Founder: Nelson Sivalingam
Founded: September 2012 (launched January 2013)
Website: www.oneminutelondon.com

“See it, like it, book it”. This is the mission statement of One Minute London, the capital’s first bookable video guide enabling users to view the capital’s restaurants, bars and clubs, prior to booking. Having spent evenings at “disappointing” restaurants that didn’t match up to their “marketing fluff”, 25 year-old Nelson Sivalingam, a film and video production specialist, wanted to create another way to scout out good places to eat and drink in London.

In January 2013 with the support of a StartUp Loan, he launched a platform which did just that. Simply described as “like watching a movie trailer and deciding whether you want to watch the film or not”, the site offers a new way for businesses to convert visitors into bookings; an idea which has already caught the approval of several leading venues. Within 18 months, the company has signed up the likes of Buddha Bar, Hix, Hyatt Group, and Be At One, and is currently generating over 1,500 bookings a month. Having featured in the Evening Standard as the “future of food”, over the next 12 months the video guide intends to secure additional investment, diversify into hotels and experiences, and expand into two other major cities.

Founder: Oliver Murphy
Founded: June 2012
Website: www.reviveaphone.com

One of the youngest entrepreneurs ever to secure investment on Dragons’ Den (and the youngest entrepreneur on our list), 21-year old Oliver Murphy caught the eye of Kelly Hoppen – along with £50,000 of her cash – after demonstrating his innovative do-it-yourself water damage recovery kit for smartphones, which has the user immerse their phone in a bag of chemicals to remove impurities that damage the circuitry. Boosted by the television exposure, Reviveaphone – which was started with just £400 from Murphy’s mum’s airing cupboard – has been going from strength to strength ever since.

Now selling around 3,000 units per month in the UK alone, the start-up is currently closing deals with distributors to put the kits in retail stores for the first time, a move which is set to significantly boost sales for the business. In addition to its UK success, Reviveaphone is garnering a strong international following; the start-up has begun to sell kits to large retail clients in New Zealand, South Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East, with more countries and regions planned. Murphy plans to expand the Reviveaphone brand to cover general phone repairs, recycling and insurance over the next year as the company consolidates its growing status in the UK and internationally.

Founders: Serge Taborin and Tim Bichara
Founded: December 2012
Website: www.qappmobile.com

Anyone who has been to a city centre bar on a Friday or Saturday night will know the feeling of standing at the bar, £10 note in hand, desperately jostling with other customers to grab the attention of harried-looking staff. Serge Taborin and Tim Bichara’s new start-up Q App is the frontrunner in a wave of tech firms (including Bar Pass) which claim to eliminate this hassle once and for all; customers can place their drinks order and pay through their smartphones, receiving a notification when their order is ready to collect.

The app’s potential utility is self-evident, and with 17 venue owners – including the Royal Albert Hall – and thousands of users signed up already, Q App is quickly gathering steam. Almost every bar and entertainment venue could potentially benefit from the increased efficiency and custom the Q App model brings, and with venture capital backing secured, the start-up is set to build upon its leading position and grow significantly over the next year.

Founders: Dana Zingher and Levi Young
Founded: October 2012
Website: www.enclothed.co.uk

With ever-sophisticated retail and customer service technology, the rise of the ‘online personal stylist’ for fashion in recent years has been a dramatic one – but most services are still squarely targeted at a female audience. Former CapGemini IT consultant Dana Zingher, 25, and 27-year-old ex-journalist Levi Young’s high-end personal shopper Enclothed is starting to plug this gap in the market by targeting fashion-conscious, time-starved men. Users create a profile when they sign up, detailing their size, preferences and what clothes they are after, with Enclothed’s team of stylists hand-picking three distinct outfits tailored to these preferences.

The outfits are then sent directly to the consumer’s door, who can try on the outfits – they pay for what they like, with Enclothed picking up the items they don’t. The site currently has around 850 primarily ABC1 male customers, a figure which is quickly growing boosted by press coverage from the likes of Time Out magazine. While Zingher and Young face competition from US brand Trunk and London-based The Chapar, the founders plan to quickly expand across Europe in 2014 as they continue to invest in their market-leading technology and drive a quiet revolution in how men buy their clothes.

Founder: Avin Rabheru
Founded: October 2013 (launched November 2013)
Website: www.housekeep.com

With five years’ experience working at Smedvig Capital and as an angel investor in his own right, backing businesses including Streetcar, Kabbee, Crowdcube and Fab.com, Housekeep founder Avin Rabheru was in a better position than most to come up with an idea for a new tech business set to disrupt a large, existing market.

Rabheru soon realised that the home cleaning market in the UK ticks all the boxes; with an estimated market size of £4bn, 90% of home cleaning is arranged directly between cleaner and customer, presenting an opportunity for a cleaning marketplace connecting 100% insured and vetted cleaners with customers at fixed prices. Launched just a few months ago, Housekeep solves problems in the market for both cleaners and consumers by giving busy professionals in central London access to reliably excellent service whilst allowing cleaners to market themselves to a huge potential audience. With a growing userbase and significant venture capital investment from some major European players, Housekeep is hot on the heels of Startups 100 rival Hassle, with plans to really clean up commercially in 2014.

Founder: Andrew Dennison
Founded: May 2011 (launched October 2011)
Website: coconutgrass.com

Specialising in fun and exciting personalised gifts at affordable prices, Coconutgrass is a great example of what can be achieved when selling through an online marketplace. Launched by 31 year-old Andrew Dennison, the home ware design business which makes art prints, cushions, tea towels and aprons, has become an e-commerce favourite with over 20,000 customers to date; success which it points to marketplace website Notonthehighstreet.com. Accepted as a seller on the site in 2011, over the last three years the product design start-up has really taken off, earning the title of Notonthehighstreet’s ‘Enterprise Plus Seller’ for being one of its highest grossing group of sellers, and granted the site’s award for ‘Start up Success’.

With all of its designs made in the UK, the gift business has hit on a growing demand for British-made goods and its success has not just been limited to the web. Since starting to develop its trade arm in early 2013, its products have been stocked in over 20 bricks-and-mortar stores and it plans to build further relationships with retailers over the coming year. Dennison says that the next 12 months are “extremely exciting,” with a new studio on the horizon to “gear up for further growth”.

Founder: Brett Akker
Founded: June 2011 (launched August 2012)
Website: lovespace.co.uk

With all the talk of saving space by moving your local digital files on to remote servers via the cloud, it’s a wonder nobody has thought of applying the same principle to physical goods – that is, until now. LOVESPACE’s unique service provides by-the-box goods storage which is collected, free of charge, direct from your door. With prices starting from £1.95 per month per box, it’s no wonder the young service is seeing rapid uptake amongst UK residents for whom space is at a premium – LOVESPACE has served more than 1,000 customers with 6,000 boxes to date.

The business has also launched an innovative partnership with Mothercare, which allows expecting mothers to defer delivery of their purchases until the baby arrives. With £400,000 investment and experienced entrepreneur Brett Akker behind the business (Akker founded the largest car-sharing club in Europe – Streetcar – which he sold to Zipcar in 2010 to focus on LOVESPACE) and a plan for international expansion into cities such as New York, Berlin and San Francisco, it looks like LOVESPACE will be collecting serious revenues alongside their boxes soon.

Founders: Malachy Guinness and Woody Webster
Founded: June 2013
Website: tutorcruncher.com

As co-founders of Bright Young Things, now the largest tutoring firm in London, Malachy Guinness and Woody Webster were well aware of the difficulty tutors can face trying to keep on top of invoices, scheduling and pupil progress all at once. TutorCruncher is their answer to these problems; an all-in-one management tool for tutors, allowing them to easily create invoices, manage their calendar, write reports that parents can view directly online, and more.

The software is available as an app on iOS and Android devices, allowing tutors to manage their work on the move as well as search and apply for new jobs. With such a laundry-list of useful features combined with a smart usage-based pricing model, it’s hard not to see TutorCruncher as an absolutely essential app for any tutor. – with £50,000 turnover after just a few months of trading, the business has already turned over £50,000 the start-up plans to cement its position in the UK over the next year with a view to quickly targeting the lucrative American market.

Founder: Cordelia Meacher
Founded: March 2012
Website: www.fieldhouseassociates.com

The enterprise landscape in the UK is changing; more and more companies have blurred the boundaries between digital, mobile and tech, and sectors which didn’t even exist 10 years ago are now well-established. It makes sense, then, that a new kind of agency should exist to help this generation of innovative start-ups and venture capital firms reach their potential, and Cordelia Meacher’s FieldHouse Associates does just that.

Ostensibly a PR agency, FieldHouse provides a multi-faceted communications strategy for its clients that focuses on results, not simply coverage – be it for an exit, new funding, or a product launch, the company promises to provide top-level strategic advice with “no hype, no crazy creative, and no way-out promises”. It is an approach which has seen leading names in tech flock to FieldHouse; its clients include businesses such as Somo, Qriously and EVRYTHNG, and investors including Octopus Investments, MMC Ventures, the Angel CoFund and the Accelerator Academy. Meacher says the business is “growing like crazy” with new business every week and two new hires on the horizon – it seems clear FieldHouse has hit upon something big in PR.

Founders: Ry Morgan and Antony Ganjou
Founded: October 2010 (launched November 2011)
Website: www.pleasecycle.com

Making our Startups 100 index for the third year in a row, PleaseCycle’s proposition has continued its growth in popularity amongst employers keen to incentivise their workforce to cycle through the start-up’s ‘BikeMiles’ scheme. Now with around 80 corporate clients including Aegis Group, Bloomberg and JMP, the company has also launched a major new white-label partnership with Halfords, which will see UK consumers earn rewards and track rides through the hardware stores’ own-branded scheme.

Indeed, PleaseCycle’s growth has been such that the founders admit they are struggling to keep up with the exponentially increasing volume of clients and the business is currently in the midst of a £345,000 seed round – which will give the company an impressive post-valuation of £1.7m – to help cope with the burgeoning demand. Alongside its client Aegis Media’s plan to launch PleaseCycle’s service in eight countries globally, the founders are recruiting a German speaker in preparation for PleaseCycle’s first in-house international expansion.