UPDATED: The UK is producing some of the most exciting and fast growing technology companies in the world – ranging from AI-powered medical research through to remote HR and electric motors for Ferrari cars.
We profile some of the most innovative start-ups and fast growing technology companies in the sectors of communication, consumer, cybersecurity, fintech, logistics, medical/heath and transport.
25 of the most fast growing technology companies in the UK
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Communication
Location: London
Founded: 2017
No. of employees: 10-50
Founders: Toby Mather, Adit Trivedi
Lingumi is an edtech company, bringing the world’s best teaching experience to pre-school children around the world through technology.
Lingumi’s first course teaches foundational spoken English, to families around the world, particularly in China and Taiwan.
The platform offers the benefits of private tuition, but at lower cost; instead of repeatedly delivering live classes, Lingumi teachers deliver daily lessons asynchronously to families, whenever they want to learn, using their proprietary voice, video and play-based teaching tools.
The company’s revenue has grown over 500 per cent in the last 12 months, with over 100,000 families learning English.
Location: London
Founded: 2004 (Mind Candy)
No. of employees: 11-50
Company founder: Ian Chambers
Moshi provides a sleep and mindfulness app for kids featuring melodic stories created to help kids drift off to sleep quickly, calming guided meditation sessions with a playful Moshi twist, created to help kids relax and learn the basics of mindfulness, and a collection of completely original instrumentals, specifically composed to soothe and relax.
Moshi has raised $47m in funding and has over 100,000 paying subscribers.
Location: London, Vienna
Founded: 2020
No. of employees: 11
Founders: Matthew Wilson and Guenther Eisinger
Remote work is here to stay. Even before Covid-19, flexible and remote working was already becoming commonplace in modern companies looking to attract the best global talent. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend but by embracing remote employment, many companies are risking non-compliance with international labour laws and regulations.
Omnipresent addresses this challenge by building a tech-enabled platform that handles all of the complexity of international employment for clients, offering them and their remote workers a simplified, cost effective and legally compliant employment solution.
Location: London, UK
Founded: 2013
No. of employees: >150
Founders: David Benigson, Miguel Martinez, Wesley Hall
Signal AI’s artificial intelligence-powered solutions provide PR and communications professionals, compliance and risk experts, in-house and agency teams and senior business leaders with the information they need.
In 2013, like many a tech giant (Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft) Signal AI started life with three people in a garage. The garage in question was located in Belsize Park in North London and belonged to the Benigson family.
Fast forward to the present day and after a period of explosive growth, Signal AI has raised over $49.5m in investment. Investors include MMC Ventures, Redline Capital and GMG Ventures. This follows revenue growth over 130 per cent in the last 12 months and more than doubling its number of customers in the same period. Clients include Allen & Overy, Amnesty International, British Airways, E.ON, Deloitte and HSBC. In 2018, Signal AI expanded its global footprint into the US, with the New York offering gaining traction and expansion into APAC well underway.
In 2020 Signal announced that business veteran and former MP Archie Norman had been appointed as its chairman. Norman has previously served on the boards of M&S, Asda and ITV, and has a wealth of experience in business change and value creation that is an important addition to the Signal AI team as the company continues to evolve.
Location: Cambridge
Founded: 2006
No. of employees: 95
Founder: Dr Tony Robinson
Speechmatics develops automatic speech recognition software based on recurrent neural networks and statistical language modelling. This year the company has announced six new partnerships. This included being part of ING Labs Brussels 2020 cohort, partnering with Daisee in Australia and Veritone in the USA. There were new customers in China too and the company is still growing revenues in the UK. Lockdown also saw business leads increase and it signed one of its biggest deals, showing that business growth isn’t dependent on physical proximity.
Speechmatics is serving a growing number of use cases, as it is winning business in the contact centre, government and compliance space and will be launching into the eDiscovery space in Q3. It has recently opened new offices in Brno, Czech Republic; Chennai, India; and, most recently, Denver, USA.
Consumer
Location: London
Founded: 2011
No. of employees: 140+
Company founder: Steven Mendel
Bought by Many is an award-winning pet insurance provider, leading the way in creating better insurance products, improving prices and delivering exceptional customer experience.
Launched in 2017, Bought by Many was the first UK pet insurer to offer online form-free claims. It designed its policies using over 40,000 pieces of feedback from pet owners. This has allowed the company to create pet insurance policies with brand new features and which fix things that people hate about other policies.
In 2019, thousands of pet owners voted Bought by Many the Most Trusted Pet Insurance Provider at the Moneywise Customer Service Awards.
Location: London
Founded: 2017
No. of employees: 30
Founders: Chaz Englander, Owen Turner-Major, Rosie Dallas
Fat Llama is the trusted marketplace for renting almost anything. It gives people access to the items they need, when they need them, without needing to buy, saving people money and saving on waste. On Fat Llama you can rent anything from cameras to campervans, with Fat Llama providing a guarantee of up to £25,000 per item.
A peer-to-peer marketplace at heart, Fat Llama has recently begun to offer its technology and insurance backed guarantee to large retailers outside of its marketplace to help them get into rental. It has recently announced a partnership with John Lewis and almost all top retailers in the UK are looking to partner with Fat Llama and get into the sharing economy.
Fat Llama raised $13.1m from investors including Blossom Capital, Atomico, Y Combinator and Greylock Partners. Its Series A funding was announced in 2018.
Location: London
Founded: 2017
No. of employees: 51-100
Founders: Alex Buttle, Harry Jones, Tom Leathes
Motorway is an online marketplace that connects used car sellers to buyers. By removing the traditional barriers between car sellers and the trade, Motorway makes used car transactions faster, easier, and more cost-efficient.
Motorway’s smart technology price comparison website allows customers to compare instant offers from online car buyers and dealers, select their best offer, and sell fast.
The platform also provides a fast and efficient way for car buying firms to buy the best-used car stock without hiring middlemen.
In addition, users can compare headline offers, read buyer reviews, fees and collection options to find their best deal. By comparing offers, consumers can get up to £1,000 more than going direct to one buyer. Motorway has delivered over £130m in completed car sales since founding and is currently turning over more than £1m worth of sales every day.
Cybersecurity
Location: London
Founded in: 2013
No. of employees: c.70
Founder: Dr James Smith, Dr Tom Robinson, Dr Adam Joyce
Elliptic empowers financial institutions and crypto businesses to confidently manage risk and meet AML regulatory compliance worldwide. Elliptic’s pioneering suite of solutions is used by over 100 crypto businesses and financial institutions worldwide to manage their financial crime risk when dealing with crypto assets. These companies rely on Elliptic to screen billions of dollars in transactions every day and to analyse them for links to illicit activity including money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and other financial crimes. Founded in 2013, the company was established to support the mainstream adoption of crypto assets. In 2019 it raised $23m in a Series B round.
Founded: 2017
No. of employees: 258
Founder: Vishal Marria https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalmarria/
Quantexa uses its predictive analytics platform to protect and detect complex financial crime for the financial services, corporate and government sectors. Quantexa has recently closed its Series C investment round after a sustained period of growth during the pandemic. Quantexa’s solution makes a real difference to society by supercharging ability of banks and law enforcements to detect criminal activity in the financial system.
Location: London
Founded in: 2013
No. of employees: 101-250
Founders: Edward Bishop, Thomas Adams, Tim Sadler
Tessian’s human layer security platform empowers people to work safely, without security getting in their way by automatically securing all human-digital interactions with the enterprise, fulfilling its mission to keep the world’s most sensitive data and systems private and secure.
Using stateful machine learning to analyse historical email data, Tessian’s parallax engine can predict, “At this point in time, for this user, does this email look like a security threat?”
Tessian protects leading enterprises across the financial, legal and technology sectors from being compromised by spear phishing, data loss, misdirected emails, unauthorised emails and other non-compliant threats executed by humans.
Fintech
Location: London
Founded in: 2014
No. of employees: 51-100
Founders: Freddy Macnamara, James Billingham
Cuvva designs simple, flexible car and travel insurance services that connect customers directly with insurers and provides comprehensive cover within minutes. Cuvva has sold over a million policies since 2016 and its insurance services offer comprehensive cover, as well as 24/7 customer support, within minutes enabling users to use a new kind of pay-as-you drive and travel insurance that is fast, easy, and friendly.
Location: London
Founded: 2015
No. of employees: 251-500
Founder: George Bevis
Tide is a business banking platform which provides mobile-firm banking services for small and medium-sized enterprises, with the aim of saving them time and money on their banking and admin.
Tide enables businesses to set up an FSCS-protected bank account and get instant access to various financial services, including automated bookkeeping and integrated invoicing.
Having raised over $114m, Tide plans to achieve an 8 per cent market share by 2023. It currently has over 240,000 customers and a market share of 4.1 per cent.
Location: London
Founded: 2018
No. of employees: 11-50
Founder: Peter Briffett, Portman Wills
Wagestream is a fintech start-up that is on a mission to bring better financial health to workers across the globe. By putting workplace data into the hands of workers, Wagestream’s financial solutions allow employees to track, budget, save and stream their earnings, all in real time. Wagestream unlocks the constraints of the monthly pay cycle and eradicates the debt issues and financial stress many workers face between pay days by giving them instant access to their earned wages.
Wagestream was founded with a social purpose and its early charity investors include Fair by Design, Joseph Rowntree, Barrow Cadbury Trust, and Big Society Capital, all social impact charities committed to improving the financial wellbeing of everyday people.
The company has raised over $79m and customers number over 300,000 from a range of businesses including Brewdog, Honest Burgers, Rentokil and five NHS trusts.
Logistics
Location: London
Founded in: 2017
No. of employees: 30
Founders: Steve Domin, Tom Bates
Duffel offers the best API to sell flights on the internet. Founded in 2017, London-based Duffel is powering the next generation of online businesses transforming travel through the most powerful and intuitive online platform to search, book and manage flights.
Location: Cambridge
Founded: 2017
No. of employees: 15
Founders: George Grey and Ian Drew
Former Arm and Linaro executives created Foundries to be “Android for the Internet of Things (IoT)”. It enables companies to build secure, connected, over the air updatable IoT and edge devices using their platform – from the smallest sensors to gateway and edge devices.
Location: London
Founded: 2014
No. of employees: 25
Founder: Yodit Stanton
OpenSensors provides a next-generation smart building management system. Large companies use them to get the most out of their workspace and have turned to them during COVID to help employees safely return to work with track and trace systems, safe social distancing features, and more.
Location: London
Founded: 2016
No. of employees: 30
Founders: Jenna Brown and Fabian Blaicher
Shipamax is a plug and play toolkit for back-office automation in logistics. Its core product connects to any email inbox or unstructured data source and automatically extracts data from emails and attachments in real-time – outputting a clean, structured feed via API. It enables organisations to accelerate the next generation of supply chain by providing support as a long-term partner.
Medical/health
Location: Cambridge
No. of employees: 70 employees
Founded: 2012
Founder: Dr Tom Weaver
Congenica is a digital health company enabling genomic medicine with the world’s leading clinical decision support platform for the rapid analysis and interpretation of genomic data. Their platform can analyse the entire human genome to collect trillions of data points, then interpret and understand every detail to allow enhanced diagnostics.
Location: Edinburgh, UK
Founded: 2015
No. of employees: >40
Founders: Christopher McCann, Stewart Whiting
When the founders of Current Health started in 2015, they didn’t have any hardware or medical device experience. But they did have a goal. They envisioned a future where you didn’t need to wait for a health problem to arise before getting healthcare. They saw a future where healthcare came to you.
Current has now built a global and diverse team that spans Edinburgh, London, and San Francisco and is united by one thing: the chance to use their skills to change the world for the better.
The business is leading the way in how to predict disease and working on how to recommend a specific intervention, ushering in a new, better era of health. Current now helps physicians, nurses, and patients at some of the top health systems in the world. Late in 2019, Current announced its $11.5m Series A funding round, led by MMC Ventures.
In 2020 Current announced a partnership with Mayo Clinic in the fight against Covid-19 using AI to detect symptoms and disease severity in patients. It has also partnered with American pharmaceutical company, Dexcom, to integrate continuous glucose monitoring into its platform for the treatment of diabetes.
Location: London
No. of employees: 135
Founded: 2013
Founders: Tania Boler and Alex Asseilly
Elvie’s mission is to improve women’s lives through smarter technology.
Its first product, the Elvie Trainer, is an award-winning app-connected trainer that helps women strengthen the pelvic floor via fun, five-minute workouts. It is now available via the NHS Supply Chain. Elvie’s credibility is backed up by more than 12 awards for innovation and design, including the prestigious CES Innovation Award, IDA Design Award and Red Dot Award.
Its second innovation, Elvie Pump, is the world’s first silent hands-free, wearable breast pump, making it possible for new mothers to pump anytime, anywhere. The Elvie Pump has received international praise and is currently displayed at the London Design Museum. In 2019 it won the “wearable design of the year” category in the Dezeen Awards and was listed as one of the Times 100 best inventions.
Location: Cambridge
No. of employees: 30
Founded: 2016
Founder: Dr Darrin Disley
Mogrify has developed a direct cellular conversion technology, which makes it possible to enhance existing stem-cell forward reprogramming methods or bypass development pathways altogether, effecting a direct transdifferentiation between a mature cell type to another mature cell type. Mogrify is deploying this platform to engineer an evergreen and scalable source of cell types that exhibit efficacy and safety profiles necessary to transform the development of therapies for diseases with a high unmet clinical need.
Location: London
Founded: 2018
No. of employees: 10
Founders: Rayna Patel, Georgina Kirby
Vinehealth’s platform uses behavioural science and AI to improve the quality of life and survival of cancer patients through highly personalised patient support. The Vinehealth mobile app allows patients to track, understand and optimise their care, supporting them to feel in control and better self-manage, as well as to communicate crucial information back to their care team. Through this, the platform generates rich real-world data to represent the voice of patients in healthcare delivery and drug development.
Transport
Location: Macclesfield
Founded: Jan 2017
No. of employees: 4
Founders: George Richardson and Ian Forde-Smith
AeroCloud’s mission is to become the largest provider of operation automation software for the small to medium-sized airport globally.
It started back in 2017 by understanding the most pressing problems faced by airports in its network and worked to solve complex problems through a co-creation model.
Its predictive AI, resource management and planning modules now hold together operations across multiple different departments in airports around the world.
CTO Ian Forde-Smith created one of the first airport operational databases, while CEO George Richardson was one of the fastest ever successful applicants to the US Federal Government purchasing schedule, gaining AeroCloud vital traction to speed up the complex government procurement process.
Location: Oxford
No. of employees: 180
Founded: in 2009
Founder: Dr Tim Woolmer
YASA has developed small, light, high-power electric motors for the electrification of the automotive and aerospace industries.
The company was selected by Ferrari to provide the motors for the SF90 Stradale, the company’s first hybrid production series supercar, and is working with Rolls Royce on a new all-electric plane that is seeking to world speed record for this category.
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