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 Developer Tools 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.
Paul Thomas
Founder and Managing Director of Lead Forensics
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About Lead Forensics: Lead Forensics is the B2B software that identifies anonymous website visitors, providing full contact details and customer journey insight.
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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.
Matthias Radestock
Co-Founder of Weaveworks
Matthias is the co-founder of Weaveworks. He previously co-founded RabbitMQ, and a number of other software technology start-ups. Matthias has a PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College, and has spent much of the past 20 years wrestling with distributed systems.
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About Weaveworks: Weaveworks simplifies operating Kubernetes workloads and provides a developer-centric operating model for cloud-native applications.
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.
Jon Coleman
Co Founder of Wonde
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About Wonde: Wonde provides third party applications access to secure school data.
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
An entrepreneurial senior executive with 25 successful years and experience grounded in building and transforming business and accelerating growth.
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About Hadean: Deploy Cloud Native Applications Simply and Securely
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.
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.
Joao Caxaria
Co-Founder and CTO of Codacy
Over 15 years of experience in Software development. Specialities: Scala, Java, .NET, Objective-C
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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.
David Sommer
Co-Founder & Product Director of Kudos
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About Kudos, Project Counter: Kudos offers web-based tools and services to help researchers, institutions, publishers, and funders increase the impact of their research.
Melinda Kenneway
Executive Director & Co-Founder of Kudos
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About Kudos: Kudos offers web-based tools and services to help researchers, institutions, publishers, and funders increase the impact of their research.
Sven Al Hamad
Co-Founder and CEO of Webiny
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About Webiny: Easiest way to adopt serverless.
Justin Ashurst
Co-Founder, CTO & COO of AppInstitute
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About AppInstitute, Peckish: AppInstitute is a software developer of a digital framework for small businesses to create their own mobile applications.
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.
Horace Ho
Founder of Nextlayer
Horace is well versed with the vigorous thinking of engineers and the more organic and creative process of designers, serving as a bridge across disciplines in team situations. Horace, a star-student at CSM, spent the year following his graduation in Shanghai developing a community-experience-based tenant recruiting strategy for a 100,000m² mixed-use building that was much better suited to the needs of residents living nearby than a more traditional retail lead strategy. A formative and formidable task to begin one’s approach to user-centred design! Since joining the tech-startup scene in London, he has helped various companies to i) find strategic points where they can significantly improve the experience of their clients; ii) efficiently occupy these strategic points by optimal use of existing resources and infrastructure. Horace founded Nextlayer to help users better organise, comprehend and utilise the content they consume from day to day. He passionately applies the same user centred approach to Nextlayer’s creative processes and hopes to build an experience that is enjoyable, intuitive and meaningful for our users.
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About Nextlayer: Mobile App
Mark Bracey
Co-Founder & shareholder of Doohclick AB
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About Doohclick AB: DoohClick AB is a Swedish based company which develops and provides out of home ad serving ecosystems
Stefan Richter
Founder of muchosmedia
Stefan is the founder and managing director of muchosmedia ltd (founded in early 2008), a UK based software company which specialises in real-time enabled web applications, with Scribblar.com being one of the examples. Over the past few years Stefan has established himself as a sought after industry expert and consultant for Flex and Flash Media Server, and his personal blog FlashComGuru.com is one of the largest resources covering Flash Video and related technologies on the web. Stefan is the co-author of ‘Hands-on Guide to Flash Video’ published by Elsevier in 2007 and he continues to speak at many industry events including Adobe MAX and Streaming Media Europe.
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About Membermeister, muchosmedia: Muchosmedia develops software solutions, focusing on video integration and real-time collaboration through websites.
Daniel Nordh
Founder of Curator & Co
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About Curator & Co, Paymobil: A fast and visual tool for creative thinking.
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.
Tiny van Niekerk
Founder of The Digital Bra
Founder at The Digital Bra.
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About The Digital Bra: The Digital Bra is a mobile applications that uses 3D scans to create a customized bra for each user.
Judy van Niekerk
Founder of The Digital Bra
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About The Digital Bra: The Digital Bra is a mobile applications that uses 3D scans to create a customized bra for each user.
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.
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.
Rachel Gawley
CTO & Co-Founder of AppAttic Ltd
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About AppAttic Ltd, AppAttic Ltd: AppAttic’s games engage users for positive behaviour change and provide data for research, potentially saving the health economy billions.
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
Paul Tarpey
Founder of MobileCaddy
Founder of MobileCaddy.
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About MobileCaddy: The uninterrupted delivery of business critical mobile apps for the force.com platform
Paul Thomas
Co-Founder & Development Director of Cupris Health
Paul Thomas is the Co Founder & Development Director at Cupris Health.
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About Cupris Health, PD HIVE: Cupris Health develope communication software and smartphone-connected medical devices.
Tom Akehurst
Founder of MockLab
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About MockLab: Super-fast hosted API mocking (Service Virtualization), with a QA-friendly UI
Francisco Martín
Co-Founder and Senior Software Engineer of Wenenu
Francisco has been part in different start-ups, all about making lives safer, from road safety devices, to risk management, and now on the cloud with Wenenu, whose mission is to democratise reliable Backups and Disaster Recovery verification tools for everyone, with ease, with a DevOps first approach and cost effectiveness as goals, as opposed to heavy, expensive and boring competitors. Wenenu is based in London, UK, being a fully remote company. Francisco has a MCc in Computer Science and Engineering by the University of Granada, Spain.
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About Wenenu: Verify your cloud backups and Disaster Recovery plans ahead of time with ease, sleep better.
Giles Thomas
Founder of PythonAnywhere
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About PythonAnywhere: PythonAnywhere is a popular and growing platform-as-a-service that makes it easy for programmers to create, store and run their software in
Jakub Pietrzak
Chief Technology Officer and Founder of SKY ENGINE
Jakub Pietrzak is the Chief Technology Officer and Founder 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
Angela Massey
Founder of Telligen
Founder at Telligen
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About Telligen: Telligen is a UK based company creating digital identities, web and mobile applications for the Arts and Culture sector
Samuel Ryzycki
Co Founder of MILLION12
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About MILLION12: MILLION12 Ltd develops projects based on Neos CMS publishing platform, including the Typostrap.io
Marcin Ryzycki
Co Founder of MILLION12
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About MILLION12: MILLION12 Ltd develops projects based on Neos CMS publishing platform, including the Typostrap.io
Chih Chun Chen
Founder of Cambridge Coding Academy
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About Cambridge Coding Academy: Cambridge Coding Academy is a constantly growing community of young coders and pre-university students.
Chih Chun Chen
Founder of Cambridge Coding Academy
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About Cambridge Coding Academy: Cambridge Coding Academy is a constantly growing community of young coders and pre-university students.
