Founders: Stuart McClure, Mark Solomon and Dave Bishop
Launched: 2015
Website: www.lovethesales.com

Collating thousands of discounted items from hundreds of the world’s biggest retailers onto one website, Love the Sales is the e-commerce start-up that’s making it easier for savvy shoppers to save money.

A young father, co-founder Stuart McClure had his “lightbulb moment” while shopping online for his family. Looking to save money by seeking out sales items, McClure found himself getting lost while browsing among the myriad of sales sites and decided that there should be a simpler way to find discounted products on the web.

The business originally started as a side-project with McClure and co-founders Mark Solomon and Dave Bishop holding down full-time jobs while managing the site. But, after later closing a round of investment, the founders were able to leave their jobs and focus on growing the start-up.

Now showcasing around a million items each day, Love the Sales’ virtual shelves display everything from clothes and accessories to electronics, furniture and sports apparatus, aggregating discounted items from some 700 retailers across the UK, the US and Europe. On the site, you’ll find brands such as Michael Kors, House of Fraser, Currys, and Vivienne Westwood.

Love the Sales has scaled while operating with a lean team of just five employees, and its founding trio insist that, while there are certainly plenty of discount sites online, “none are as comprehensive as theirs” – with other flash sales and voucher sites typically offer outdated stock and irrelevant deals.

Over the next year, the start-up plans to continue to expand on its relatively new US and EU territories, while improving its innovative machine learning and AI capabilities.

The ultimate goal? To make Love the Sales “the very best place to shop for people looking to improve their lifestyle for less”. Jumping from the 95th spot in our 2016 Startups 100 to 33rd in this year’s list, we’re confident it will achieve this aim!

Founders: Luke Appleby & James Townsend
Founded: October 2014
Website: www.kontor.space

Luke Appleby and James Townsend first struck upon the idea for Kontor whilst sharing a taxi home after work.

Working as chartered surveyors in commercial property for real estate consultancy CBRE, the pair realised they had discovered the same gap in the market to offer property services to the tech, media and creative sectors – particularly the growing numbers of start-ups and small businesses.

In October 2014, they launched Kontor; a service that provides real estate acquisition advice to help clients find spaces that “maximise their creative and business potential”, fuel productivity, attract talent and have the flexibility that growing businesses need.

With a lean team of seven staff, Kontor curates what it sees as the “coolest workspaces”, offering flexible and traditional lease options and taking a fee from the landlord. To date, the business has secured over 1,000,000 square feet of space for clients and tripled its turnover – smashing its five-year target by three whole years.

Amongst its illustrious list of clients are WeWork, PROPERCORN, MarketInvoice, Blaze, 500 StartUps, Jaguar Land Rover, Virgin Media and Techstars.

The second half of 2017 will see Kontor work on the development of new services including the launch a new arm of the business that works directly with landlords, helping them to find tenants for their spaces.

The service is currently only available in London, but Appleby and Townsend aren’t stopping there: in the near future they intend to expand across Europe’s major cities and beyond…

Founders: Tim Antos and Richard Hall
Founded: October 2013 (launched in May 2015)
Website: www.kokoon.io

Struggling with sleep due to impending deadlines and “general life stresses”, Tim Antos was referred to a sleep clinic and discovered the calming power of audio. It was the miracle cure he’d been looking for but he found that achieving a sleep-inducement state with normal headphones wasn’t possible as they were “bulky, uncomfortable and would easily dislodge”.

Alongside fellow Young Gun Richard Hall, Antos set about creating a solution and started Startups 100-listed Kokoon Technology – thought to be the world’s first sleep-sensing headphones.

The noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones mould to a user’s head and use brainwave technology to monitor the user’s sleep and analyse their sleep pattern. Paired with a smartphone app, this enables the headphones to find the lightest point in your sleep cycle to wake you and gives you a nightly sleep score.

The Startups Awards-nominee raised just under $2m in two months on Kickstarter and saw 10,000 orders placed its headphones.

With retail sales at £299 a pair, Antos and Hall have the beginnings of a potentially lucrative business especially when you factor in additional revenue generated through the premium app subscription service where users can unlock unlimited high-quality audio content for £9.99 a month.

2017 is the year of sleep – just take a look at the businesses ranked in the first and fifth spots of this index – and Kokoon is another great business which is driving growth by helping consumers to have a better night’s sleep; offering more advanced features and superior headphones than its rivals.

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

“As I grew up, I found that the sweets I liked didn’t grow up with me”, remarks Made In Chelsea star-turned-entrepreneur Jamie Laing in his Startups 100 entry.

In 2014, Laing finally got to make his dream of being a real-life Willy Wonka a reality when – alongside friend and business partner Edward Williams – he launched gourmet confectionary brand Candy Kittens.

Using natural ingredients, flavours and colourings, Candy Kittens is on a mission to reinvigorate the confectionary market with its range of “tongue-tingling”, gluten-free sweets in flavours such as sour watermelon, Eton mess, sour blueberry and sweet pineapple.

Now stocked with Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Ocado, as well as WH Smiths, BP forecourts, River Island, Missguided and Tesco Express, the company has recently also embarked on its first brand collaboration with Hello Kitty. A partnership that has seen it launch a brand new sour apple flavour in Topshop stores nationwide and as far afield as Paris, Berlin and New York.

Up 10 places on last year’s ranking, Candy Kittens achieved a sweet £1.3m revenue for 2016 and a cool £400,000 in profit and is already on track to more than double turnover in 2017.

A relative of Sir Alexander Grant – the man credited with inventing the digestive biscuit – if Laing’s confectionary heritage is anything to go by, he and Williams have got a lot to offer yet.

Founders: Richard White and Tom Mundy
Founded: January 2015
Website: www.goodlord.co

Anyone who has ever rented a property will likely describe the experience as complex at best and agonising at worst.

Fortunately for tenants and landlords, proptech start-up Goodlord is working to change this perception by bringing agents, tenants and landlords together to streamline the rental process through its one multi-sided platform.

The idea for Goodlord came to co-founder Richard White while he was working for London estate agency Foxtons. Here, White witnessed first-hand how the “bad systems” which are commonplace in the industry created time-consuming, awkward struggles which plagued the rental process.

Joined by brothers Tom and Philip Mundy, the venture came together as the trio pooled their knowledge to find a solution: Tom Mundy’s background in accountancy and business was instrumental, while Philip Mundy – who has since left to work on his own start-up – provided programming expertise.

Goodlord’s refreshing approach has proved popular; since its January 2015 launch the business has scaled rapidly. It has hired 72 employees and attracted over £10m investment from high-profile firms including LocalGlobe and Global Founders Capital, as well as angel investors Damian Lane of Episode One and Steve Garnett, EMEA chairman of Salesforce.

Targeting estate agencies who “aspire to offer a better, fairer service to landlords and tenants”, Goodlord’s platform is now in use at 400 agencies across the country, including Sothebys and Life Residential.

The business’ goals for the next year are big ones; with plans to hire more talent, introduce “game-changing” new products for tenants and grow its market share.

We believe Goodlord will be making the rental process easier for everyone for a long time to come.

Founders: Phil Blaydes and Chris Abbass
Founded: July 2015 (launched October 2015)
Website: www.talentful.co

In an industry with that targets hitting KPIs and earning commission as opposed to helping companies make great hires, Talentful claims to represent a new breed of recruitment agency. Having experienced what it views as a flawed model first hand, recruitment professionals Phil Blaydes and Chris Abbass decided to turn it on its head.

In October 2015 the enterprising duo launched Talentful to serve fast-growth tech companies. An uncommon model, Talentful’s recruiters are sent to work in-house as part of the client companies, immersing themselves in company culture and gaining a true understanding of the type of people who would fit the business best.

Furthermore, instead of charging clients fees for successful placements, the start-up charges a fixed monthly sum which covers unlimited hiring and cuts costs to the client. And with no promise of commission, Talentful’s 25 recruiters are motivated by finding the perfect hires rather than taking home a cheque.

Blaydes and Abbass knew they were on to something good when they signed their first big client, Zopa, on a 12-month contract, and went on to make 64 hires for the business alongside saving it almost £300,000 in agency fees. Talentful has now worked with an impressive 53 clients, including Audible, Nutmeg, ClearScore and DubSmash.

Impressively, Talentful is already profitable despite having raised no investment at all, and is projecting £1.6m turnover for 2017. Looking to double in size by the end of this year, the start-up plans to expand internationally, and has already signed its first clients in New York and Berlin, continuing to work towards its goal of “spearheading a disruption of the recruitment industry”.

Founders: Lee Clarke and Greg Gormley
Founded: August 2014 (Launched October 2016)
Website: www.bink.com

In December last year, just two months after launch, London-based loyalty app Bink landed £2m in funding taking its total investment to £10m to date. If that isn’t an endorsement of this nascent start-up’s potential, then its growing customer base and client portfolio is.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Lee Clarke and Greg Gormley, Bink is on a mission to disrupt the estimated $100bn global loyalty industry. Born out of the frustration of missed loyalty points, Bink enables consumers to digitally consolidate their existing plastic loyalty cards within one app, view all their points and balances in an aggregated screen and link them to their payment cards. The app is now nearing 100,000 downloads.

Unlike digital wallet companies, which require shoppers to present their smartphone and have a barcode scanned, Bink users simply have to shop with their Bink-registered payment card to receive all the necessary data and feed it back to the retailer. Additionally, if a user shops in a store where they are not yet a member of the loyalty scheme, the app offers the opportunity to join via a one click button.

It generates revenue through a cost per acquisition fee, when it adds a new consumer to a loyalty programme; a transaction fee for every time a user receives a reward, charging per coupon used and a license fee.

The company’s growing list of 20 major retail clients includes Arcadia Group, Morrisons, Pizza Express, River Island, Virgin Atlantic and Gap to name a few.

With a £25m Series A round set for July, Bink is aiming to secure a total of 50 core retail partners by the end of the year and has its sights set on expansion into the US, with the opening of a New York office later in 2017.

Should everything go to plan – and it looks highly likely – the company is on target to hit £6m in turnover just over a year after launch.

Founder: Adam Kara, Aaron Kara, Ian Darlington and Mike McGann
Founded: August 2014
Website: www.learningheroes.com

Nearly everyone, at some point in their career, has had to sit through a mind-numbingly boring training video at work. Thankfully, Warrington-based Learning Heroes is here to save the day.

Founded in 2014 by Adam Kara, Aaron Kara, Ian Darlington and Mike McGann, the e-learning business creates short, sharp and engaging animated videos. Having originally worked for a conventional e-learning company, the foursome found the content the company created “bored them stiff”.

Deciding to put more emphasis on quirky yet concise animation for “the YouTube generation”, and less focus on stock images and “dragged out” content, with a user-friendly subscription model, Learning Heroes – dubbed the “Netflix of e-learning” – was born.

Accessible via a smartphone or tablet, Learning Heroes aims to condense e-learning so employees have more time to spend ‘on the job’ and at home with their families.

Now making videos for over 300 customers across the UK, US and Australia, Learning Heroes offers subscribers 180 training modules and over 1,500 blended learning courses in its content library. Keen to reflect pressing topics in the news and the workplace, recently added modules include ‘modern slaver’ and ‘unconscious bias’.

Set to make a whopping £2m in profit for 2017, the business counts the likes of Mercedes, Kellogg’s and KFC among its users.

Having recently signed deals with fellow e-learning companies TalentLMS, Docebo and Education Blackbaud, the start-up has set its sights on US expansion and hopes to open an office here in the coming months.

Learning Heroes could certainly teach other start-ups a thing or two about business!

Founders: Martin Sweeney, Nick Lally, Mairtin O’Riada, Leonard Austin and Stephen Whitworth
Founded: October 2014 (Launched February 2016)
Website: www.ravelin.com

One of our top new businesses of 2016, Ravelin’s entry in the prestigious Startups 100 2017 index was a sure bet, especially in light of the recent cyber attacks and the work it does to stop fraudsters before it’s too late.

A fraud detection and prevention platform, Ravelin utilises artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help online businesses protect their margins.

Launched in February 2016 by Martin Sweeney, Nick Lally, Mairtin O’Riada, Leonard Austin and Stephen Whitworth, the co-founders came up with the idea for Ravelin based on past experience. The five had all been employees of taxi app Hailo, a prior Startups 100 company, when they encountered a fraud problem.

While looking for a solution that would cater to Hailo’s on-demand business model, the team realised that no such service existed so they decided to quit the company and build their own.

Integrating visitors, registration, ordering, location and payment data from its clients in real time before using machine learning, Ravelin is able to decipher whether a website visitor is genuine or a fraudster attempting to extract data or finance.

The London-based start-up claims this approach has helped its users reduce charge-backs to 0.1% of sales, as well as increasing conversion and reducing the need for manual reviewing.

Only charging for every successful transaction, one-year old Ravelin has already processed over 10 million requests per month across its 20 clients which includes the likes of Deliveroo, Time Out, Quiqup and Verifone.

With 32 employees and counting, the start-up has raised approximately £5m across three funding rounds. We have to agree with investors; Ravelin is a company that’s easy to back as one of the UK’s best new businesses.

Founder: Emily Forbes
Founded: January 2014
Website: www.seenit.io

The media business has climbed steadily from 94th in the 2015 Startups 100 to 64th in 2016 and it now lays its final claim in the Startups 100 in 24th. It has also been named a finalist in the Startups Awards two years running and won the highly coveted Disrupt Cup at TechCrunch’s 2016’s Startup Battlefield.

Forbes was inspired to launch Seenit while making a documentary about an anti-rhino poaching protest and she came to realise the power a crowd of smartphone-owners could have in capturing a wealth of great footage.

Today, Seenit enables brands and organisations to turn employees, fans and influencers into their own mobile phone crew. The platform works on a pay-as-you-go and subscription basis, charging organisations on how many projects they run, as well as add-ons such as data analytics.

Seenit is used by a roster of global brands which is too big to list in full but includes Adidas, Bacardi, Heineken, Puma, Vodafone, BBC Worldwide, Coca Cola and O2.

The last year has seen the platform expand stateside after winning its first four US clients, while its content has been broadcast across BT Sport, NBC Universal and the BBC. This has coincided with a 112% increase in revenues and the growth of its team from 10 to 25.

Forbes says the industry is now “really starting to wake up” to the power of user generated content, and as brands come to realise its potential, so too will they come to want to work with Seenit.