Founders: Tushar Agarwal, Tom Watson and Rohan Silva
Founded: October 2013 (launched January 2014)
Website: www.hubblehq.com

London’s largest online marketplace for offices, Hubble provides an innovative solution to a supply and demand mismatch. It enables start-ups and small businesses to rent great workspaces from companies that have it going spare.

While working in banking, co-founder Tushar Agarwal noticed how many companies had office space going to waste while small businesses struggled to find an affordable place to work. He discovered that by utilising technology and cutting out the middlemen – brokers – he could offer a simple process with hugely reduced fees to start-ups.

With monthly rolling contracts Hubble says it offers greater flexibility than its competitors, and its disruptive new ‘artificially intelligent office agent’ replaces human property agents with artificial intelligence (AI) which can return relevant office search results within 30 seconds.

As well as providing a simple, cheaper process, Hubble was also founded with a goal of helping start-ups to find environments that nourish company culture and encourage growth, encouraging them to “love where they work”. A mission which Hubble’s co-founder and former advisor to David Cameron, Rohan Silva, also shares as founder of popular members club-style workplace Second Home.

Perhaps owing to its innovative processes and simple usability, Hubble – which has jumped up eight places since last year’s Startups 100 – now has over 15,000 businesses signed up to its platform, with a choice of 1,500 buildings and 15,000 desk spaces across London and Manchester.

Over the next 12 months, Hubble plans to set up in at least two more UK cities, while rolling out its AI office agent across the country. The long-term goal is to develop Hubble into a global leader in its industry, with the aim of matching millions of businesses with the perfect workspace for them.

Founder: Melinda Nicci
Founded: November 2014 (Launched January 2015)
Website: baby2body.com

Researching health and wellbeing during her own pregnancy back in the mid 1990’s, Melinda Nicci became frustrated at the lack of empowering or positive information to help mums-to-be.

Fast forward 15 years, Nicci had launched her own fitness classes around Greater London alongside a fitness DVD, but discovered that even in the 21^st century health and fitness support and advice for pregnant women and new mums had not greatly improved.

After returning to university to obtain a master’s degree in sports psychology to gain a better understanding of the wellness space, Nicci launched Baby2Body in January 2015.

An online advice platform for pregnant women and new mothers, Baby2Body aims to create a unique and tailored experience for its users with wide-ranging personalised content on topics such as food, fashion and fitness.

Users can sign up and receive free content from Baby2Body’s blog, emails and app – while premium content is also available on the app for £9.99 a month.

Following mums-to-be every stage of the way – through early pregnancy to post-partum – Baby2Body’s custom advice means that all tips and advice are time specific so the advice mums receive at three months will be different to what they receive at eight months.

Now with over 500,000 mums using the platform across 30 different countries, and having raised £962,000 to date, Baby2Body is well on its way to ensuring that both expectant and new mothers are best informed to feel “uplifted, inspired and sexy”.

Founders: Gary Jenkins and Lee Cullen
Founded: April 2015
Website: www.nobraineragency.co.uk

When ex-journalists Gary Jenkins and Lee Cullen came together in April 2015 to launch No Brainer they had no clients, no external funding and limited capital; “it’s probably best described as no business!”

Today,  the PR, social media and content marketing agency has worked with 18 clients – among them M&S Bank, Northern Powergrid, HomeServe and MBNA – employs four members of staff, and has made significant six-figure profit.

Focused on “helping businesses achieve their dreams simply by telling their stories better”, No Brainer offers a service which it dubs ‘creative intelligence’; combining intelligence-led communications and creative ideas to business opportunities through storytelling.

Similarly to fellow Startups 100 2017 company Kaizen, No Brainer was created as a means to help brands better make use of PR, SEO (Search-Engine Optimisation) and online as Jenkins and Cullen felt there was a “lack of traditional agencies in the UK delivering anything close” to this.

This integrated approach is working and delivering results with No Brainer having not lost one client since launch.

Growth to date been completely organic with new clients sourced on the back of referrals and recommendations and Jenkins confidently assets that No Brainer’s “new business pipeline is very strong”.

As well as chasing new business, Jenkins and Cullen intend to grow headcount and office space but they recognise that achieving this growth won’t be easy: “We’ll continue to do what we’ve done through through hard work, smart planning, genuine partnerships, strategies rooted in business objectives and not vanity measures”.

Striving to “create a business of real value – both as legacy and commercially”, it was a ‘no-brainer’ for our judges to include  No Brainer in the Startups 100 2017.

Founders: Lana Elie
Founded: July 2015 (Launched February 2016)
Website: www.floom.com

Working as a PA at Burberry where she was tasked with sending “a lot of flowers”, Lana Elie was amazed at the lack of options for sending “beautifully crafted bouquets”. She found the process of giving billing, delivery and card details time-consuming and tedious.

Frustrated, she decided to leave the corporate world behind to launch a start-up venture which would provide a necessary solution; a concept which would later become Floom.

Launched in February 2016, Floom is a single place online marketplace which connects users to the best independent florists in the UK – think Etsy for flowers.

The platform’s ‘florist dashboard’ allows florists to upload pictures of their products and select stock quantity, meaning customers buy exactly what they see in the photos. This also means the business doesn’t have to maintain a perishable stock and can, instead, rely on the skills and brand profiles of its partners, leaving it time to focus on the platform technology.

Keeping 20% of the retail price of each transaction, Floom has already amassed a list of high-profile customers including the BBC, Jamie Oliver Ltd, ITV, News, McKinsey, King, Conde Nast and Hearst.

Having just closed a £580,000 crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube, following an earlier £300,000 angel investment round, Elie aims to sign 500 new florists by the end of 2017 and develop “some unique tech offerings” to support Floom’s nationwide growth plan.

Modest ambitions for an entrepreneur who has also managed to juggle running start-up with writing business blogs about her entrepreneurial journey!

Ultimately, Elie wants to see Floom become the place to go to send flowers from a local independent florist anywhere in the world. Watch this space…

Founders: Simon Heawood and Tom Cavill
Founded: November 2015
Website: www.bricklane.com

Born out of the frustration of trying to save for a first home, Simon Heawood and Tom Cavill started Bricklane.com to help first home savers get a foot on the ladder and reach a first home “years quicker than by saving with cash”.

Claiming to offer the first online Property ISA, Bricklane.com allows anyone to participate in the property market for as little as £100, by investing in a fund of expertly chosen homes tax free.

Users can then see their investment increase alongside the property value and earn rental income, and exit by selling their shares to other investors. The platform simply charges 2% of the money its customers invest and an annual 0.85% annual fee on their total holdings (charged monthly).

The platform currently features a range of homes across Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham, spreading users’ investment across a number of properties to decrease risk. It targets one to three bedroom homes in the £125,000 to £350,000 price range, with strong rental demand, opportunity for price growth and, crucially, character.

Bricklane.com has some exciting developments in the pipeline for the next year: it expects to launch in London over the coming months and wants to enable its customers to use Bricklane.com in conjunction with the government’s Lifetime ISA scheme.

“In it for the long haul”, Heawood and Cavill are on a mission to help as many people as possible achieve their aspirations of owning a home.

Founder: Rachel Jones
Founded: November 2014 (launched March 2015)
Website: www.snapdragon-ip.com

Serial entrepreneur Rachel Jones came to realise the power of intellectual property (IP) after her last business, a retailer of children’s car seat Totseat was put at risk from “potentially crippling” counterfeiting.

Having had to fight fiercely to protect her own IP, Jones was inspired to create SnapDragon Monitoring; a service which would help small-and-medium businesses fight fakes online and protect their IP.

The service, which employs a team of experienced multi-lingual data analysts, uses IP rights to defend brands on e-commerce platforms across the world. Using proprietary software, the business can monitor, report and remove infringing goods from the world’s 100 most visited online marketplaces, auction sites, and social media channels.

Last year, SnapDragon prevented the sale of $1obn worth of counterfeit products and Jones is so confident in SnapDragon’s ability to fight counterfeiting that the business aims to make itself redundant for each customer within 18 months of service introduction.

Available on a subscription-basis, the service is now trusted by fast-growing retail brands such as Morphsuits, Harris Tweed and Endura to fight its IP battles on the web. Its client portfolio will be further bolstered shortly with the addition of “a number of exciting and well-known clients to its books over the coming months.”

Enabling small businesses to exert their control over IP, much like that of multi-nationals but at a reasonable price, Jones asserts that SnapDragon is a powerful force for good:

“SnapDragon has the potential to positively affect global trade by seriously denting the number of counterfeit goods for sale, removing dangerous products from the market and helping small firms to reap the hard-earned benefits of their innovations.”

With counterfeit crime a global challenge, we’ll be keeping a close eye on SnapDragon as its ramps up its efforts to help small businesses fight back.

Founders: Scott Woodley and Mark Hughes
Founded: August 2015
Website: www.tutorful.co.uk

Frequently asked by parents to recommend high quality private tutors that could boost their child’s performance, primary school teacher Scott Woodley quickly became frustrated at how difficult it was to match somebody reliable and recognised an opportunity to start a business.

He recruited his childhood friend Mark Hughes, then working as a technology analyst for a large investment firm, to help him solve the problem. Together they launched Tutorful (formerly Tutora) – a service that connects families in the UK with “the best” private tutors for after-school, at-home visits.

Although a number of similar companies have sprung up in recent years, Tutorful allows parents to browse tutors for free and only pay when a lesson has been completed – unlike rival marketplaces that require them to pay upfront to access a list of tutors.

The company takes a platform fee from the payment, starting at 25% and reducing down to a cap of 15% as the tutor teaches more lessons. Tutorful also uses a ‘best-match’ algorithm that allows tutors to be searched by number of lessons taught, reviews and ratings from parents, cost, proximity and more, to ensure students find a perfectly suited tutor.

Bootstrapped with around £18,000 of the founders’ own money, the company has already secured more than 7,000 active tutors, who are collectively delivering nearly 5,000 lessons per week, and is currently seeing 700% monthly revenue growth.

Having doubled its initial target to secure £700,000 in a campaign on Crowdcube in April 2017, Tutorful plans to unveil a range of exciting features including an online tuition portal and apps for students and tutors. And that’s just the start as it looks to become the largest tuition company in the UK within the next 12 months…

Founder: Dr. Rajan Bedi
Founded: September 2014
Website: www.spacechips.co.uk

Spacechips was founded by Dr. Rajan Bedi to solve major problems currently being faced by the global satellite industry.

Having worked for 12 years at Airbus UK where he led the development of the Space Electronics for the Alphasat, SES-12/14, NEC, NovSAR and Sentinel-1 satellites, Bedi came to notice a number of key market niches within the space sector and decided to launch a business creating products and services to address these niches.

Three years since launch and Bedi’s high-tech space electronic company has started building innovative products to disrupt the market.

One of the first of these products is a transponder which allows satellite manufactures to offer operators re-usable and bespoke performance. The transponder claims to reduce the weight of future satellites by 50%, their power dissipation by 50%, their size by 60% and cost by 40%.

Patent-pending, the company’s invention has the potential to help suppliers or electronic components to the space industry better understand future trends and generate better return-on-investment; potential that saw the business take home High-Reliability Product of the Year at the Elektra 2016 Awards.

A finalist at the Startups Awards 2016, Spacechips also has other arms of the business which includes offering space-electronics design consultancy services to manufacturers of satellites and spacecraft around the world.

And there’s more. The business also provides global training courses in space electronics to help customers make better informed technology decisions with guidance on product roadmap, business strategy, technical marketing and space-market trend advice to suppliers of space-grade microchips.

So what are Bedi hopes for the business? He tells us that his goal is to make a real difference to the space sector, particularly as the UK government has a target to achieve a 10% market share of the space industry by 2030.

Founders: Freddie Blackett
Founded: December 2015
Website: www.patch.garden

It was whilst trying to turn the “bare, unloved balcony” in his new house into an urban garden he “could be proud of” that Freddie Blackett realised there was no online destination for aspiring but clueless horticulturalists.

So in December 2015 he founded Patch, an online garden centre that helps consumers discover the best plants for them and delivers to their door, catering to people who are relatively inexperienced when it comes to flora.

Since launch the company has worked with more than 2,000 customers across London; whether they’re looking to brighten up their balconies, terraces, window sills or indoor spaces. Users can search for plants by different types of room, as well as contemporary, classical, exotic and oriental plants for outdoor spaces and buy specialist pots to house them in.

Significantly, a number of major brands have also turned to Patch to help make their offices more “homely and pleasant” including Google, MADE.com, Jamie Oliver and Tilt. For Christmas 2016 the platform launched its first ever Christmas tree offering, which attracted a flood of orders and its biggest logistical challenge to date – the busiest day saw it deliver 430 trees across London!

The next year will see Patch continue to nurture its growth, by focusing on developing its specialist team and making sure it continues to align itself to customer needs, as well as sourcing a greater number of suppliers and ever more exciting indoor and outdoor plant species.

Blackett says his ultimate ambition is to “become the leading e-tailer in the online gardening world and to enable city dwellers everywhere to create incredible gardens and indoor spaces filled with foliage”.

Founders: Matt Robinson, Phil Cowans, James Turford
Founded: December 2015 (launched September 2016)
Website: nested.com/

A founding team with a strong track record is typically a good indicator for repeat business success and so you can be confident that Nested is in safe hands with a CEO (Matt Robinson) who co-founded GoCardless, and a CTO (Phil Cowans) who was also CTO of Songkick.

Combining start-up experience with COO James Turford’s private equity background, the trio have built Nested – an online estate agency which guarantees users a sales price from day one.

The only business of its kind to make this offer, Nested promises customers that, if they don’t sell their home in 90 days, it will give them the guaranteed amount thus “eliminating the uncertainty of selling a home”.

You’re likely to be reading this thinking “How can an estate agency make such a promise?” Well, Nested charges 3% fees on the amount it guarantees the property for and then anything the property sells for over this amount is split 70/30 in the property owner’s favour.

The idea for Nested originated when Robinson was buying his own home and realised it was near impossible to buy a home in a chain-free position. With a third of chains in the UK falling through, Robinson considered the idea of making a sale guarantee and this set Nested in motion.

Supported by just under £10m in external investment, Nested and its team of 12 staff is now helping five property owners a month – and that’s only since launching last September. The business helped its very first customer, Richard, sell his property in just 67 days – almost a month less than the house sale average.

While Robinson admits “being a very cash-intensive” start-up business comes with its challenges, the future looks bright for Nested and it intends to up its customer numbers over the coming year.