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About SKY ENGINE: Evolutionary AI Platform for the Deep Learning in Virtual Reality with Synthetic Data for any Computer Vision applications
