Founder: Joni Farthing
Founded: July 2012 (launched October 2012)
Website: www.womenoutsidethebox.co.uk

Founder Joni Farthing came up with the concept for Women Outside the Box after experiencing difficulties finding another woman to set up in business with – she realised the stereotype of ‘three guys starting a global brand over a pint’ just didn’t ring true for women. After getting 100 women to a networking breakfast on International Women’s Day in March, Farthing saw the scalability of such an offering and Women Outside the Box’s inaugural festival, held in Bristol last year, attracted more than 1,000 aspiring female entrepreneurs from the area. The young business is currently attempting to raise a round of investment on crowdfunding site Seedrs to hire additional staff and Farthing hopes to launch the festival in other regions of the UK over the next year.

Founder: Dan Riley
Founded: February 2013
Website: www.spearheadinteractive.com

Spearhead Interactive’s model is almost unique in the web development sector as they can provide 3D elements for almost any business, educational institution or public sector website in the world, ranging from product demonstrations and assembly tutorials to virtual reality environments. Founder Dan Riley says the potential of the company’s offering to assist businesses is virtually endless; Spearhead’s technology can demonstrate the intricacies of an electrical circuit or plumbing system but also has the ability to generate up to 12 square miles of explorable virtual terrain. Spearhead’s clients to date have included biometric security systems manufacturer iEvo and double glazing consultants The Consultancy and Riley says discussions are ongoing with a number of other high-profile customers. Over the next year the company will continue to re-invest its earnings into research and development and plans to grow its portfolio of work in order to further demonstrate the technology’s wide potential to clients.

Founders: Dean Frankhauser and Vincent Thome
Founded: November 2011
Website: www.nuji.com

As a teenager looking for new music on Amazon, co-founder Dean Fankhauser regularly used the social shopping element of the site, where users can view similar albums bought by shoppers when browsing a music page. It is this element that is essential to the Nuji concept – an online department store built around the twin concepts of personalisation and social shopping, rather than at the periphery. Users create personalised public wishlists from the site’s extensive catalogue (drawn from more than 40,000 retailers) and track similar lists from others, with an affiliate model offering them discounts on their favourite stores. It is a concept with enormous potential; the founders say they are receiving more than 20 emails a day from retailers wishing to work closer with the site and the company is growing at a hugely impressive 100% month-on-month. The duo have ambitious plans to grow the site into the largest department store on the Web.

Founders: Andrew Ibbotson, Matthew Verity and Damian Mitchell
Founded: January 2012
Website: www.trueview.me

There’s no shortage of dating sites, but there’s none quite like TrueView. The founders’ ingenious idea was to harness the popularity of social networking sites to collate data about singletons that paints a true picture of their personalities. The site can then use this inside information to find matches who share tastes and interests. The brand had just been selected to take part in Wayra when they appeared in our Startups 100 2012 list, and have since raised investment from business angels, as well as Wayra and Telefonica, maximising their full £150,000 SEIS allowance. With the app now live, TrueView is gaining traction among smartphone users, already attracting more than 10,000 users. Having bootstrapped early on, the founders have now left their jobs to focus on Trueview full-time and have every faith that their innovative start-up is the future of online dating.

Founder: Tom Walkinson
Founded: July 2011 (launching summer 2013)
Website: www.albaorbital.com

When considering the world’s great space-faring nations, Scotland doesn’t exactly spring to mind – yet Tom Walkinson’s Glasgow-based ‘space burial’ service, the first of its kind in Europe, aims to change that. Housed at Scotland’s Entrepreneurial Spark Incubator and with backing from the government’s new Satellite Applications Catapult, Alba Orbital aims to offer a service whereby customers can have their ashes shot into space on board a micro-satellite – something Walkinson calls the ‘gold standard’ of funeral care. The company is currently in discussions with large distributors in the funeral care industry in preparation for its product launch later this year with what will be ‘very competitive pricing’ compared to Celestis, the US equivalent of the service and Alba’s only worldwide competitor. 

Founder: Virginie Charles-Dear
Founded: January 2012 (launched April 2012)
Website: www.toucanbox.com

When watching a popular children’s programme with her four-year-old daughter, inspiration struck Virginie Charles-Dear as she realised that the ‘everyday household objects’ needed for the activities featured on the show were actually far from commonplace – as she puts it, ‘who saves 24 ice lolly sticks?’. toucanBox solves this issue by offering a six or 12 month subscription service that delivers a complete package of activities for children and toddlers every month, containing all the materials and instructions needed for four different creative DIY projects. Drawing on her previous experience as head of marketing at an ecommerce start-up, Charles-Dear has created a concept that parents and grandparents can easily buy into. The young company has already been backed with a six-figure investment from 20 angel investors including Innocent Drinks founders Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, and toucanBox has plans to scale its offering in the UK in preparation for a launch across the Atlantic. 

Founders: Anthony Ng Monica, Ivor Stankov, Lucy Foster, Andre Rego and Dimitar Kazakov
Founded: August 2012
Website: www.swogo.com

Covered by Startups following its launch last year, Swogo originally offered a direct-to-consumer service giving customers personalised recommendations for tech products by asking them a series of simple questions about what they want from a device. The company’s business model has since undergone a radical pivot; Swogo’s founders are set to re-launch the service as a business-to-business model, allowing its clients to integrate the technology into their online stores to better engage with customers and provide Swogo with a more effective revenue stream. The potential of the company’s unique technology has certainly caught the eye of investors; Swogo has raised a total of £77,500 through two rounds of Seedrs funding, in addition to winning £10,000 in the NACUE Varsity Pitch competition. The new start-up was also the youngest business to be accepted into the prestigious European start-up incubator startupbootcamp Amsterdam, raising a further €15,000 through the scheme. Swogo is currently in talks with several heavy-hitters in the UK retail sphere in preparation for a pilot launch of its new revenue model and has ambitious plans for rapid expansion across international markets following its launch.