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 SMS 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.
Kenny Ewan
CEO & Founder of Wefarm
Kenny Ewan is originally from Scotland and he studied architecture at Dundee University, before moving to Peru to work for an international NGO for seven years. While he was in Peru he worked closely with local farmers and indigenous communities on sustainable agriculture projects,where he learned about the power of grassroots innovation. After his time in Peru he joined Cafedirect Producers Foundation, an independent UK charity that works with a network of more than 280,000 smallholder farmers. As part of their start-up team he led the development of WeFarm from 2010 to 2014, before launching it as an independent social enterprise in 2015. WeFarm connects smallholder farmers in Africa and Latin America to vital information on agriculture via SMS. Farmers can ask questions on farming and receive crowdsourced answers from farmers around the world on even the most basic mobile phone, without having internet access or leaving their farm. In November 2015 we have 32,000 farmers using our system.
Follow Kenny Ewan:
About Wefarm: Wefarm is a farmer-to-farmer digital network that enables users to share information via SMS.
Daniel Gill
Founder and CEO of Augnet
With wide industry knowledge and insight, both as an Angel investor and as a Telco industry insider, Daniel Gill started Augnet with an ambitious plan to disrupt and revolutionise the SMS sector. Since founding the company, he has raised investment from a range of seasoned investors, including lead investor the venture capital firm Triple Point. His leadership of Augnet follows a decade with Skype and Microsoft, where he led a high-performance team and spearheaded a number of ground-breaking business development initiatives in the telecoms space. With his leadership Augnet is on track to revolutionise the way things are done in the SMS space.
Follow Daniel Gill:
About Augnet: Augnet is a London-based technology start-up set to revolutionise the SMS and messaging space.
Mark Hla
Founder and CEO of Pure360
Mark Hla is Founder and CEO at Pure360.
Follow Mark Hla:
About Pure360: Pure360 provides email marketing and SMS software for businesses to access customers via mobile and web devices.
Ken Banks
Founder of FrontlineSMS
Ken Banks is the founder of [Frontline SMS](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/frontlinesms) and [Kiwanja.net](http://www.Kiwanja.net). He specializes in the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world. He combines over 22 years in I.T. with over 15 years experience living and working throughout Africa in countries including Kenya, Nigeria (where he ran a primate sanctuary), South Africa, Mozambique, Cameroon, Zambia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. In 1999 he graduated from Sussex University with honours in Social Anthropology with Development Studies His vision is to empower others to create social change, and he does this by developing and providing tools to mostly grassroots organisations who seek to better use technology in their work. In 2007 he hit headline news on the BBC when his text messaging application – FrontlineSMS – was used to help monitor the Nigerian Presidential elections. Since launch the software has been successfully implemented in over forty countries including Afghanistan, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, the Philippines and Pakistan Ken has recently been interviewed by the BBC World Service, The Economist, BBC News Online, The New York Times, Nokia, Mongabay.com, The Africa Journal, White African and the Sussex University Alumni magazine, among many others, and he was recently invited to take part in an Aspen Institute round table discussion on the use of mobiles in activism and civic engagement. Ken has written about his work, and the wider role of mobile technology, for a number of publications including Pambazuka News, Didactics World and Vodafone Receiver magazine, and has a regular online column in PC World. He has also acted as an official judge for the Global Mobile Awards, the Mobile Messaging Awards and his own nGOmobile initiative, and is a regional judge for the 2008 Adjudication Panel for the African ICT Achievers Awards Programme He has spoken about the application of mobile technology at a number of conferences, workshops and organisations including Nokia, IDEO, Stanford University, the MacArthur Foundation, Amnesty International and the University of Arizona. He has also presented papers at the W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries (Bangalore, 2006 and Sao Paulo, 2008) and the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (Canada, 2007), where he also sat on a specialist panel discussing web delivery models for emerging markets. Ken also spoke at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (2008), and delivered a keynote address at Mobile Messaging 2008 in Cannes Ken was recently awarded grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Open Society Institute (OSI), and has been short listed for two mobile industry awards for the development of FrontlineSMS. Between 2006 and 2007 he was based at Stanford University as a Visiting Fellow on the Reuters Digital Vision Program. He currently spends his time between Cambridge (UK) and Stanford University in California.
Follow Ken Banks:
About FrontlineSMS, Kiwanja.Net: FrontlineSMS is free, open source software.
Mark Hay
Founder, CEO, and CTO of Melrose Labs
Follow Mark Hay:
About Melrose Labs: Communication services inception, development and operation. Enabling and optimising communications. #CPaaS #SaaS #UCaaS #APIs
Gav Richards
CTO / Co-Founder of Aiir
Follow Gav Richards:
About Aiir: The complete platform for audio content creators.
