Founders: Rachel Fletcher and Natalie Letcher
Founded: August 2013 (launched October 2013)
Website: www.uni-quest.co.uk

Having worked in higher education for 30 years, Rachel Fletcher and Natalie Letcher felt that university service providers were becoming increasingly unable to keep up with the evolving demands of home, EU, and international student enrolment. Their solution? To create a unique service that would make university leaders’ lives easier – an idea that would develop into UniQuest.

Launched in October 2013, London-based UniQuest provides a customised “hands-on” service which promises to enable universities to increase their enrolment-driven tuition fee revenue. With a number of UK universities already signed up, including the University of the West of England and the University of Roehampton, the service gives universities real-time access to data, reports and insights so that they can optimise their enrolment recruitment and marketing activities.

The platform also includes a responsive service for prospective students – email, phone, live chat etc. – and simple data forms for universities to convert applicants and offer holders.

While Fletcher and Letcher say they have had to work hard to convince universities to trust them, raise awareness, and be invited to tender, the duo has successfully overcome these challenges; winning a number of “long-term, multi-year contracts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

Given that the business is already profitable with a team of 24 employees, Fletcher and Letcher are now looking into expansion. New staff hires are also in the pipeline, alongside an office move to accommodate its growing headcount.

Founder: Georgina Nelson
Founded:  January 2014 (launched Jan 2015)
Website: www.trurating.com

If you’ve ever visited a business review website then you’ll probably have read many reviews created by “ranters or ravers” i.e. those who are extremely satisfied or dissatisfied with their experience.

These reviews don’t often provide an accurate or representative view of how the majority of customers feel which can be both frustrating for businesses who want to learn from feedback, and customers who want to know whether reviews are reliable.

Georgina Nelson recognised this issue and came up with the idea for getting feedback questions onto business payment terminals, so that consumers would be more inclined to answer the questions and both businesses and consumers would benefit.

Despite having no background in the payments industry, Nelson launched truRating in January 2015 as the world’s first mass point-of-payment consumer rating system.

With a huge team of 51 employees to assist her, Nelson has already signed up 150 outlets to use the service including The Real Greek and Patisserie Valerie, and truRating is now poised to go live with a number of large UK retailers.

A fast, simple and anonymous ratings system, Nelson says that with truRating an average of 88% of consumers rate a business – a stark contrast to the 1% of customers that usually provide feedback to businesses. What’s more, tech firm Gartner has reported that truRating’s payment terminal reviews are actually 40% more accurate than post-experience reviews.

Already live in Australia and with a US pilot lined up, by 2017, Nelson believes truRating will have collected 300 million ratings – more than the total number of reviews collected by TripAdvisor and Yelp during their lifetimes to date. And with stats like the above, we reckon Nelson will have retailers queuing up to implement the software…

Founders: Martin Campbell, Robert Drury, Stuart Dawson and Eamon O’Dwyer
Founded: January 2014 (launched November 2014)
Website: www.ormsbystreet.com

Late payments and cashflow are the scourge of small business owners the world over, inhibiting growth and threatening their very future. While working on a ‘credit score subscription service’ for Barclays, Martin Campbell, Robert Drury, Stuart Dawson and Eamon O’Dwyer saw the potential for their product to combat these cashflow problems.

Using the data they had built up with Barclays they created CreditHQ (the first product for their business Ormsby Street in November 2014): an online tool that helps small businesses take control of their cash by providing financial insights to spot late payment trends.

The basic subscription in the UK is free, providing users access to more than seven million company records, with the standard subscription providing a more detailed credit and payment score, including up-to-date financial information such as net worth, assets, liabilities, sales, and details of adverse credit events.

In the UK alone, CreditHQ has 27,000 small business users, with more in Germany and Italy thanks to a partnership with Deutsche bank. This is the second appearance in the Startups 100 for Ormsby Street, which continues to innovate and develop new products and will focus on securing new partnerships with banks throughout 2016 to help reach as many new customers as possible.

Founders: Aaron Dicks and Tom Craig
Founded: March 2013 (Launched November 2012)
Website: www.impression.co.uk 

Finding digital marketing agencies lacking while working for an internal marketing team, young entrepreneur Aaron Dicks and Tom Craig decided they could do it better.

What originally started as a freelance side project then quickly grew into tech-focused digital marketing agency Impression. Today, the Nottingham-based company employs 22 people and growing, offering a service that it says goes “well beyond the norm to really get to the core” of what makes its clients’ businesses tick. By this, the company means it invests time in understanding profit margins, popular products and services and concentrates its efforts on promoting those, as well as working closely with a client’s internal marketing and communications teams to ensure both parties are focused on the same goals. And it’s an approach that’s clearly working.

Impression currently has more than 65 clients across e-commerce, manufacturing, tourism, hospitality, energy suppliers, professional services, fintech and food, charging a set day rate.

The entirely self-funded business is set to double its turnover this year to £1m as it seeks to grow its team in line with its own growth and secure both bigger clients and bigger projects. The next 12 months will also see the development of its own internal tools. With two talented young entrepreneurs at the helm and a fresh approach to digital marketing, Impression looks set to go far.

Founders: Jamie Laing and Edward Williams
Founded: May 2012 (launched February 2014)
Website: www.candykittens.co.uk

Having dreamed of becoming a real life Willy Wonka since he was a boy, it was almost inevitable that Jamie Laing’s first entrepreneurial endeavour would be in the confectionary market.

Laing’s family already has some illustrious confectionary pedigree – he’s related to Sir Alexander Grant, the man credited with creating the first ever digestive biscuit as an employee of McVitie’s in 1892.

Looking for a gap in the market, the now 27-year-old Made in Chelsea star realised that sweets hadn’t grown up with him and spotted an opportunity to reinvigorate the somewhat dated industry. Together with Edward Williams – an industrial design graduate who’d previously owned a design and branding business – he started Candy Kittens, a producer of gourmet, real fruit-based, gluten free sweets.

Launched in February 2014 with £500,000 in start-up funding from friends and family, Candy Kittens turned over £700,000 in 2015 just a year after launch and is on track to hit £1.5m this year. Its range of natural sweets is now available in Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Topshop and Selfridges, as well as several independent retailers and via an online monthly subscription service.

An impressive start for a high-end confectionary brand, and a sign that it could well break the mould and become a household name within an already crowded sector.

Founders: Treena and Simon Budd
Founded: October 2013
Website: www.lifeline24.co.uk

After a 10-year stint in the financial sector, Simon Budd moved to Norfolk with his wife Treena and started a job in a local housing association. It was here he came up with the idea to provide a superior alarm and safety service for residents at a lower cost.

The husband and wife team set up Lifeline 24 – a company that supplies personal pendant alarms and keysafes for the disabled, frail and elderly, which are monitored from its UK-based emergency response call centres. The company prides itself in not employing salespeople to sell it products but instead relies on recommendations from friends, family, carers and healthcare professionals. Equipment is rented out to customers, who are then charged a monthly (£12.49 per month) or annual (£128 per year with two months free) monitoring fee depending on their needs.

To date, Lifeline 24 has supplied more than 6,000 customers with its personal alarms; a figure that will help it more than double its turnover in 2016 to nearly £1m – netting a significant profit. On the back of this, the business is planning to fuel rapid international expansion, having already launched in Ireland, the entrepreneurial duo and their 25-strong team now has Australia and the US in their sights.

Founders: Iain Fraser and Luke Barlow
Founded: January 2011 (Launched December 2014)
Website: www.netduma.com

Battling with a congested network at university because their housemates would hog the bandwidth, Iain Fraser and Luke Barlow became determined to find a solution.

While studying for a PhD in computer science at the University of Nottingham, Fraser created an anti-flood, a feature that “completely eliminates” network congestion at home. On the back of this success, he began to develop more features that would eventually lead to the Netduma router: bespoke software that’s installed directly on to your router to reduce internet congestion and latency caused by excessive use of bandwidth. The Bedfordshire-based firm – nominated for Startups Awards Export Business of the Year – already sells to thousands of customers in 75 countries around the world, with the US accounting for 50% of demand and strong sales in Germany, France, Spain and the Middle East to name a few.

Currently focused on online gamers, Netduma has some exciting developments in the pipeline including partnerships with YouTubers who have a large influence in the gaming world – which could promote the product to millions.

Already with a significant international presence less than two years after launch, the company’s ambition of being on the majority of the world’s residential routers within the next five years doesn’t seem completely out of reach.

Founder: Darren Litton
Founded: November 2013
Website: www.cocobachocolate.com

From chartered accountancy to chocolate is an unusual career trajectory; but after struggling to find the kind of “real chocolate” his grandfather made for him as a boy growing up in Australia and missing Sydney’s thriving café culture, Darren Litton decided to combine the two and launch a chocolate café and retail brand.

Last year’s number 89, Cocoba sells a range of different Belgian chocolate and savoury products, including 28 different kinds of chocolate bar, real chocolate hot chocolate, artisan coffee, paninis, pastries and soups from its flagship store in Bluewater shopping centre. The brand also retails more than 130 different products in other stores such as Selfridges, Harrods, farm shops, delis and via its own website.

Currently, the café arm of the business receives thousands of customers and is having to turn away wholesale customers due to lack of storage and production capacity. The next year will see Cocoba open an industrial unit for producing and packaging to help meet this demand, as well as the launch of a chocolate subscription box service and a second store. This 18 strong-team is putting real chocolate back on the menu, and with demand soaring, expect to hear a lot more of them in the coming months.

Founder: Tom Hatton
Founded: March 2014
Website: www.refme.com

Referencing is the bane of many a student’s life – tedious but absolutely vital to get right. Whilst studying at Oxford Brookes, 25-year-old young entrepreneur Tom Hatton found existing tools were often poor quality and difficult to use.

His solution was Startups 100 2015-featured RefME, a free citation app that scans book or journal barcodes and automatically generates an accurate reference. Just two years later – and having grown faster than Twitter – the service is already being used in more than 14,000 institutions around the world across the UK, US, India, Australia and Canada. What seems like a simple concept has taken a lot of work at the backend, with the app having to learn to automate references for any content, no matter how obscure, in over 8,000 styles. In summer last year, the app was named the UK winner of education technology competition EdTech Europe, giving RefMe the chance promote itself at partner events worldwide.

After taking total investment to $5m in 2015, for the next 12 months, Hatton and his 45 employees will focus on driving growth while continuing to refine RefME’s product offering. We’ve also learned about a recent big announcement of its premium products: RefME Plus and RefME Institute. RefME plans to continue to serve the research needs of students globally and enhancing their offering is a critical step towards achieving this goal…

Founders: Cem Savas and Emre Kazan
Founded: November 2013 (Launched March 2014)
Website: www.plentific.com

Plentific is a free online service that allows homeowners and homebuyers to find and connect with trade home improvement, maintenance and repair professionals including everyone from architects, builders, electricians, and locksmiths.

With shared backgrounds in investment banking and property, Cem Savas and Emre Kazan had overseen the development of 30 properties in London, going through the process of buying and renovating and using a number of professional services in the process. Fed up with the lack of technology in the sector they started Plentific to help tradespeople build an online presence and showcase themselves to consumers.

The site takes a commission when a job is booked through the platform, with premium membership and advertising opportunities also available. In the UK alone, Plentific has more than 75,000 businesses in its network across 55 categories and 700 services, and with the site powering the Find a Pro section on Zoopla and Primelocation, professionals listed can build up an online presence that can potentially attract 50 million page views.

Over the next 12 months, the London-based business plans to expand into new countries around the world by integrating with strategic partners and roll out new features including a payments gateway allowing professionals and customers to quote and pay through the dashboard.

Helping both trade professionals and consumers get a better deal, Plentific is one to watch.