Founders: Ben Way and Paul Williams
Founded: October 2010 (launched April 2011)
Website: www.freetricity.net

A start-up co-founded by serial entrepreneur and former Young Gun Ben Way with successful business leader Paul Williams will always have promise, but doubly so when that start-up has a viable plan to provide households across Britain with green energy for free. Listed in our 2013 Startups 100, Freetricity takes advantage of the government’s Feed in Tariff green energy incentive scheme to provide free solar panel installs to householders, who will also see their energy bills drop as a result.

The company embarked upon a £50m drive in September 2013 to provide 1,500 installs a month to those in fuel poverty; Freetricity has worked with housing associations and local authorities including Cross Keys Housing, Woking council and Colchester council as part of this drive. The company has now raised more than £100m in funding from backers including Lombard, Zouk Private Equity and Macquarie Bank – hugely impressive for a start-up, and a clear indication of faith in the Freetricity proposition. Its “revolutionary” new product Flexicell – set to allow businesses and householders to store solar energy for later use – is set to be launched within the next year, an innovation that could potentially propel Freetricity to new heights.

Founders: Kevin Flood and Mike Harty
Founded: September 2011
Website: www.powerlinks.com

Making our list in 2012 and 2013, PowerLinks appears again having seen another year of significant growth for its innovative in-content ad delivery service. Following the success of their affiliate marketing business Shopow, digital advertising seemed like the perfect next step for young entrepreneurs Kevin Flood and Mike Harty. For a pay-as-you go fee – charged either on a pay-as-you-click or per-1,000 ad impressions basis – the PowerLinks service integrates relevant advertisements into the copy of content found on the web, giving its clients the control of an ad server alongside the targeted nature of in-content advertising.

More than 800 websites are now on board with PowerLinks’ innovative model, helping to drive revenues to £850,000 across 2013. The next 12 months are set to be a truly pivotal time for PowerLinks – the founders expect to more than double revenues to £2.1m, through an ambitious plan to roll out across the US whilst consolidating relationships with some ‘big players’ in UK advertising.

Founder: Richard Corbett
Founded: February 2010 (launched May 2012)
Website: www.eyeteasemedia.com

It was impossible not to feature Eyetease Media in our list for the third year in a row; 28-year-old Richard Corbett’s innovative digital taxitop advertising company has continued growing at an explosive pace. Introducing the world’s first adaptive taxitop advertising – in which different ads are shown to passers-by depending on the time of day, year and area of town – would have been impressive enough, but Eyetease has continued innovating, launching an ads-for-access model to roll-out free 4G passenger WiFi (‘CabWiFi’) in black cabs across London.

CabWiFi has proved especially popular with passengers and advertisers alike since its launch, and is the first-ever WiFi network to be approved for use in London’s iconic black cabs. Impressively, Eyetease has been largely self-funded, and its substantial organic revenues are expected to back an ambitious drive for growth in 2014, quadrupling the business’ London footprint to 1,000 cabs, developing new technology, and consolidating a number of high-profile deals with the likes of the world’s largest taxi media company VeriFone. The company will also see the opening of its office in the Big Apple with plans to more than double staff numbers to 12. All of which makes Eyetease well worth hailing as a great British brand.

Founders: Jamie Ward, Mike Blake and Neil Harmsworth
Founded: February 2011
Website: www.payasugym.com

Now making our list for the third year in a row, PayasUgym represents a long-overdue overhaul of the UK gym industry, which has typically been reliant on long-term contracts tying customers to specific locations at extortionate rates. Allowing customers to pay for single-use passes across a network of more than 1,700 gyms across the UK – a third of the entire market – PayasUgym has grown to become the largest gym access programme in the world, with around 150,000 registered users.

The business has significant potential for further growth, with no direct competitor in the UK, but the founders are keeping their feet firmly on the ground – they insist it has not been an easy route to success, with further challenges ahead. PayasUgym plans to launch a new class booking service this year, and with a recent further investment of 1.6m led by Albion and MMC Ventures, the founders are investigating the possibility of launching the successful model internationally in 2015.

Founders: Liam James and Matthew Green
Founded: February 2012 (launched March 2013)
Website: www.theioutlet.com

Demand for iPhones is now higher than ever but, in the current economic climate, not everyone can afford to pay the full RRP or be tied in to an expensive contract; step in iOutlet. Launched in February 2012 by 26 year-old Liam James and 25 year-old Matthew Green, The iOutlet specialises in second hand refurbished iPhones, repairing smartphones in a poor state to add value and bring consumers “the same quality but at a much lower cost”. The simple proposition has managed to tap into the extremely lucrative iPhone market and has even utilised existing e-commerce platform eBay as their main sales channel; keeping costs low and giving the brand access to a bigger market across Europe.

To date, the iPhone reseller has sold to over 10,000 customers in 40 countries and its financials are staggering. Last year the company secured £2.1m revenue and £340,000 profit, and figures are set to nearly double in 2014. Initially started around their day jobs in order to maintain cashflow, James and Green now stand as owners of a multi-million turnover business. Over the next year, the young entrepreneurs intend to launch iOutlet stores in one or two city locations and also plan to build an iPhone recycling arm to lower stock cost prices.

Founder: Ed Bussey
Founded: January 2011
Website: www.quillcontent.com

It was whilst building online clothing retailer Figleaves.com that Ed Bussey came up with the idea for Quill – he realised that online businesses needed to focus on content, not advertising, as a genuine way of engaging their customers and helping them to make purchasing decisions. There are, of course, many publishers out there willing to create content for a fee, but most are limited by the size of their workforce. Quill’s unique solution is to call on a huge pool of talented freelancers across the globe to create on-spec content for websites, allowing the company to take on huge volumes of work.

The Quill platform now comprises more than 2,500 ‘content creators’, taking in writers, editors, graphic designers, photographers and video producers, with the quality of their output vetted by a combination of human editors and built-in automated quality control systems. The start-up has now produced content for more than 80 clients – including LA Fitness, Shop Direct, STA Travel and Reckitt Benckiser – and its unique model has almost unlimited potential for growth. Following £5m recent investment, Quill plans to target Germany and China as its first international markets over the next year, as well as rolling-out a new white-label Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version of the platform soon.

Founders: Timo Schmidt and James Carter
Founded: April 2012
Website: www.gousto.co.uk

Recipe box delivery start-up Gousto has been no stranger to publicity this year – to put it mildly. The founding pair achieved nationwide coverage after the start-up was rebuffed by investors on BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den, only to promptly raise £500,000 from a group of food industry veterans, leading to many touting Gousto as “the one that got away” from the Dragons. Its proposition is a simple yet seductive one; customers order from a list of recipes changed weekly and the ingredients are delivered to their door in exact quantities, allowing people to create restaurant-quality meals whilst eliminating unnecessary wastage.

The shift from offline to online food buying is estimated at 20% each year, and Gousto, with 10,000 customers and growing, is fighting for pole position in this increasingly congested field; our number three entry Hello Fresh is one of their main competitors. Having broken even, Timo Schmidt and James Carter have ambitious plans for Gousto over the next 12 months. In the process of opening a second warehouse and developing its technology platform, the company expects to grow by a “few hundred percent,” a goal that seems more than achievable with their recent additional funding round of $300,000.

Founders: Cassandra Stavrou and Ryan Kohn
Founded: October 2009 (launched October 2011)
Website: www.propercorn.com

Long a staple of overpriced cinema kiosks, popcorn as a pre-packaged snack food has never quite taken off in the same way, but following in the footsteps of previous Startups 100 gourmet popcorn success story Joe & Seph’s, Cassandra Stavrou and Ryan Kohn’s start-up Propercorn looks on its way to changing that. PROPERCORN’s gluten free, low calorie and 100% natural popcorn comes in five different flavours and lays claim to being a legitimately healthy snack food without the ensuing ‘trade off’ of bland or disappointing taste.

It is a claim that consumers appear to heartily agree with – PROPERCORN currently sells around 1.5 million packets of popcorn a month and has recently commenced export operations to Benelux, Ireland, Norway and Switzerland. The start-up confidently expects to treble revenues in the notoriously competitive snack food market this year – and after trying it, we well believe they might.

Founders: Tim Phillips, Simon Dennis, David Holliday and Alex McEvoy
Founded: June 2013
Website: www.gateone.co.uk

The global business consulting industry is one of the most top-heavy in the world, with the ‘Big Four’ consultancies (Deloitte, PwC, Ernst & Young and KPMG) collectively exerting a virtual monopoly on the market. Taking on the giants of this entrenched industry by starting a small challenger firm is certainly a risky business, but Gate One’s founders, a team of ex-Big Four employees themselves, feel they have struck upon a winning formula.

Gate One provides its clients with a unique ‘ripple effect’ service; assembling a team of consultants with expert knowledge of an entire project’s lifecycle, these are transplanted into firms to work side-by-side with their clients as they collectively face the challenge of dramatic change in an organisation. And it’s not only the clients which receive above-and-beyond care, either; the consultants themselves participate in an internal ‘incubator model’ in which they are given the opportunity to progress their entrepreneurial ideas in exchange for equity. With four high-profile clients already on board and more on the horizon, the founders confidently expect the firm to double in size across 2014 as they continue their aim of revolutionising the world of management consulting.

Founders: Niall Murphy, Andy Hobsbawn, Dom Guinard and Vlad Trifa
Founded: January 2011 (launched October 2012)
Website: www.evrythng.com

Recognised in our 2013 Startups 100 as well as selected amongst the finalists in the Startups Awards’ Mobile Business of the Year category, EVRYTHNG has an ambitious and truly unique proposition – it gives inanimate, offline products a smart edge by connecting them to the web. EVRYTHNG’s technology allows retailers and brands to create ‘profiles’ for their offline products, allowing users to check in and view real-time information about their product – taking brand engagement to a new level. With over 3.3 trillion consumer products shipped annually, the start-up’s potential for growth is enormous, and EVRYTHNG expects to more than quadruple revenues this year as it begins to deliver on its promise.

Having followed up early stage venture capital from Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström’s firm Atomico the company recently announced a Series A funding round of $7m backed by Cisco, Dawn Capital, New York’s BHLP LLC and Atomico. It has just opened a US office and the founders plan to focus on more international expansion across the next 12 months, in addition to growing the company’s client base in the UK and further refining its groundbreaking technology.