Founders: Jack Horton and Freddie Reid
Founded: October 2012
Website: www.whitesfx.com

Working in the finance and foreign exchange industry at different levels, Jack Horton and Freddie Reid observed that most mainstream foreign exchange firms have a similar feel; often emphasising transactions over customer service, they are also almost exclusively based in the City and hence have a strong association with banking and finance institutions. The duo created Whites FX to offer a fresh approach to this staid market – the Nottingham-based firm has customer service and relationship management built into its very core.

Each new customer is assigned a dedicated ‘dealer’ who will get to know their business inside out, helping them to manage the tricky foreign exchange process in a way which suits them. Added to this, Whites guarantees a better exchange rate for firms than traditional interbank FX services, committing to a level of transparency and cost-effectiveness difficult to find elsewhere. Processing just over £57m through the platform in its first 12 months of trading, Whites is hot on the heels of competitors such as Kantox. Its pioneering business model means it is already profitable and the founders have rapid expansion in sight as they launch an ambitious plan to crack the US market.

Founder: Ryan O’Rorke
Founded: August 2012
Website: www.flavourly.com

Featured in our 2013 list, Edinburgh-based Flavourly is a food delivery business with a twist: the start-up delivers members a selection of the finest independently-produced artisan British foods to their door for a flat monthly fee. It makes our list again following a super-fast equity crowdfunding deal, raising £116,000 in under 24 hours on the Angels Den platform. Admittedly, it had already secured the interest of 15 investors at a ‘speed funding’ event in London, but nevertheless, it ultimately exceeded its target with £153,542 from 13 of the interested parties.

This is not the only thing the business run by 24-year-old Ryan O’Rorke has achieved in the last period – having grown to 4,100 paying subscribers, the business has turned over more than £210,000 since November, with £72,000 net profit. It was also named as a Shell LiveWIRE winner last year and secured a £34,000 grant from the Scottish EDGE Awards. As a now well-established champion of independent British food producers everywhere, Flavourly is set to turn its attention to the burgeoning craft beer market, launching a craft beer club based on the same principles as the food business. All this makes the magical £1m turnover a realistic target for the year.

Founders: Alice Hastings-Bass and Rebecca Glenapp
Founded: April 2011
Website: www.lux-fix.com

Completing a hat-trick of appearances on Startups 100, this hand-picked fashion site for time-poor professionals has continued its remarkable worldwide rise to prominence in 2014. Now with 30,000 members browsing products from more than 120 designer partners on the main site, LUX FIX is also generating revenue through a new white label arm, operating fashion e-shops for The Telegraph, Evening Standard and Independent newspapers.

Its multi-faceted revenue model will see it generate turnover of around £1m in 2014 – extremely impressive for a formerly bootstrapped start-up of less than three years old. After initially growing organically, LUX FIX is now set for boosted growth having attracted recent angel funding from some major players in the tech sector – including Skyscanner’s Barry Smith, former Last.fm COO Spencer Hyman and Mr & Mrs. Smith’s Tamara Heber-Percy. With celebrity and magazine endorsements on both sides of the Atlantic, a scalable revenue model and an attractive lead generation model for fashion brands, LUX FIX is well on its way to becoming a household name.

Founders: Dean Fankhauser, Vincent Thome and Anton Meryl Nithianandan
Founded: November 2011
Website: www.nuji.com

Nuji made our 2013 list for the rich potential of its ambitious proposition, which is to build the internet’s largest department store with social and personalisation built into its very core. Its public wishlist system allows people to create, follow and track lists of their favourite products, with users then offered discounts using a smart affiliate model. Approximately 200,000 shoppers now use the site, a number which is growing all the time as Nuji continues to post extremely impressive month-on-month growth figures of 20%.

As you might expect, this kind of performance has not gone unnoticed by investors, and in March of this year the site raised $2m in seed funding from the Accelerator Group, Seedcamp and others, helping to finance the launch of a new iOS app the following month. This app will be the start of what the founders cryptically refer to as a “mobile strategy that is unlike anything else”; time will tell whether the site becomes the next Amazon, but its excellent performance over the past year is certainly hugely promising.

Founders: Michael Wood and Alexis Prenn
Founded: August 2010 (launched February 2011)
Website: www.receipt-bank.com

Sole traders and small business owners will all be aware of the painstaking data entry and frustration that comes hand-in hand with logging business expenses. Founder Michael Wood was trying to find a solution to this himself when he came across a company called Receipt Farm – the service allowed businesses to post in their paper expense receipts, which were scanned in and added to a cloud account. When Receipt Farm decided to shut down before Wood could complete his trial period, he decided to take matters into his own hands and buy the whole operation outright, and Receipt Bank was born.

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform automatically integrates receipt data into mainstream accounting software for a monthly fee, saving small firms countless hours of manual entry. The proposition’s appeal is self-evident, and with 20,000 current users, more than £1m in angel funding, and a pace of growth regularly exceeding 3% per week, it is clear the consumer base agrees. The next 12 months will see Receipt Bank hatch an attempt to crack the lucrative North American market as the founders continue to deliver on the company’s rich potential.

Founder: Amelia Humfress
Founded: December 2012
Website: www.steer.me

Even someone with the most cursory knowledge of the enterprise landscape in the UK will know that the tech sector is enjoying a vogue – to put it in the mildest terms. The surge of the sector has meant people with coding and app development knowledge are in increasingly high demand, but as Amelia Humfress discovered when trying to code herself, in the absence of a specialist degree people are often left trying to learn to code themselves.

In response to this, the young entrepreneur set up Steer, which offers simple five-day courses in front and back-end web design for £1,500 and is a firm proponent of the mantra that learning to code can be simple. Backed by £100,000 seed funding, the start-up has already taught over 350 people to code since launch, generating £174,000 in the process – with over £81,000 net profit. With 2014 the government’s official ‘Year of Code’ – the young start-up expects to have a landmark 2014 as it increases these figures fourfold organically.

Founders: Martin Freeman and Rebecca Kench
Founded: July 2011
Website: www.properteco.co.uk

Since making our 2013 list, the safe building specialist has continued to refine its focus on removing dangerous radioactive radon from older buildings – long-term exposure can seriously damage health, but the danger of radon in buildings was widely overlooked until propertECO offered its solution. propertECO has focused on acquiring new clients in its second year, focusing especially on the banking sector – due to the way banks are constructed, dangerously high radon concentrations are often found within basement vaults, representing a significant opportunity for the fast-growing specialist company.

In addition to its radon remediation contracting work, the start-up has signed a deal with a US manufacturer which will see it become the first UK distributor for a range of radon testing and removal devices, selling the products through their website and directly to trade customers, as well as recently founding the UK Radon Association, a six-strong trade association aimed at raising awareness of the dangers of radon amongst UK companies. With just two employees but a predicted revenue for 2014 of £745,000, propertECO is set for more growth as it continues to promote awareness of the dangers of radon and grow its reach in the next 12 months.

Founders: Alastair Paterson and James Chappell
Founded: May 2011
Website: www.digitalshadows.com

Since being featured in our list last year, cyber-intelligence firm Digital Shadows has continued to grow in popularity among its prestigious, blue-chip target market, generating impressive revenues which look set to break the £1m barrier in 2014. Its unique set of automated language-processing algorithms sort 80 million sources of information in real-time, identifying threats to the security and reputation of Digital Shadows’ clients at an early stage. For all the business benefits of the cloud, mobile and social media, the company has firmly positioned itself as a solution to mitigate the risks with a round-the-clock intelligence service.

Early breakthroughs for the business were in part attributed to it securing a place in Canary Wharf-based Fintech Innovation Lab London, which is hosted at Level39 and gave the founders instant access to some of the major banks during the trial phase. Backed by its growing list of customers, which now include some of the largest banks in the world, Digital Shadows is set for an ambitious 2014, as founders Alastair Paterson (32) and James Chappell (39) plan to double the size of their team, release their new SearchLight Client portal and launch in the US for the first time. Not bad for a business started with £20,000 of savings.

Founder: Michael Devlin
Founded: May 2012 (launched August 2012)
Website: core150.com

Michael Devlin’s start-up was recognised in 2013 as its shaker bottle product began to gather steam amongst consumers and distributors alike. The patented design allows users to measure out their protein and other supplements in the exact quantities they need, eliminating any guesswork and the health problems associated with over-consumption of powder supplements. Since then the bootstrapped start-up has continued to grow in popularity with members of the public. With contractual agreements totalling £2.1m to date, Core 150 has sewn up distribution deals in Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, the UAE, USA and parts of Europe, meaning the business is already on its way to becoming a global force.

The B2C arm of the business is in similarly rude health, with GNC UK & US, Holland & Barrett and Amazon amongst Core 150’s numerous retail partners. Devlin recently launched a new meal management system as part of Core 150’s wider strategy to become a major player in the fitness and nutrition market; this ambitious plan for growth coupled with a fanatical online following means Core 150 is set to seriously shake up its sector in the next year.

Founders: Joe and Sam Middleton
Founded: June 2012
Website: www.thechapar.com

Business doesn’t get much more personal than this father-son run, unique, shopping service. The Chapar is an e-commerce solution to the fashion conscious man’s hatred for shopping – filling a gap in the market that father Joe Middleton discovered after years of experience in the industry (Joe worked his way up to president for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Levi’s). Each client gets a team of stylists that cater outfits to the specific man’s taste, job, size and lifestyle; the clothing is then sent to the client, he chooses what to keep and the rest is returned for free.

Sam  emphasises that personalisation is their key USP; whereas most e-commerce solutions to people’s inability (or undesirability) to shop are geared towards the mass, The Chapar is for the individual man. Sam and Joe have ambitious expansion plans for the next 12 months; and with a projected turnover of over a million, brands like DIESEL, Ben Sherman and Kurt Geiger on board, and more than 2,000 customers already – it appears that their personal touch is working.