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 Cloud Data Services 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.
Maria Chatzou Dunford
CEO and Co-Founder of Lifebit
Dr. Maria Chatzou, CEO of Lifebit, is a biotech innovator and a proud geek, expert in bioinformatics, medical informatics and high performance computing. She is also a passionate entrepreneur and has founded two companies, Innovation Forum Barcelona and Techstars-backed Lifebit. Prior to Lifebit, she was a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, in Barcelona, where she was designing and deploying tools and methods that facilitate the analysis of Big Biomedical Data, allow for biological discoveries, and promote personalised medicine. She was part of the developing team of Nextflow, a programming framework that is revolutionising the computational analysis of genomic data and setting the foundations for personalised medicine computational analyses. Maria is also a frequent industry speaker and has spoken in many international conferences on the subjects of docker containers, genomics workflows, the computational challenges of personalised medicine, AI and HPC in genomics, women in leadership, entrepreneurship, science ventures, among many other topics.
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About Lifebit: Lifebit CloudOS is the intelligent genomics platform that is the industry standard for unified, secure research over distributed big data.
Pablo Prieto Barja
CTO and Co-Founder of Lifebit
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About Lifebit: Lifebit CloudOS is the intelligent genomics platform that is the industry standard for unified, secure research over distributed big data.
Ricky Thomas
Founder & CEO of Avora
Ricky Thomas As founder and CEO of superfast, cloud-based data intelligence platform AVORA, Ricky Thomas is a key disruptor in his space. Ricky has decades of experience building global, scalable high-speed database and transaction systems & now with AVORA, he has built a platform that aggregates any number of data sources, delivering meaningful insight with the power of machine learning. Ricky believes that “to drive growth, businesses need to drastically reduce data blindspots & the time it takes to access critical information, transforming your business’ time to action.” He is a regular speaker at the London Analytics Forum and industry panels on the challenges of traditional data systems and how to overcome them. Previously CTO at IG Group before building a number of business across Europe, most notably PetMeds which he sold in 2013.
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About Avora, MedicAnimal.com, Socialite: Avora provides a complete augmented analytics solution powered by AI that makes in-depth data analysis as easy as a web search.
Dominique Guinard
Co-Founder & CTO of EVRYTHNG
Dominique Guinard is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of EVRYTHNG, the Internet of Things Smart Products Platform that connects any consumer product to the Web, and manages real-time data to drive applications. He is also a co-founder of WebofThings.org. Prior to that, he worked at MIT Auto-ID Labs, SAP, Auto-ID Labs Zurich, and Sun Microsystems. Guinard holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. Later on, he obtained a PhD from ETH Zurich. He was listed 5th amongst the top 100 IoT thinkers by Postscapes. Early in 2012, his PhD research was granted the ETH Medal.
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About Blockchain Research Institute, EVRYTHNG, Webofthings.org: EVRYTHNG develops an IoT platform for consumer product brands, articulating data with real-time insights for billions of things.
Ohad Folman
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Practi
Founder & CEO at Practi.
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About Just Eat, Practi: Practi develops cloud based software solutions to manage retail businesses.
Ajay Patel
Founder & CEO of HighQ
Ajay Patel As Founder of HighQ, Ajay continues to deliver on his vision of enabling a new, modern, highly efficient and ‘best in class’ secure platform of collaborative engagement and transaction for security, compliance and regulatory minded enterprises. As Chief Executive Officer, he leads the company growth strategy, product direction and senior management team. Ajay graduated with a first-class degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Manchester University and later completed a Master’s degree in Information Systems at LSE. He qualified as a chartered accountant at PwC in London and later occupied roles in leading investment banks Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. After spending several years in the City, he realised the corporate environment didn’t fulfil his creative, professional or personal ambitions and subsequently started HighQ.The idea was simple: to create a dynamic, fun and successful company that puts its employees and clients at the centre of everything it does.
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About HighQ: HighQ empowers leading law firms and corporate legal teams to transform the way they work and deliver legal services.
Daniel Bloor
Vice President Engineering, Co-Founder of The Cloudminer
Daniel is an Engineering geologist with experience within both the mining and civil engineering industry having worked in the UK, Australia, SE Asia, Africa and Central Europe. As the Vice President Engineering at the CloudMiner Ltd he has helped to develop a team to deliver a cloud based vluation and analytics tool to help add a standard and transparency to the mning industry where project econmoics are concerned.
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About The Cloudminer: The Cloudminer offers a cloud-based data mining software suite that aggregates data from multiple commodities.
Michael Ross
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of DynamicAction
Michael Ross joined DynamicAction as Co-founder and Chief Scientist in 2007.Michael has spent the last 20 years in the ecommerce world. He joined McKinsey in 1994 and spent 5 years consulting in the early days of the internet. From 1999 to 2006, he was co-founder and CEO of figleaves.com [which was sold to N.Brown in 2010]. Since 2007, he has been the Co-founder and Chief Scientist of DynamicAction (and former parent company eCommera), which delivers technology and decision analytics solutions for multichannel retailers including Neiman Marcus, ASDA, Brooks Brothers, Jaeger and many others. He is also a non-executive director of Abcam plc and Wex photographic.
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About DynamicAction, EDITED, London Business School, N Brown Group, Sainsbury’s Bank: DynamicAction is an analytics solution designed specifically for eCommerce, store, and omnichannel retail teams.
Ian Hepworth
Co-Founder, Technology and Operations Director of Segura Systems
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About Segura Systems: Segura’s cloud-based software allows businesses to understand, map, monitor and control their supply chains.
Peter Needle
Co-Founder, Managing Director of Segura Systems
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About Segura Systems: Segura’s cloud-based software allows businesses to understand, map, monitor and control their supply chains.
Matthew Scullion
Co-Founder and CEO of Matillion
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About Matillion: Matillion is an integration platform for cloud data warehouses.
Ed Thompson
Co-Founder & CTO of Matillion
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About Matillion: Matillion is an integration platform for cloud data warehouses.
Simon Riggs
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of 2ndQuadrant
Simon Riggs is the Founder and CEO of 2ndQuadrant. Simon has worked with enterprise-class database applications and uses his operational experience to contribute to many features of PostgreSQL’s internal design and usability. He is also co-author of the “PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook” series.
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About 2ndQuadrant: 2ndQuadrant provides solutions for mission critical PostgreSQL databases, ensuring high availability, backup & disaster recovery, & more.
Aruna Schwarz
Founder and CEO of Stelae Technologies
Founded the company in 2002 in Paris, funded by a group of private investors. Prior experience in marketing, product management and business development in the telecommunications and technology sectors with BT (UK), Cable & Wireless (UK, France, EMEA), 9 Telecom (France) and Rosebud Technologies (a content management solutions vendor).
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About Stelae Technologies: Stelae Technologies is a software vendor that offers information management solutions.
David Peto
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Aframe
David founded Aframe with a vision to create a video platform that is powerful enough to handle the huge volumes and myriad formats of video production, but is simple enough that anyone could use it. He’s taken this idea from a one-room office covered in post it notes, to a global business with offices across the UK and US, raising significant Venture Capital funding along the way.
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About Aframe: Aframe Media is a SaaS-based company that provides cloud video production storage and workflow.
Phil Sant
Chief Engineer & Founder of Stage
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About Stage: Stage builds a technology platform that revolutionizes music payment pipelines.
Dominik Tomicevic
Co-Founder and CEO of Memgraph
Dominik Tomicevic serves as the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Memgraph.
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About Memgraph: Memgraph makes creating real-time streaming graph applications accessible to every developer.
Tony Pepper
Co-Founder & CEO of Egress Software
Tony Pepper co-founded Egress Software Technologies in 2007 and currently serves as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for the company. Tony has overseen the company’s rapid expansion, driving innovation and worldwide sales. Tony currently serves as Chief Executive Officer, overseeing all aspects of business growth and innovation, with particular focus on Sales and Marketing. Pepper has an in-depth understanding of the data security market and prior to Egress held executive management and integration roles at Reflex Magnetics Ltd, Pointsec Mobile Technologies, and Check Point Software Technologies. Over the years, he has presented on a variety of data security-related issues and strategies for mobile computing and best practices surrounding secure data exchange. Pepper holds a Bachelor of Arts honours degree in Politics from Nottingham Trent University. He also holds a Masters degree in Software Engineering from Liverpool University.
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About Egress Software: Egress is a software company that specializes in human layer security designed to prevent accidental and intentional data breaches.
Neil Larkins
Co-Founder & COO of Egress Software
Neil Larkins co-founded Egress Software Technologies in 2007 and currently serves as Chief Operations Officer, playing an instrumental role in shaping the strategic direction of the business, with particular emphasis on product and service development. Neil possesses a thorough understanding of the information security market and has helped Egress build a reputation on technological excellence. Working with both corporate and public organisations, he has helped deliver cutting-edge solutions that meet specific requirements for secure data exchange and collaboration, as well as compliance. Prior to Egress, he held executive management positions at Reflex Magnetics, Pointsec Mobile Technologies and Check Point Software Technologies. Neil serves as Chief Technology Officer, playing an instrumental role in shaping the strategic technical direction of the business, through product and service development. A regular speaker at information security and technology events, Neil has a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Manchester.
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About Egress Software: Egress is a software company that specializes in human layer security designed to prevent accidental and intentional data breaches.
Steve Marsh
Founder and CEO of GeoSpock
Steven Marsh is a Co-Founder of GeoSpock Limited and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Steven Marsh is also the lead architect of the Collide platform and co-lead architect of GeoSpock DB. He has experience of building real-time and highly-scalable systems he has overseen the creation of GeoSpock’s state-of-the-art geo-location and social networking mobile development platform. Steven Marsh is a computer scientist. As part of his research, Steve is part of a team building a customisable FPGA-based super-computer designed to carry out real-time simulation of extreme-scale neural networks such as the brain. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
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About GeoSpock: GeoSpock builds GeoSpock DB, the unique space-time analytics database that delivers rapid insights at a fraction of the cost.
Abishek Raju
Founder and Technology Evangelist of Yobitel Communications
A highly motivated, self-driven, empowered Entrepreneur from strong IT Infrastructure background, Founder and successfully managing Yobitel Communications (Multi Cloud Business Intelligence Service Provider) Multi Cloud Technology & Business Advisor – Engineering the Open Cloud Architecture through SaaS Policy based Intelligence. Blockchain Evangelist & Technology Advisor – Redefining the evolution of Distributed Ledger Technology – DApps Applications through AI. My vision “Create a connected world and simplify IT in human life”.
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About Grabnpay eCommerce Private Limited, Yobitel Communications: Yobitel a Managed SaaS Cloud Service Provider offers Network & IT Infrastructure, Multi Cloud Hosting & Consulting, Container Orchestration
Ali Adnan
Co-Founder of Authlete
Born and raised in Japan, Ali is a British citizen who comes from a multicultural background and speaks several languages. Ali has led high-tech European start-ups for over 15 years creating value by bringing people together from varied backgrounds.
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About Mytrax: Authlete provides a set of Web APIs with which developers implement servers supporting OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, Financial-grade API, etc.
Imran Shafqat
Co-Founder & CTO of ThingTrax
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About ThingTrax: ThingTrax helps manufacturers reduce downtime and increase operational efficiency with their devices capturing data from machines.
Russell Carter
Founder and CEO of Simply Mystro
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About Simply Mystro: Saas, fintech , banking , blockchain , validations
Ben Foakes
Founder & Managing Director of BASE Media Cloud
Ben has 15 years media industry experience, having worked as an Editor, Colourist, Producer and Post Supervisor across a range of media projects. Since career highlights editing BAFTA-winning F1 for ITV, his credits span BBC promos, Bond films, Channel 4 documentaries and Jessie J tours, to the post supervision of drama series, SUSPECTS for Fremantle. Ben previously founded and led post facility Sequence, before launching BASE Media Cloud.
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About BASE Media Cloud: BASE Media Cloud is an innovative Managed Cloud Services company.
Richard Quigley
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Ventriks
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About Ventriks: Ventriks is a cloud platform that facilitates data discovery, engineering, management, and analysis.
Chris Garrett
Founder of Hyperlaunch
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About C8VA, Decimal, Hyperlaunch: Hyperlaunch is a dev-ops platform that offers continuous integration and deployment, infrastructure-as-code and team collaboration services.
David Jones
Co-Founder of ipushpull
David Jones is the co-founder of iPushPull, the service that lets users link remote Excel spreadsheets and other desktop applications, and delivers live data to mobile devices. Previously he was a director of Applaud Technology, a startup which developed an investment portal for the private banking industry. Prior to that he worked in information technology at a series of leading investment banks, including BNP Paribas and Barclays Capital.
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About ipushpull: Live data sharing and workflow automation platform providing real-time interoperability of data across any application
Daniel Eccleston
Co-Founder of ipushpull
In 1999, after 5 years in the derivatives trading industry providing trading and risk management solutions, Dan co-founded one of the leading trading software providers for electronic markets. He built it into a successful business over the next 5 years leading to a trade sale. He then spent a number of years delivering trading platforms for a global broking house before launching a proprietary financial futures trading company. Subsequently he co-founded iPushPull, an exciting new venture to build a user-focussed cloud-based platform for sharing live data targeted at businesses globally.
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About ipushpull: Live data sharing and workflow automation platform providing real-time interoperability of data across any application
Lisa Mazza
Co-Founder & CCO of ThinkLab.ai
Co-founder of ThinkLab.AI, a machine learning algorithm marketplace offering clients artificial intelligence solutions to deliver game-changing insights from data. Lisa gained 10 years experience in finance prior to setting up ThinkLab, focusing on business development in foreign exchange markets and working closely with quant teams that were developing algorithms ensuring transparent and efficient ways of trading for clients. She also has experience in the Fitness & Health Tech sector. Lisa holds a first class degree in Business Management from the University of London, Queen Mary and is passionate to help democratise machine learning by creating a marketplace that brings academia and companies together to gain powerful insights into data.
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About ThinkLab.ai: ThinkLab is an educational platform.
David Barker
Founder & CTO of 4D Data Centres
David B. is the Founder & CTO at 4D Data Centres.
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About 4D Data Centres, techUK: Cloud, Connectivity and Colocation, with data centres in Sussex, Surrey, Kent & London.
Ben Portsmouth
Co Founder and CEO of Andromeda POS
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About Andromeda POS: POS , Digital Ordering and Cloud Services for Delivery Restauarants
Nigel Wright
Founder and CEO of Converge Technology Specialists
Nigel Wright CEO and founder of Converge Technology Specialists, Nigel has 18 years’ experience delivering technology services to the legal profession in both the enterprise and SME sectors. Nigel’s expertise in providing strategic analysis of IT systems and identifying opportunities for improved efficiency, drives competitive advantage for clients. Well-known and respected within the sector, Nigel is often invited to speak at events and to advise industry bodies on the issues and opportunities facing law firms today.
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About Converge Technology Specialists: Converge Technology Specialists is a specialist provider of hosted and managed IT services through private cloud.
Liam Gilchrist
Founder of Lexical Labs
Liam Gilchrist is the founder and chief executive officer at Lexical Labs.
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About Lexical Labs: Lexical Labs is an AI-powered platform that helps lawyers to review their contracts and generate a counter-proposal.
Paul Donnelly
Founder and CEO of Teknov8
Paul Donnelly is the founder and CEO of Teknov8.
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About Teknov8: Teknov8 provides managed IT services to help businesses accelerate business activity and boost efficiency.
Peter Parkanyi
Founder of Ruuta
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About Ruuta: Your private cloud with a fast, reliable & secure Wi-Fi. Take control of your internet!
