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 Advertising 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.
Peter Day
Chief Technology Officer of Quantcast
After gaining a PhD in machine learning (and a brief career in academia) Peter spent 12 years working in the financial markets in a variety of roles in the quantitative finance sphere, including low latency pricing, portfolio analytics (xVA) and culminating in being responsible for Equity Derivatives Risk and Pricing technology globally for UBS. More recently Peter has left the financial markets to rediscover his roots in Machine Learning and is currently the UK Engineering Director for Quantcast – a leading ad-tech firm that uses Machine Learning to target advertising in real time.
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About Quantcast: Quantcast helps create a more personalized digital world.
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Dominic Shine
Chief Technology Officer of Dentsu Aegis Network
Dominic is responsible for strategic direction, innovation, delivery and integration of the group’s technology and data assets covering client-facing products, business platforms, infrastructure and cyber security. He joined the group in 2017 from News Corp where, as Global CIO, he delivered a major transformation of technology capabilities to enable growth of digital product revenues, modernisation of platforms and processes across all business functions, and a major reduction in operating costs. Previously, as Group CIO of the events division of Reed Elsevier, he led a global transformation of platforms and products to enable the launch of new digital products across 500 events in 30 countries. He started his career in the finance sector where he spent 15 years in international digital and technology leadership roles working for leading companies in investment banking, asset management and insurance.
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About Dentsu Aegis Network: Dentsu Aegis Network is the first digitally native network that specializes in media, digital and creative communications services.
Blair Robertson
Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of TVSquared
Blair is a seasoned data scientist and visualization guru with a background in Artificial Intelligence. He has spent the past 13 years helping global companies improve decision-making and product development through the application of analytics. As TVSquared’s CTO, Blair is an expert in a range of statistical techniques such as data modeling, signal processing and machine learning, which he and his team deploy to continually improve the company’s technology platform. Throughout his career, Blair has focused on presenting complex technical concepts in an easy-to-consume, business-friendly way and has a reputation for designing analytic products that are highly visual and intuitive. Previous engagements have included time as principal analyst at Sumerian, where he led analytic engagements with dozens of the world’s largest companies. Blair has also acted as a private consultant for a wide-variety of data-driven companies in financial services, utilities and hi-tech, and as a financial technology consultant with Accenture Plc.
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About TVSquared: TVSquared is the global leader in TV attribution.
Francesco Petruzzelli
Chief Technology Officer of Bidstack
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About Bidstack, WhaleSlide: Bidstack empowers brands to place advertising into spaces that sit naturally within video games.
Nick Wilson
CTO of WME
Nick Wilson is CTO of Break Media, the Internet’s largest entertainment destination for men 18-35.
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About BrandAds, WME, WME: William Morris Endeavor (WME) is primarily a talent agency representing artists across every entertainment sector.
Marco Van de Bergh
Founder & CTO of LoopMe
As LoopMe’s CTO, Marco oversees LoopMe’s product and technology development from the London office. Marco has worked in mobile advertising since 2006, as Director of Technology EMEA at Ad Infuse (sold to Velti) and Director of Products for Velti based in San Francisco. He worked in development & strategy for mobile services as Senior Business Analyst in Vodafone Group R&D Strategy.
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About LoopMe: LoopMe is focused on brand advertising, using AI, attribution, and analytics to deliver measurable outcomes.
Kostas Melas
CTO of FanCircles
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About FanCircles: Reach followers and fans through your own fan club platform built for music artists, YouTubers, television shows and celebrities
Darren Lee
Chief Technology Officer & Coder of AI Bots as a Service – a Conversational AI engine by AI BaaS
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About AI Bots as a Service – a Conversational AI engine by AI BaaS, Atos: A world-leading Conversational AI engine. Voice assistants powered by AI BaaS.
Wilfrid Obeng
CTO of AudioMob
I have had roles at J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Google. During my time at Google I worked in the Cloud and GTech division and was promoted twice before leaving to pursue my own venture, AudioMob. These achievements have gained me various accolades including being identified as a Future Leader, Rare Rising Star, Outstanding Student and Top 10 Computer Science & Analytics Undergraduate.
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About AudioMob: Monetizing mobile games non-intrusively using audio ads! AudioMob are the creators of Audio Enhanced Banners & Rewarded Audio
Heather Utech
CTO of DMG Media
Heather Utech is CTO at DMG Media.
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About DMG Media: DMG media is a consumer media company engaged in print and online newspaper publishing.
Chris Scott
CTO of Zephr
Chris Scott serves as chief technology officer at Blaize.io, a mass scale decision engine for subscription experiences.
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About Zephr: Zephr is a technology platform for media companies to grow their subscription revenue.
Nick Reffitt
Co-Founder & CTO of Tapdaq
Nick has been coding since a young age. He picked up programming aged 12, and started consulting a year later. He met Ted at a similar time, and they both hacked on various projects over the years. Nick is in charge of all the technical aspects to Tapdaq. CS grad from University of Kent.
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About Tapdaq: Tapdaq helps mobile developers to maximise their revenue with unbiased ad mediation, and retain their most valuable users.
Aaron McKee
CTO of Blis
Aaron McKee is a seasoned technology executive with a history of building products at the intersection of big data and machine learning.With 25 years of professional experience in the technology sector, and almost a decade as an executive, he’s helped companies, teams, and products across every stage of maturity and across a range of industries.He helped break web server performance records at Intel and launched the first modern local search product at Ask.com. As CTO of Struq, a performance advertising technology company later acquired by Quantcast, he was one of the first to bring a deep use of machine learning to dynamic content personalization and programmatic advertising. Aaron has also served as CTO of both Skimlinks and Job Today, both sector-leading consumer and business-facing marketplace companies. Outside of work, Aaron spends as much free time as possible with his family – a wife and two young sons – traveling, eating, and generally being a nerd. He graduated with distinction from the University of California, Berkeley with a dual degree in Computer Science and Psychology and has split his career across both Silicon Valley and Europe.
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About Blis: Blis is the leading privacy-first, location-powered programmatic advertising partner.
Dom Marmont
CTO & Co-Founder of FIXR
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About FIXR: FIXR is a leading ticketing and event management platform built for fans and organisers.
Jonny Brankin
CTO of Smartzer
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About Smartzer: Smartzer makes videos and live streams interactive & shoppable on e-commerce, video ads and social.
Toby Doig
CTO of Captify
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About Captify: Captify offers a search retargeting service that enables advertisers to focus on users to match their desired audience with inventory.
Elnar Hajiyev
Co-Founder & CTO of Realeyes
Elnar stands at the heart of Realeyes’ core technology and IT architecture, driving the company’s emotions tracking vision. Elnar started coding at the age of 10 and built some of the first online shops in Azerbaijan. At 18, he created Azerbaijan’s first online beauty pageant, which got hundreds of thousands of hits, millions of TV viewers and extensive nationwide press coverage. He has also co-authored numerous academic publications, as well as been the recipient of several awards and prestigious scholarships. He went on to study for a fully-funded PhD in Computer Science at Oxford focused on database structures, which now form the essential foundation of our technology platform. During his PhD Elnar co-founded Semmle – working on big data analytics technology to provide business intelligence – and managed the company during its first few years before a fateful meeting with Mihkel led him to becoming one of the co-founders of Realeyes. He has built and now leads our Research & Development offices in Eastern Europe, and has been granted a US patent, with 6 more EU patents currently pending.
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About Realeyes: Measuring Human Response At The Speed & Scale Of AI
Cabell de Marcellus
Co-Founder & CTO of Dianomi
Cabell, Co-Founder and CTO, is responsible for the strategic development of dianomi’s platform, he coded the original HA/LAMP architecture. He also represents dianomi in North America presenting to advertisers and publishers. Prior to founding dianomi, Cabell was Head of Software Development and Equity Services at Interactive Investor where his software was a vital part of the $1BN flotation.
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About Buckingham Gate Chartered Financial Planners, Dianomi: Dianomi is a global leader in content marketing.
Toby Reid
Chief Technology Officer of Croud
Toby Reid is the Chief Technology Officer of Croud and Serpico. He is a former Chief Architect at TruRating and Technical Architect at NCC Group. Mr. Reid graduated from the University of Kent with a BS in Multimedia Technology & Design.
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About Croud: Croud is a digital marketing agency that provides services including SEO, PPC, content, programmatic, paid social, and analytics
Jacob Clarkson
CTO of Amigo Technology
Jacob Clarkson is Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at Amigo Technology. He’s a startup CTO with over 8 years of commercial experience architecting, developing and maintaining complex software systems in a variety of languages. Before joining Amigo, he worked in Java software development, predominantly working with J2EE stacks, JSF and Oracle databases. Working in relatively large scale national systems at various places (one of which being the NHS), he gained expertise in relational databases.
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About Amigo Technology: Amigo is a cloud-based marketing technology platform that turns marketing ideas into brilliant digital experiences.
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
Javad Zahir
CTO of MINT
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About MINT, MYNTELLIGENCE LIMITED: MINT is a tool that allows marketers to manage their entire media spend across all AdTech platforms through a single interface.
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
Dorian Logan
Co-Founder & CTO of BrightTALK
has been the chief architect of BrightTALK™s technology since joining the company in 2004. Mr. Logan brings more than 20 years experience developing enterprise applications to his position as chief technology officer, working previously for IBM Global Services in the Interactive Media Center and Scient. He graduated from Nottingham Trent University (U.K.) with a bachelor™s degree in Computer Systems.
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About BrightTALK: BrightTALK provides videos and webinars for professionals and their communities.
Adam McGrath
Chief Technology Officer of Glow Digital Media
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About Glow Digital Media: Glow Machine is an ad tech platform for creating, improving and understanding Facebook and Twitter Ad campaigns.
Adam McGrath
Chief Technology Officer of Glow Digital Media
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About Glow Digital Media: Glow Machine is an ad tech platform for creating, improving and understanding Facebook and Twitter Ad campaigns.
Cameron Gordon
CTO and Co-Founder of OnePulse
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About OnePulse: OnePulse is a mobile app that connects people and businesses with opinions and reward them through PayPal.
Simon Critchley
CTO of Avocet
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About Avocet: Avocet provides a demand-side platform for digital advertising with viewability, cross-device and class-leading optimization all built-in.
Pavel Sich
CTO of Moovshack
As software architect, Pavel is responsible for the technical direction and full software development lifecycle at Sequent, Moovshack and IOSBITS.
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About Moovshack: The first fully interactive, mobile-first property platform that doubles as a free-to-list portal & a brandable estate agent app
Mark White
CTO of Codec
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About Codec: We help brands to discover and tap in to the pockets of culture that drive growth. Powered by award-winning AI.
Jun Wang
Co-Founder / CTO of Nozzle.ai
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About Nozzle.ai: Nozzle.ai is an eCommerce and advertising optimization platform for Amazon.
Stephen Carl
CTO of Sliide
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About Emu Analytics, Sliide: Mobile technology company that work with MNO, MVNO and OEM partners globally to increase engagement, drive revenue, and decrease churn.
Antonio Reyes
CTO & Co-Founder of Bidnamic
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About Bidnamic, Dizinga: Bidnamic is a machine learning platform that helps retailers unlock the full potential of Google Shopping.
Moin Maniar
CTO of Appsumer
Moin Maniar joined Appsumer as CTO in 2016.
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About Appsumer: Appsumer automates user acquisition & performance marketing dashboards, reports & insights
Paul Wolf
CTO of BitPoster
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About BitPoster, Yewleaf: BitPoster is a marketplace for programmatic trading of outdoor media.
Fabrice Gagneux
Group CTO of Digitalbox
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About Digitalbox, Interscroller: Digitalbox have created a ‘push media’ publishing model able to deliver large, high quality audiences in a brand-safe environment.
Peter Docherty
Founder & CTO of ThinkAnalytics
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About ThinkAnalytics: ThinkAnalytics provides and deploys real-time personalized content recommendation search engines to the markets.
Chris Watts
CTO / Co-Founder of NumberEight
Chris is the co-founder and CTO of NumberEight, a London-based AI company that detects user context from smartphone sensors and uses it to build audiences of behaviourally similar users. He is an ex-IBMer, where he researched air pollution sensors and has multiple patents to his name. He holds computer science degrees from Southampton and Cambridge and brings the know-how to achieve the theory of context detection in the real world.
Chris’ team has since produced patent-pending inventions, including efficient techniques for smartphones to process high-frequency data without significant battery impact, the ability to make personal devices work together to adapt to context and mood, and the process of defining groups of people with similar interests using anonymised sensor data.
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About NumberEight: NumberEight solves mobile addressability at scale by giving new life to untapped 1st party data. The company empowers app developers, ad partners, and advertisers to explore the power of mobex (mobile context) to connect with their users in a relevant, impactful, and most importantly, a private way. They do this through our best-in-class mobile AI software, which predicts the live context of a user (e.g. running, commuting) from sensors present in the device, and then packages them neatly into ID-less behavioural audiences (e.g. joggers, frequent shoppers). All computation happens on-device, thus producing a privacy-by-design solution that guarantees a higher regulatory immunity.
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.
Andrew Martin
Founder and CTO of Inkpact
Andrew Martin is the founder and CTO of Inkpact. He previously served as the head of product at Sideways 6. Andrew earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Portsmouth.
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About Inkpact: Deliver handwritten personalised notes and gifts to the people who make your business great
James Wilberforce-Andrews
CTO co-founder of Tailored.to
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About Tailored.to: Tailored is a personal shopping assistant matching in-market prospects to advertisers. We power personalised marketing at scale.
Daniel Winterstein
Founder & CTO of Good-Loop
Founder and CTO of Good-Loop — delivering ethical and effective advertising. I’m an entrepreneur, an AI consultant, and a recovering academic. I specialise in data science, Natural Language Processing (computers that read and talk), software development — and applying these to business problems, especially in the space of user profiling and communication technology. Strong academic background, with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University and a 1st class Mathematics degree from Cambridge.
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About Good-Loop, SoDash, Winterwell Associates: Good-Loop converts advertising money into charitable donations – whilst delivering 70% higher engagement for the advertiser. Win-win : )
Ed Eliot
Founder & CTO of BrightLocal
Ed oversees technical operations. He built our first two tools and the basics of our admin panel. Ed brings 15 years of development experience to BrightLocal.
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About BrightLocal: Take the lead in local search.
Lukas Dirzys
Founder and CTO of Creative AI
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About Creative AI: Creative AI gives every business, big or small, the power of a dedicated marketing team.
Katie Nykanen
CTO of Adstream
Katie is the 2019 winner of Women in IT’s CTO of the Year award recognising the work her team have done transforming Adstream internally into a leading player in the Adtech space optimising Cloud, Devops Practices, CI:CD and the latest Tech. She is passionate about getting the best from People and Technology to produce products which deliver real value to Businesses across Industries. Taking pride in a deep business and technical knowledge she believes leading a successful team is down to being a great role model, advocating flexibility and actively encouraging growth and development across the team.
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About Adstream: Adstream is an advertising content management and cross-media distribution technology platform. Changing the way advertisers track content.
Ron Perkins
Founder and CTO of zubbit.io
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About : zubbit.io Driving Traffic via Content. Don’t Just Share it, zubbit!
Ron Perkins
Founder and CTO of zubbit.io
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About : zubbit.io Driving Traffic via Content. Don’t Just Share it, zubbit!
David Burns
Co-founder & CTO of Original People
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About Original People: Digital design and innovation studio, based in Soho, London
David Burns
Co-founder & CTO of Original People
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About Original People: Digital design and innovation studio, based in Soho, London
Joel Hopwood
Chief Technology Officer of Shopper Media Group
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About Shopper Media Group: Shopper Media Group specializes in commerce marketing activation, connecting retailers and brands with shoppers at the point of purchase.
Satinder Ubhi
Chief Technology Officer of TXTImpact
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About TXTImpact: TXTImpact is a New York-based SMS Text Marketing and Business text messaging service provider.
Rodrigo Menegazzo
CTO of Squawka
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About Squawka: Squawka is a digital media company focused on using stats & data viz to fuel content for fans
Tim Wilson
CTO & Co-Founder of centiment.io
I’m the Chief Technical Officer at Centiment.io which provides predictive analytics in relation to digital content using machine learning and AI. In 2005 I sold a freeware games website/company aged 15, now over 10 years on I’ve developed a heavyweight skill set across internet-based services. Having worked in senior/lead roles in both client and server side development and user-behavioral analytics for large corporations from Amazon to Virgin, my understanding and passion for web platforms only continues to grow with the industry.
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About centiment.io: Centiment Adtech uses artificial intelligence to find out how your audience FEEL and the BEST time to serve an ad.
Gianluca Angelici
CTO of Adgistics
Entrepreneur and expert of marketing related technologies. MSc in computer engineering, specialised in Artificial Intelligence applied to Web data. I’m particularly interested in how technologies impact and change organisations. Investigating about it I wrote the book “The Liquid Corporation”. I’m currently CTO and Board Member of Adgistics.
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About Adgistics: Adgistics is a specialist Digital Asset Management solutions provider for world-class brands.
Anthony Stonham
CEO/CTO of Local Puzzle
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About Local Puzzle: Supporting independent merchants, rewarding shoppers’ loyalty, revitalising the high street
Anthony Stonham
CEO/CTO of Local Puzzle
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About Local Puzzle: Supporting independent merchants, rewarding shoppers’ loyalty, revitalising the high street
Justin Sperling
CTO of SpeakerMatch
Justin Sperling is an alumnus of The University of Texas at Austin and has been with SpeakerMatch since 2011. Justin makes sure that everything runs smoothly… constantly creating enhancements, perfecting new features, and tinkering with new tools to ensure a user-friendly experience for speakers, event planners and others who use our website.
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About SpeakerMatch: SpeakerMatch is the world’s largest speakers bureau.
Mehmet Bilgin
CTO of Interceptd
Mehmet Bilgin is the CTO of Interceptd.
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About Interceptd: The smartest defense to shield and protect your marketing budget.
Chris Poel
CTO of Sportolutions
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About Sportolutions, Sportolutions: Ticketing and Marketing Automation Solutions
Paul Maidment
Co-founder & CTO of ZeniAd
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About ZeniAd: We deliver interactive advertising experiences to virtual reality content.
Ashley Powell
CTO of Snizl Ltd
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About Snizl Ltd: Snizl is an app that allows business owners to post spontaneous, real-time deals, competitions & events; to interested local people.
Jérôme Charvet
Chief Technology Officer of Sportskred
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About DH: Digital Hosting, Sportskred: Sportskred: helping brands, athletes and agents achieve more together.
Siraj Sayed
Acting CTO of Jeeeni
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About Jeeeni: Jeeeni is a multidimensional lifestyle service that connects users with businesses, services, and communities within one single app.
Stephan Meier
CTO of Screenburn
Stephan is the CTO of Screenburn, and together with a team of developers works on making our product great.
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About Screenburn: Screenburn is a Facebook VoD platform enabling the sale of film and TV from a Facebook page.
