Founder: Nicholas d’Adhemar
Founded: February 2013 (Launched August 2014)
Website: www.apperio.com

If ever there was ever an example of why you shouldn’t just ‘stick to your day job’ then look to Nicholas d’Adhemar and his start-up Apperio for inspiration.

Having worked as a lawyer for six years with CMS Cameron McKenna LLP, d’Adhemar decided he wasn’t just going to sentence himself to a life of working for someone else and so set about carving out a career on his own.

Upon noticing a lack of transparency surrounding legal fees within the industry, the former legal counsel decided to take matters into his own hands and Apperio was born.

An online platform designed for both legal firms and large corporates, Apperio offers users access to transparent, real-time information on legal fees and identifies areas for improved efficiency.

Operating on a SaaS based pricing model for law firms and a tiered pricing model for corporates, the start-up has recorded over £37m in fees on its site since inception. 37 law firms and 15 large corporates have used the service including Dentons, Lewis Silkin, Macfarlanes, Deliveroo, Octopus Investment and Zoopla.

Impessively, d’Adhemar has grown the business organically since launch in 2014 and even ran the business sole-handedly for the first 18 months.

Its second Startups 100 appearance (up nine places on 2016) d’Adhemar was also recipient of our prestigious Young Guns award last September; solely reserved for innovative young founders running fast-growth businesses.

Already operating in Europe, the US and Canada, the London-based start-up is intent on deepening its footprint in North America by adding to its sales and customer services team.

Having raised over £3.5m to date from the likes of Notion Capital, IQ Capital, NextLaw Labs, Burford Capital, Apperio is in good shape to become the “central nervous system that powers the business of law globally”.

Founder: Will Read
Founded: 2014 (Launched April 2015)
Website: www.sideways6.com

After securing a graduate job at a large corporate, young entrepreneur to watch Will Read felt he was constantly met with managers who had no interest in any ideas he had on how to improve the company.

Disillusioned by not being allowed to creatively express himself, Read quit his corporate gig and set about creating a ‘suggestion box 2.0’ for large employers.

Finding that the market was saturated with various apps and websites dedicated to such a cause, Read was shocked to discover that one app had listed his former employer as a client.

Convinced something was wrong with the current system, namely that submitting ideas was perceived as too time consuming and distracting for entrepreneurial employees, Read created Sideways 6 – an innovation management platform which integrates with existing applications such as Slack, Workplace by Facebook and Yammer.

Operating on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, Sideways 6 has already secured the services of Virgin Trains, British Airways, BP and Diageo and is set to turnover £1.2m for 2017 – testament to an already impressive business story.

Always helping businesses look for new and fresh ideas, from any source, the business has helped crowdsourced 25,000 ideas to date and is looking to add a further 100,000 this year.

Intent on doubling headcount in the next 12 months, the start-up says it will grow revenue by 300% to 400% and will seek to obtain 30 new clients.

Read explains why he’s determined to make Sideways 6 a household name business:

“We want to be synonymous with the word ‘idea’. When people think ‘search’ they think Google. When they think ‘social’, they think Facebook. For ‘auction’, its eBay. We want people to think Sideways 6 when they hear the word ‘idea’.”

Founders: Christer Holloman, Fredrik Borgquist and Anders Hallsten
Founded: October 2014 (launched August 2015)
Website: www.divido.com

In what can be very aptly described as a win-win, fintech start-up Divido offers what it refers to as ‘finance as a service’; enabling customers to pay for any purchase in bitesize installments, while retailers are paid in full instantly.

Based on the belief that banks are typically slow to innovate, Swedish-born founding trio Christer Holloman, Fredrik Borgquist and Anders Hallsten decided that they could developing new, unique  technology themselves, providing useful financial innovations so that banks could focus on lending.

Backed by top-tier financiers, technology entrepreneurs and Europe’s biggest early-stage VC, Divido started with £100,000 and a goal of helping customers spread the cost of big purchases made at small stores which weren’t typically able to offer staggered payment options.

Three years later, Divido is now able to facilitate £25m of credit, financing up to £25,000 at a time to cover users’ transactions.

The start-up has partnered with national and multinational retailers both online and offline and these partnerships mean retailers are able to attract new customers and sell more big ticket items. Divido charges a single set up fee, a monthly fee and the cost of the finance it provides.

Today, Divido serves an average of 5,000 consumers per month – spreading the cost of purchases between 12 months and five years.

Divido’s big plans for the next 12 months include quadrupling turnover, securing more relationships with retailers and reaching more consumers. We’ll be watching on from the sidelines as it “builds the future of payments”.

Founders: Luke Johnstone and Alex Stewart
Founded: April 2014 (launched September 2015)
Website: www.packd.co.uk

Promising to provide an effective health kick in under one minute, PACK’D’s frozen smoothie kits launched into Whole Foods back in 2015. Six months later, the brand had been stocked in over 750 stores nationwide.

Growing up, co-founder Luke Johnstone dreamt of becoming a professional sportsman and it was while playing in the FA Youth Cup for football that he learnt how proper nutrition could benefit his performance. Though a knee injury brought an unfortunate end to his sporting career, his passion for nutrition remained.

As opposed to pre-bottled smoothies which are often heat-treated and deceptively high in sugar content, Johnstone decided to start a business that would sell nutritious frozen smoothie packs containing the right fruits, vegetables and superfoods for a targeted health benefit.

With help from co-founder Alex Stewart and backing from The Prince’s Trust, the pair began to sell PACK’D in markets in Hackney every weekend, testing their recipes on customers. During this time, Johnstone lived in his parents’ garden shed, spending almost two years perfecting smoothie combinations and building the business.

From these humble beginnings has come early success, with the brand winning Best New Health & Wellness Product 2016 at the IFE World Food Innovation Awards.

Now listed in over 1,000 stores, including Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Ocado, Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, Planet Organic, PACK’D also sells to gyms to blend and serve the smoothies fresh onsite.

With its uncomplicated concept and plans to launch exciting new products, PACK’D’s future is bound to be fruitful.

Founders: Jasmine Eilfield and Ryan Farquharson
Founded: January 2015
Wesbite: www.expocart.com

Rather than going to university, Jasmine Eilfield and Ryan Farquharson opted to attend the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy – a course dedicated to equipping students with entrepreneurial skills. It was here that they had their first taste of exhibitions and conferences; running a small events business together that invited successful entrepreneurs to share their experiences and offer advice.

Their familiarity with appearing at exhibitions led to the birth of ExpoCart – the start-up which is on a mission to “radically improve exhibitors’ experience in organising the equipment they need for their exhibition stand”.

The platform operates a one-stop-shop for exhibition products from the UK’s leading brands, saving exhibitors time and money by eliminating the need to source quotes and order from multiple suppliers. Customers can hire or buy everything from carpets to display cases and payment systems to display screens, which ExpoCart delivers, sets up, derigs and collects.

To date, ExpoCart has helped more than 2,000 exhibitors – including Ve Interactive, iCandy, Breast Cancer Now, Mane ‘n Tail, Square pie, Grant Thornton and Booking.com – organise their stands at major venues across the country such as ExCel London, Olympia, NEC Birmingham and Manchester EventCity.

The coming months will see ExpoCart expand its range of products as it looks to build a supply network that enables it to become the default platform for exhibition equipment – not just in the UK, but across the world…

Founders: Tom Blomfield, Jonas Huckestein, Paul Rippon, Gary Dolman and Jason Bates
Founded: February 2015 (launched October 2015)
Website: monzo.com  

When Monzo made its inaugural appearance in the Startups 100 index last year, we noted that – as a pioneering business attempting to create a mobile bank from scratch – the start-up had pretty humongous ambitions and goals.

Yet, one year on and the business, described as a “customer service company empowered by technology”, has made major in-roads and is on its way to achieving its aim of rolling-out a smartphone-based bank with an integrated banking app and credit card.

One recent announcement in particular has seen the two-year old London start-up take a major step towards making that mission a reality: in April this year Monzo saw its banking licence restrictions lifted making it a fully authorised, unrestricted bank.

Now bringing live current accounts to existing users – a process which CFO Tom Blomfield says will take several months to complete “to ensure the best possible experience for its users” – Monzo is a true example of a disruptive business creating a “first” in an industry plagued by a lack of innovation and challenges in “giving customers what they want”.

Once live accounts are set up, Monzo users will have their own account number and sort-code and will be able to make bank-to-bank payments and set up Direct Debits, as well as having their salary paid into their Monzo account.

Supported by a recent (wait for it)… staggering £22m funding round, incorporating a £2.5m crowdfunding which saw backing from 6,500 Crowdcube investors, Monzo’s “journey to build a better bank” is well on track.

Don’t believe us? Just speak to its army of 200,000 customers who have spent over £2.5m through Monzo to date!

Founders: Shumel Lais
Founded: June 2015 (Launched in August 2016)
Wesbite: www.appsumer.io

Shumel Lais, an entrepreneur with six years’ experience working at two of the world’s largest media agencies, first struck upon the idea for Appsumer whilst building hacks and workarounds in spreadsheets that helped him to achieve “incredible advertising results with minimal leg work”.

Lais came to the realisation that there was a market for brands to access the same techniques and set about building a commercial and scalable version.

Founded in 2015, Appsumer helps mobile-first brands to grow faster by making data-driven advertising decisions and ultimately achieving better return on spend.

Charging a recurring license fee dependent on usage, the platform’s software enables clients to connect to a variety of media and analytics sources, analysing and monitoring key data and planning and forecasting their future performance. Despite launching just last August, Appsumer has already secured a number of major clients including restaurant booking app Velocity, leading postcard app Touchnote, dating app LOVOO, and Lifecake – the London photo app acquired by Canon.

In November last year, Appsumer secured $1m in funding from Galvanise Capital which it used to bolster research and development, improve its intelligence platform and drive customer acquisition.

Ultimately, Lais says his ambition is for Appsumer to be the “Hubspot of mass marketing in a mobile-first world”, citing the way it “empowers marketers to control their own destiny”.

If its progress so far is anything to go by, its goal of emulating this multi-million dollar US marketing firm looks well within reach.

Founders: Douglas and Estelle Lloyd
Launched: March 2016
Website: www.azoomee.com

With more and more children accessing the internet at an increasingly younger age, parents are becoming all too aware of the many dangers and extra costs associated with leaving the kids to their own devices – literally.

Founded by husband-and-wife team Douglas and Estelle Lloyd, Azoomee is an entertainment app designed for children to watch TV shows, play games and listen to audiobooks with internet safety being a key priority.

An idea which came to them after the duo’s children stumbled across inappropriate images when browsing the internet, the app is ad-free and operates a freemium model which offers limited content for free or the entire package for £4.99 a month or £39.99 a year. The business also donates a portion of every subscription to the NSPCC.

Battling against major brands like Netflix, Sky and the BBC, Azoomee believes its emphasis on more than just video is what separates it from stiff competition. With tutorials, audiobooks, an art studio and a parent-approved messaging service, much of the content on the app actively encourages kids to get ‘off the screen’ and learn art, science, natural history, spelling and magic.

Having raised £3.5m since launching last year, including a 77% overfunded crowdfunding campaign, Azoomee appears as popular with investors as it is with kids – and has already secured a significant commercial contract.

In March 2016, the start-up partnered with O2 to become the sole entertainment provider on the telecommunication firm’s new children’s tablet; the Alcatel Pixi 8.

Adding 1,000 new customers every week and recently nominated for a BAFTA for its internet safety series Search It Up Azoomee is well worthy of a place in the Startups 100 2017.

Founder: Nick Coleman
Founded: June 2014
Website: www.snafflingpig.co.uk

A place of conversation and contemplation, it’s no surprise so many great British businesses have started down the local – and Snaffling Pig is no different.

For Nick Coleman and Andrew Allen, a quick drink led to the pair discussing the recent rise and re-birth of classic British food and drink hitting menus and shop shelves across the country.

With the craft beer revolution showing no signs of abating, the duo began to wonder why no one had revisited the much-loved British bar snack – the humble pork scratching.

Served in pubs up and down the country for the past 250 years, the snack has been given a 21^st century makeover by Snaffling Pig, while also attempting to retain its traditional charm and quality.

The Berkshire-based start-up has 12 different flavours across its ‘porkfolio’, including salt and vinegar, sage and onion and sweet chili, while a deal with a brand with over 200 years’ heritage saw the arrival of the ham and Colman’s Mustard scratchings in March.

Selling its pub grub in re-fillable glass jars, as well as foil bags, the snacks are currently available in 1,500 pubs across the UK as well as John Lewis, Selfridges, Notonthehighstreet.com and Center Parks – to name a few.

Appearing on Dragons’ Den back in August, Allen and Coleman’s pig pitch was enough to lure Mr Moonpig himself Nick Jenkins to invest £70,000 for 10% equity, while an appearance on ITV’s This Morning saw its jars of savoury treats voted one of the top non-chocolate advent calendars for 2016 – and led to 3,800 orders in just three hours.

Expecting to more than triple revenue to an impressive seven digit figure in 2017, it’s little wonder Snaffling Pig has trotted into our Startups 100 ranking…

Founder: Lauren Dorling
Founded: 14/11/14
Website: www.solesmith.co.uk

Admittedly “bored” by her customer service job, Lauren Dorling began researching potential business ideas when she stumbled across a pair of ski socks which she thought were perfect for her up and coming holiday.

Wishing to have them personalised, the Birmingham University graduate was shocked when she was unable to find anyone online offering personalised socks. The now 27-year-old didn’t hang around. She handed in her notice, just days after being given the keys to her new house, and jumped in with both feet.

Inspired by her mother, who had made children’s blankets and cushions from her garage, Dorling founded Solesmith which designs, makes and personalises designer socks.

A seasonal business, the Derbyshire-based start-up focuses much of its attention on unique items for Christmas, weddings, birthdays and annual holidays like Father’s Day, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day.

All personalised socks are made to order, with the majority of Solesmith’s sales coming from one-off transactions, though plans are already in place for a subscription-based model in the coming months.

Selling via its website, on independent sites such as notonthehighstreet.com, and even in some independent stores, the brand has already expanded its offering and now sells everything from t-shirts, to pyjamas, to jewellery boxes and pencil cases.

2017 will also see the launch of the wholesale side of the business, allowing other creative firms to offer customers personalised items via Solesmith’s wholesale dropship website.

A true kitchen-table start-up that has grown to serve over 75,000 customers worldwide and 20 staff at peak gifting times, Solesmith is set to turn over a six-figure sum for 2017. It just goes to show what you can do when you pull your socks up and start your own business!