Founders: Darren Westlake and Luke Lang
Founded: 2011
Website: www.crowdcube.com

Making our Startups 100 list for a record third time in a row is some feat, but Darren Westlake and Luke Lang’s equity crowdfunding pioneer is richly deserving of this milestone. Launched as one of the first such platforms in the UK, Crowdcube has grown into a true leader in the sector and a byword for UK crowdfunding in general. 2013 was another landmark year for the company, as the founding duo oversaw £12.4m raised across 54 separate successful pitches; a staggering increase of 562% from 2012, and more than the platform had facilitated in its entire existence up to that point.

This year has also seen Crowdcube team up with Strathtay Ventures to launch a new Venture Fund – the first of its kind, it allows Crowdcube’s army of armchair investors to participate in a professionally managed fund backing the platform’s array of listed businesses. Already with a base in Sweden, Westlake and Lang are also taking Crowdcube truly international in 2014, currently setting up in Brazil, Spain, New Zealand, Italy and Poland. Not content with all this, Westlake and Lang have revealed the existence of a new product (“currently under wraps”) which will be launching in the next two months. Watch this space!

Founders: Adam Taylor and Lexi Tamasan
Founded: January 2011
Website: www.petshop.co.uk

Listed at number 18 in Startups 100 2013, Adam Taylor and Lexi Tamasan’s innovative pet food delivery business has seen impressive growth in the last 12 months; having hit their turnover target of £3m in 2013 (with £250,000 net profit), they confidently expect to grow this to £5m in 2014. The start-up allows customers to order discounted pet products online (it currently offers savings on over 10,000 pet supplies), and its innovative ‘Bottomless Bowl’ subscription service ensures those signed up never run out of pet food again.

The founders experienced a breakthrough moment this year when PetShop.co.uk was approached and awarded a £250,000 grant from the EU-backed Rural Growth Network, which will be used to launch PetShop into the lucrative European pet food market – with an estimated market size of £30bn, the potential for growth is huge. PetShop.co.uk will also launch its own brand dog food this year and invest in its infrastructure to ensure its incredible rate of growth can continue.

Founder: Anneka Chauhan
Founded: August 2012
Website: www.i-stayput.com

It’s not surprising that i-stay; the “bag strap that stays put”, has featured in the Startups 100 for the second time given its rising position in the UK’s luggage market. Launched two years ago after founder Anneka Chauhan, a 2013 Young Gun, spotted a commercial opportunity for ‘non-slip’ replacement luggage straps and laptop bags, the company has attained strong growth in Britain and overseas. Within the last 12 months, it has signed a global IT distributor to its board for UK markets and has opened up several new channels with distributors in Canada, America, Sweden, Norway, and Demark. Trade is not the only area where the chiropractor-approved bag strap business has seen growth, and it now boasts six-figure revenues and a team of 16 employees.

The brand’s detachable webbed bag straps that spread the weight across the user’s shoulder, whilst minimising “the usual aches and pains associated with shoulder bags” have certainly struck a chord with users and reviewers alike; i-stay has featured on the pages of Computer Weekly, Daily Express, Business Traveller, and the Daily Mail, to name but a few. Aged just 27, Chauhan has big plans for the company and wants it to have a presence in all major countries over the next year.

Founder: Debbie Wosskow
Founded: October 2011
Website: www.lovehomeswap.com

Since making our 2013 list, serial entrepreneur and investor Debbie Wosskow’s holiday home-swapping service Love Home Swap has seen a real surge in growth. Differentiating itself from the standard peer-to-peer rental model used by its competitors, Love Home Swap offers users the option to swap and rent properties as well as using its unique points system to earn credits for allowing people to stay in your home whilst you’re away (points can be cashed in to rent properties for free). Capitalising on its USP – the site has grown its index to 54,000 luxury homes in more than 150 countries across the globe – six times as many as at the start of 2013. Through Love Home Swap’s service, members save an average of £2,202 on hotel bills per trip, so this expanding popularity should come as no surprise.

Backed by a total of £2.7m funding (as well as the recent acquisition of a leading competitor 1stHomeExchange) and with exponentially increasing turnover, Woskow plans to go head-to-head with US competitor Airbnb across 2014, growing the site’s userbase to more than 100,000 members and firmly establishing Love Home Swap as the world’s largest online travel club.

Founders: Adam Pikett, Victoria Walton, Daniel Rhys Jones and Luke Pikett
Founded: April 2011
Website: www.sportpursuit.com

SportPursuit’s place on our 2014 Startups 100 is well deserved – the business has been on our radar almost since inception, reaching the finals of our Young Start-Up of the Year 2012 award after being covered in Just Started in 2011. Adam Pikett and Victoria Walton’s start-up can lay claim to being the UK’s first-ever flash sales site for sports gear, giving its members access to leading brands at “why not” prices.

Since starting just three years ago, the brand has seen phenomenal growth, with an eye-watering turnover, a 43-strong team and one million registered members, a hugely impressive achievement for a young digital company. With more than 600 brands signed up to the site, SportPursuit’s model is proving a hit with consumers and brands alike. In the next 12 months the flash site has plans to double its member base, it’s clear we will be hearing a lot more about SportPursuit in the coming months.

Founders: Bertie Stephens and Adel Louertatani
Founded: March 2011
Website: www.flubit.com

Valued at $50m in its soon-to-be-announced Series A funding round, we placed Flubit at number 13 last year, despite it having launched less than a year earlier. Since then, the Tech City-based e-commerce start-up has continued to deliver on its rich potential and looks set to make another step-change imminently. The online shopping service uses its relationships with hundreds of retailers to give consumers the best possible offer on anything they are looking to buy online, be it a laptop, book, toy or anything else.

It is a model which works for consumers, retailers and Flubit itself. Consumers get a lower price, retailers get better conversion rates and Flubit makes a commission on every sale. Having raised $2.75m seed funding from business angels and turned over a seriously impressive £2.5m in 2013, founders 27-year-old Bertie Stephens and Adel Louertatani, 48, have today disclosed a major commercial partnership with Barclays. The deal will see it able to access a million active users of Barclaycard’s bespoke offers. A Growing Business Young Gun, Stephens is confident the deal will propel 35-employee Flubit to new heights and told one publication he would like to see the business resembling Amazon in five years – watch this space!

Founder: Logan Naidu
Founded: July 2012
Website: www.dartmouthpartners.com

Recruitment consultancies are 10-a-penny in the UK, but Dartmouth Partners offers something different – the fast-growing company made our list last year for its unique proposition, which focuses on developing exceptional talent from campus level upwards rather than trying to amass a pool of talent later on.

Founder Logan Naidu simply says he spotted a “gap in the market” when establishing Dartmouth, and the figures back this up; turning over £1.8m last year through its growing portfolio of clients – which include several well-known international banks – Dartmouth is predicted to more than double this to around £4m in 2014. International expansion is already on the cards, with Dartmouth planning to open its first foreign office in early 2015; just like its own pool of graduates, we expect great things of Dartmouth Partners.

Founders: Daniel Land and Jeremy Sanders
Founded: April 2011
Website: www.cocodimama.co.uk

Frustrated by a lack of great, quick breakfast and lunchtime options in London, City workers Daniel Land and Jeremy Sanders decided to capitalise upon an opportunity to create the capital’s “first quick service Italian restaurant”; an idea which would see them at the fore of a start-up success story. Launched in April 2011, Coco Di Mama, listed for the second time in the top 10 of the Startups 100, has quickly gained a stellar reputation among London foodies and now serves its delicious Italian delicacies to over 4,000 customers a day from 6:30am to 5:00pm. Having started out with an initial store in the capital’s prestigious Fleet Street, Land and Sanders have seen the company double in size each year with additional sites in Monument, St Pauls, and London Wall and 45 employees now on the books.

With more stores in the pipeline over the next 12 months starting with a new site near Liverpool Street, the Italian mini-chain is keen to retain its popularity with City workers and counts success as having “created a loved brand that customers associate with quality and great service.”

Founder: Graeme Reid
Founded: January 2012
Website: www.mac-l.com

Reaching the top 10 for the second year running, the service-led maritime consultancy has continued to make impressive strides as a challenger brand in what is a notoriously closed sector. The firm now has more than 90 global customers in the oil, gas and renewables markets including multinationals such as BP Exploration, Centrica, Total and Chevron; if founder Graeme Reid ever worried about being taken seriously by major players, it’s safe to say he can put those fears to bed.

Whilst Reid admits it is challenging getting customers to change supplier in a market known for being resistant to change, the firm’s £3.5m predicted turnover for the year ending June 2014 paints a rosier picture, with MAC having secured £750,000 worth of work in January alone. The company will focus on building its lucrative Gulf of Mexico client base across the next 12 months, as well as developing the burgeoning social arm of the business – raising money for safety awareness initiatives and helping severely disabled children.

Founder: Nigel Verdon
Founded: January 2012
Website: www.thecurrencycloud.com

If someone in the know was asked about the major challenger brands in the international money exchange market, it’s likely the names Kantox (also making this year’s list), Transferwise, MedBank and Sofort might spring to mind. All of these successful payments firms have one thing in common – their transactions are powered by The Currency Cloud. The start-up operates a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) international currency conversion platform, taking the hassle out of complex international money transfers by offering its clients an all-in-one automated service. Unlike the opaque terms of traditional foreign exchange providers, the ‘Payment Engine’ fully discloses the price the client pays, the market price and the price The Currency Cloud itself pays, offering a level of transparency unrivalled anywhere else on the market.

Since launch, the platform has seen extremely impressive growth – the number of transactions has increased twelvefold year-on-year, and The Currency Cloud now has more than 125 customers facilitating payments for around 50,000 end users. The start-up’s remarkable success has not gone unnoticed by the venture capital community – across 2012, the business raised more than $9m, and in April of this year completed a $10m Series B funding round led by existing investors. Now transacting over $4m monthly, it’s no surprise that The Currency Cloud is our highest new entry!