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 Search Engine 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.
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.
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Sebastjan Trepca
CPO, CoFounder of Lyst
Sebastjan is currently a cofounder and CTO of Lyst, a social curation platform for online fashion. Prior to founding Lyst, he was VP of Engineering at Noovo, a content sharing and discovery startup. He was also Technical Lead at Social Expeditions, founded the Python Community of Slovenia and studied Computer Science at the University of Ljubljana.
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About Lyst: Lyst is a global fashion search platform that allows users to browse through thousands of online fashion stores.
Chris Morton
Co-Founder & CEO of Lyst
Chris Morton is the CEO and cofounder of Lyst (www.lyst.com), a social curation platform for online fashion. Prior to founding Lyst, Chris was an investor at Balderton Capital and Benchmark Capital, focussing on consumer internet; specifically ecommerce, music and games. Chris was also Business Development Manager of the Energy and Materials division at QinetiQ, one of Europe’s leading technology R&D organisations. Chris earned his M.A. in Natural Sciences (Physics and Philosophy) from Cambridge University, 2003, and he is a DERA Scholar.
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About Lyst: Lyst is a global fashion search platform that allows users to browse through thousands of online fashion stores.
Ian O’Rourke
CEO & Founder of Adthena
Ian has been involved in technology businesses and start-ups for over 22 years and has built businesses in Australia, Taiwan, Silicon Valley and the UK. One of these, Oovie, became Australia’s largest DVD kiosk operator before being acquired by Hoyts, the country’s top entertainment group. Another venture, Treeview Estates, has created a 148-home retirement village outside of Sydney. Formerly Ian was based in San Francisco heading Asian sales for Intershop, an eCommerce software start-up. From the early stages through a successful Nasdaq IPO and beyond. He established Intershop’s Asian operations growing sales from zero to US$8m in under three years. Ian has grown Adthena since 2012 to its current position as the premier global provider of competitive intelligence. Recent key achievements include a growth rate up from 50% to greater than 100% and a 92% increase in sales value as well as staff engagement scores exceeding 80%. Ian has also secured significant investment from Candy Crush entrepreneur Mel Morris, who now brings unmatched experience to Adthena’s board as it expands its operations in the US, UK and Australia. Ian likes to foster a culture of great products, getting things done, responsibility, freedom and continuous improvement. While Adthena itself has won many major industry awards, Ian’s entrepreneurial determination has also been recognised with the Developing Entrepreneur Award at the WCIT Enterprise Awards – commonly regarded as the ‘Oscars for technology entrepreneurs’. A double graduate of the University of Queensland, Ian is also a fluent Chinese speaker having lived and studied in Taiwan. He is married with two children and is an avid rock climber.
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About Adthena, Treeview Estates: Adthena is a competitive intelligence solution for search marketers.
Scott Woodley
Co-Founder of Tutorful
Scott is a qualified teacher, with a Masters in Law and a BA History degree. An idealist to the core, Scott always seeks to ‘make things better’ and perfect our service: hence our manic workload! He is a keen cyclist, runner and, generally, an avid sports enthusiast.
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About Tutorful: Tutorful is an online education company.
Mark Hughes
Co-Founder & CEO of Tutorful
Mark has a Masters and degree in Engineering from Cambridge University and has since worked as a Technology Analyst for one of the largest investment companies in the country. He brings the business mind and technological know-how to our organisation, and, as the creative genius of our team, has an ardent passion for ensuring that Tutorful provides a smooth, slick platform for everyone. Mark loves climbing and can normally be found hanging off mountains in the Peak District.
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About Tutorful: Tutorful is an online education company.
Shane Lake
Co-Founder and Managing Director of hungryhouse
Shane Lake is co-founder and managing director at Hungryhouse.
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About hungryhouse: hungryhouse is a U.K.-based online platform for takeaway and food delivery that provides a wide range of cuisines and dishes.
Bruce Palmer
Founder and Director of Elemental Digest
Bruce has over 40 years’ experience developing process engineering solutions to food management and waste innovation. It was his experience, vision and creativity which identified the need for a circular solution to meat protein production and the declining health of the soils. With over 6 years of development, research and optimisation he has realised his ambition creating a unique, patented process, that capture valuable assets previously lost from the human food chain and has added value to the other waste streams by creating a novel organo-mineral fertiliser. Bruce founded a successful pet food business (Forthglade) which he owned and ran between 1972 and 2010 before selling up to Private Equity. As he says “we can’t afford to waste waste!”
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About Elemental Digest: Elemental Digest is an international food and industrial waste problem into value-added end products.
Peter Coe
Co-Founder of Xperiome
Peter Coë, co-founder and content director, has been with the company from the outset. He has more than three decades’ experience in communications, originally as a reporter, editor and presenter for TV-am, the BBC and Sky News, and has led complex healthcare programmes in multiple languages and countries since 2007.
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About Xperiome: Xperiome is a global healthtech company that delivers deep insights in rare disease experiences
Julie Walters
Founder & Executive Director of Xperiome
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About Xperiome: Xperiome is a global healthtech company that delivers deep insights in rare disease experiences
Daniela Cecilio
CEO & Founder of asap54.com
CEO & Founder at ASAP54
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About asap54.com: Asap54 is an app that provides customers information about items of clothing based on photos the customer has submitted.
Jonathan Nicol
Founder & Managing Director of Stratajet
Jonny Nicol Ranked as one of Aviation Week’s Top 10 Leaders of European Business Aviation (at EBACE 2016), Jonny Nicol has undoubtedly risen to be one of the most prominent and influential figures in the private aviation industry. A military man through and through, Jonny is adamant that preparation is the key to success. This is why his vision to revolutionise the private jet industry took five years to develop. Having trained as a fighter pilot and served as an officer and pilot for a decade with the British Army, Jonny Nicol left the British Armed Forces to pursue a career as a an entrepreneur. A self-taught computer scientist, Jonny developed a passion for using technology to disrupt typically traditional industries, his first two businesses doing precisely that in the recruitment and military sectors. After selling the second business to Hewlett Packard’s EDS Defence, Nicol spent time as a freelance commercial pilot, during which time he was struck by the archaic and inefficient nature of private aviation. Noting that old-fashioned systems, such as the means of booking a private jet over the phone via a broker, were holding back the industry from advancing in line with other travel innovations, Jonny set about building a system that could bring private jets into the modern age. Reinventing the industry was no mean feat, involving five years of highly advanced computer programming and overcoming major hurdles, but Stratajet, dubbed ‘the world’s most sophisticated price comparison site,’ is the result. The first of its kind, Stratajet is the world’s fastest private jet booking service. With a technology sophisticated enough to filter through all the necessary variables that go into calculating the cost of flights, it’s the only platform that gives customers direct access to the private jet market. It returns accurate costs of a large range of aircraft in seconds, all of which can be booked instantly. Streamlining an old-fashioned and time-consuming booking process, Stratajet is solving the major problems hampering private aviation; inefficiency and wastage. By cutting costs for aircraft operators and in turn driving down prices for the passenger, Stratajet is making private jet travel more widely accessible to the mainstream traveller.
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About Stratajet: Stratajet is a real-time private jet booking platform using the power of technology to give its passengers total control and freedom.
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.
Tarun Sainani
CEO & Founder of World Around Me
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About World Around Me, WT InfoTech: World Around Me is a local discovery app to help searching local places & services – on the phone camera with augmented reality – anywhere.
Ian Pridham
Co-Founder & CTO of Openplay
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About Openplay: OpenPlay is an online platform that allows any sports facility to take online bookings, payments and manage their customers.
Sam Parton
Co-Founder & CEO of Openplay
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About Openplay: OpenPlay is an online platform that allows any sports facility to take online bookings, payments and manage their customers.
Chris Mackie
Director and Founder of 205 Media LTD
Chris Mackie is a Director and Founder of 205 Media LTD.
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About 205 Media LTD: 205 Media is a creative agency that offers a range of personalized services to its clients.
Edil Ajibaev
Founder, CEO of picVpic
Edil Ajibaev, the founder of several international startups, has made a significant impact in the tech industry with his AI-based clothing search engine. This innovative tool, leading in product search quality, has accumulated the world’s largest fashion product database, boasting 14 million products.
Edil’s company has pioneered a hybrid system of machine learning, visual search, and manual labelling. This system identifies prevalent fashion phrases and semantically integrates them into a Knowledge Graph, offering superior search quality in the fashion domain.
Edil’s entrepreneurial prowess has been recognized globally, with 7 international startup competition wins in cities such as London, San Francisco, New York, Kyiv, Almaty, Singapore, and Brussels.
In addition to his primary ventures, Edil has co-founded and advised several technology companies, helping them launch and achieve commercial success. He is also an active board member of various startups and organizations shaping the tech ecosystem.
Edil has authored several industry-related articles and is a passionate speaker on Entrepreneurship, Artificial Intelligence, and Leadership. In 2023, he received an award for the most significant contribution to the IT sector at the largest CA IT conference, supported by the US government.
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About picVpic: picVpic offers a search engine that enables its users to compare and rank products from various online stores.
Koran Murphy-Saffet
Co-Founder of Dimble App Ltd
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About Dimble App Ltd: Straight-to-the-point shopping app
Tomi Oladigbolu
Co-Founder of Dimble App Ltd
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About Dimble App Ltd: Straight-to-the-point shopping app
Mark Ackred
Co-Founder of Dabbl
Co-Founder of Dabbl.
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About Dabbl: Dabbl is a mobile app that enables to take control and invest in companies and brands you love.
Michael Ballard
Founder of Genie
Founder of Genie.
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About Genie: Genie is a social search application that allows the user to get personalized recommendations or give answers based on their experience.
Prasanna Kulkarni
Founder of Comparesoft
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About Comparesoft: Your go-to place to shortlist & compare enterprise software. Driven by human & machine learning. Used by PwC, Honda & 8736+ businesses
Vojtěch Otevřel
Founder of GoOut
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About GoOut: GoOut is a culture guide platform for events and places in Prague.
Jeremy Burge
Founder of Emojipedia
Jeremy Burge is the founder of Emojipedia and creator of World Emoji Day. As Editor in Chief of Emojipedia he oversees emoji definitions and news articles on the site, and has been listed in the Business Insider UK Tech 100 in 2016 and 2017.
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About Emojipedia: Emojipedia is an online platform that provides emoji search, emoji documentation and a historical image archive.
Davis Martens
Founder of Factbase
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About Factbase: Factbase is a search engine for market research available on the internet, to power researcher, analysts and professionals alike.
Julia Felton
Co-Founder of Everyclick
Julia Felton is a Co-Founder at Everyclick.
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About Everyclick: Everyclick is a search engine that helps users raise money for charity.
Julia Felton
Co-Founder of Everyclick
Julia Felton is a Co-Founder at Everyclick.
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About Everyclick: Everyclick is a search engine that helps users raise money for charity.
Tony James
Founder of Bikesy
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About Bikesy: Bikesy UK Cyclists Search Engine
Max Rose-Collins
Co-Founder of RankTracker
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About RankTracker: Rank Tracker automatically tracks your daily keyword positions movements across all major search engines.
Steve Pritchard
Founder of omoii
Founder of omoii and inventor of the omoii algorithm, working with network partners to expand omoii offering.
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About Moberce, Moberce, omoii, Soreferme: Digital Media Agencuy For Charities
Steve Pritchard
Founder of omoii
Founder of omoii and inventor of the omoii algorithm, working with network partners to expand omoii offering.
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About Moberce, Moberce, omoii, Soreferme: Digital Media Agencuy For Charities
Baljeet D.
Founder of Neighbrz.com
Founder at Neighbrz.com
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About Neighbrz.com: Facebook for local neighbourhood