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 Retail 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.
Dennis Curry
Executive Director and Deputy CTO, Technology Fellow of Konica Minolta
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About Konica Minolta: Konica Minolta is an Innovative Company and continues to create inspiring products and services in the field of imaging.
Paul Clarke
Chief Technology Officer of Ocado Group
Paul Clarke is Director of technology at Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer. After joining Ocado in 2006, Paul initially worked on warehouse control systems and then joined the team designing Ocado’s next highly automated fulfilment centre. After establishing new teams for simulation and mobile development, Paul then co-wrote the first of Ocado’s award-winning mobile apps, which remain the only apps from a major retailer supporting full offline shopping. In his current role, Paul heads up Ocado Technology, whose 600+ software engineers and other IT specialists are responsible for building all the software and IT infrastructure that powers Ocado and Morrisons’ online grocery business. Ocado is in the midst of re-platforming its complete solution to create the Ocado Smart Platform — a combination of scalable, modular hardware for building automated warehouses and its end-to-end e-commerce and fulfilment solution running in the cloud. Ocado will use this platform to put retailers around the world online using their unique business model. In what little spare time he has alongside his work and family, Paul loves to invent and build stuff, design PCBs, write software and generally tinker.
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About Ocado Group: Ocado is an online grocery retailer providing services, technology, and automation to grocery e-commerce businesses around the world.
Mehdi Doghri
Co-Founder & CTO of Save Your Wardrobe
Entrepreneur, Investor, Advisor. Interested in the Fintech, Fashion Tech, Retail Tech and consumer mobile apps.
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About Save Your Wardrobe: FashionTech startup using AI to make Fashion more digital and sustainable
Ben Dixon
Co-Founder & CTO of Sona
Ben is a senior developer focused on web application development. He primarily creates Ruby on Rails and Android applications. He also has experience in front-end development in both Backbone and Angular JS as well as infrastructure management with Chef and Docker. He’s the author of Reliably Deploying Rails Applications (http://www.deployingrailsbook.com/) which covers how to deploy medium-sized Rails Applications in an easy, scalable fashion, and spoke at Railsconf 2014 on this topic. He also spoke at Railsconf 2015 on how Docker can be tightly integrated with Rails to do far more interesting things than just deployment. He is currently CTO of Sona, the unified frontend for the frontline workforce.
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About Sona: Sona is the employee app for tomorrow’s workforce.
Samuel Heather
VP, Chief Technology Officer of KodyPay
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About KodyPay: Revolutionising in-person payments to grow your business with a trustworthy and innovative solution.
Dave Ettle
Co-Founder & CTO of Zynstra
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About Zynstra: Zynstra is transforming edge computing at the retail edge.
David Scott Turner
Co-Founder and CTO of Imburse
David’s long background in and strong passion for disruptive technology makes him the right person to lead our technical development and vision as CTO of IMburse. David deploys his extensive startup and advisory experience, coupled with his strong leadership, innovative thinking and strong technical background into the role; all essential to lead the technical development off IMburse. It is no surprise that with someone like David in your corner the product will be amazing.
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About Imburse: Imburse is a cloud-based payments integration platform.
Tim Boughton
CTO & Co-founder of Mention Me
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About Mention Me: Harness the exponential power of your brand fans
Tom Cohen
CTO & Co-Founder of Popsa
Tom Cohen joined Popsa as Co-Founder & CTO in 2016.
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About Popsa: Popsa is a machine learning startup that automatically designs, makes, and delivers personalized physical products.
Daniel Vartnov
CTO of Veeqo
CTO at Veeqo.
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About Veeqo: Veeqo provides a cloud service that helps online retailers manage their business operations.
Danny Hawkins
CTO & Co-Founder of Quiqup
Danny Hawkins is the CTO and Co-Founder of Quiqup.
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About Quiqup: Quiqup is a provider of on-demand, same-day, and scheduled delivery solutions to retailers and restaurants.
Ben Jones
CTO of GfK
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About GfK: GfK is a market research institute in Germany.
Jaime Lomeli-R.
Co-Founder & CTO of Aura Vision
Co-Founder and CTO at Aura Vision Labs
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About Aura Vision: Aura Vision enables brick-and-mortar retailers to positively influence shopper journeys with cutting-edge computer vision.
Julian Polzella
Founder & CTO of Shopwave
Julian founded Shopwave following the acquisition of his startup VouChaCha, which built multi-platform, location-based, scalable, API-driven architectures for top 200 UK retailers & enterprise clients such as Orange & Lastminute.com. VouChaCha was acquired as part of Markcomedia in a £55 million deal by Monitise PLC. Julian is an Entrepreneurial Spirit Award Winner and holds a first class honours degree in Computing Sciences. He developed expertise in economic, trading, social, reinforcement & machine learning AI technology at Palantir and at university.
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About Nift-e Labs, Shopwave: Kitchen & Ops Automation, POS, App Integration & Payments. Shopwave helps the worlds leading restaurant and retail brands to scale globally.
David Guest
Chief Technology Officer of Specsavers
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About Specsavers: Specsavers is an international company providing a trusted eye care service, affordable glasses and contact lenses.
Glyn Powditch
CTO & Co Founder of Dream AI Ltd T/A Dream Agility
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About Dream AI Ltd T/A Dream Agility, Pre-PIM AI, SBG Bury: Multi-award winning, AI company with proprietary Visual AI and Machine Learning, specialising in Retail
Panagiotis Tsarouchis
Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Duel
Panagiotis ‘Naio’ Tsarouchis is an award winning designer and developer with prolific experience in entrepreneurship having founded design and technology education startups including Consider Magazine, Art In Progress and Treesix. Naio is Duel’s Co-Founder, CTO and expert in both complex computer science and user-centric design, having built Duel from a UGC platform into a fully-featured Brand Advocacy suite. As a fellow Co-Founder of Daredevil Project gaming studio, he has a deep, technical understanding of how gaming virology, authentic brands and customer behaviour intersect on a platform level. When not working, you’ll probably find him rescuing art in Bristol, adding to his impressive rum collection and rocking his synth.
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About Duel: Brand Advocacy Platform that enables purpose-led brands to drive organic growth & retention through word-of-mouth & advocacy
Subhash Muchala
CTO of Dynamify
PhD, University of Oxford
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About Dynamify: Dynamify is an all-in-one platform using technology, data, and AI to enhance service delivery and margin.
Andrew Lucas
CTO of Taggstar
Andy is a start-up veteran, having started a web hosting business during the late 1990′s. Post dot-com boom he moved to networks & operations, managing the European IP network for a global telco. In the last 5 years he has delivered software and managed engineering teams for three startups, working in Java, in the cloud, with big data and machine learning, across ad tech and now influence marketing. In his spare time he likes to drink coffee and cook experimental dishes
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About Taggstar: Real-time social proof message expert for enterprise eCommerce | Conversion uplift by up to 12% | Shop Direct, N Brown, TUI, Missguided use.
Robertas Sadovskis
Chief Technology Officer of Barbora Polska
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About Barbora Polska: Barbora Polska is a company that provides online shopping for fresh food and household chemicals to be delivered at good quality
Atul Bhardwaj
CTO of MediaMarktSaturn
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About MediaMarktSaturn: MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group is Europe’s leading trading company for consumer electronics as well as the associated services and services.
Kelvin Clibbon
Chief Technology Officer of Ecrebo
Kelvin joined Ecrebo in February 2018 as Chief Technology Officer. He is an experienced and effective CTO with strong managerial, technical and commercial skills. Building on a first class academic background, Kelvin has an outstanding track record of delivering innovative leading-edge products, which have enjoyed significant market success. He has previously held senior roles at Lumeon, Powa Technologies and Neverfail Group.
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About Ecrebo: Ecrebo is a point of sale marketing platform.
Kartik Venkatesh
Chief Technology Officer of Trunomi
Kartik is a multi-stack architect, and is well-versed in both open stack and Microsoft stack. He has been architecting and building web scale, secure, distributed systems and data solutions for 9+ years. Before Trunomi, Kartik was the Chief Architect for DLA, leading development of a Netflix competitor OTT solution for Latin America, featuring advanced machine learning and big data techniques. Prior to that Kartik led development and technology for several large scale products spanning multiple industries, including Gates Foundation, Starbucks, RedBull, Fox, AT&T and Sony. Kartik started his career at Microsoft straight out of high school, after being discovered for his programming aptitude. Microsoft sponsored his education at University of Washington, where he completed a B.S. in Computer Sciences.
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About Trunomi: Enterprise Privacy Platform allowing companies to meet all regulatory requirements for global Data Privacy Regulations
Fraser Hardy
CTO of Qudini – Retail Choreography
Fraser Hardy is Founder & CTO at Qudini.
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About Qudini – Retail Choreography: Retail Choreography solutions to transforming customer experience, operations and data for retailers and banks.
Mike Kimberley
Chief Technology Officer of Rakuten Fits Me
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About Rakuten Fits Me: Fit Origin is the ultimate fit recommendation solution for eCommerce fashion retailers.
Tom Dunning
CTO of Documobi
Tom was a Development Consultant for some of the UK’s best agencies for a number of years. Described by some as a “forensic developer”, Tom excels at finding new benefits and business applications for the features planned for development, further extending the product offerings. His knowledge of high traffic systems and SOP ensures we’re ready for explosive growth.
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About Documobi: Documobi is a mobile solution that enables businesses to conduct personalized advertising campaigns.
Karl Wintrell
Chief Technology Officer of The Very Group
Karl Wintrell is the Chief Technology Officer at The Very Group.
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About The Very Group: The Very Group is an integrated digital retailer and financial services provider.
Ryan Townsend
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Shift Commerce
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About Shift Commerce: Shift Commerce delivers a next-generation, API-centric, SaaS-based Digital Retail Platform.
Adrian Negoita
CTO and Co-Founder of BotsAndUs
Adrian Negoita is a CTO and Co-Founder at BotsAndUs. He is an experienced software test engineer who is motivated by building high-quality products and sharing his knowledge to support the wider adoption of robotics.
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About BotsAndUs: BotsAndUs is a data-driven robotics and AI company that provides full-stack robot systems for dynamic spaces.
Jeffrey Li
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Agorafy
Jeffrey heads software development as the lead architect of Agorafy. Prior to joining Agorafy, Jeffrey was a web developer for Right Media, and then for Yahoo! where he developed applications targeted at helping networks, advertisers and publishers manage advertising campaigns and inventory. He’s the proud owner of an impressive lot of penguin collectibles, but hopes to adopt a family of penguins one day.
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About Agorafy: Agorafy is an open platform for organizing and sharing real estate listings and information in the U.S.
Victor Olatunya
CTO of AtHashtags
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About AtHashtags: Combined Online and real world Marketplace that allows vendors to sell and connect with consumers online and in multiple physical locations
Matt Stupple
CTO of Equiduct
Matt Stupple is the CTO at Equiduct.
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About Equiduct: Equiduct is a trading platform offering premium Best Execution services and a lit central limit order book.
Laurence Gillian
CTO of Gather & See
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About Gather & See: Bringing the best womens sustainable and ethical fashion online.
