Founders: Jack Beaman and Novo Abakare 
Founded: January 2015
Website: syftapp.com 

This punchy little David Haye-backed start-up is coming out swinging against the big players in the temporary recruitment space, thanks to its new approach.

Founded by Jack Beaman and Novo Abakare, Syft is an online top tier staffing solution that helps employers in the hospitality and events industry find the best-trained, vetted workers.

Having experienced the frustrations of temping while at university – where, he says, flexible workers could often be treated like a commodity – Beaman wanted to create something that put worker welfare at its heart, while simultaneously giving control to the employer.

Since launching three years ago, Syft has attracted a number of employers from the hospitality, events and warehousing sectors including Gordon Ramsay’s chain of restaurants, the SMART group, and Dish.

It has also whet investor’s appetites with an impressive £8.75m funding raised to date. Backers include Creandum, PROfounders Capital, Lord Young and founders from Photobox, Gamesys, Play.com and Velocity, alongside Haye.

But you expect that investment figure to rise over the coming year.

Syft is in talks with some of “the world’s top VC firms” to raise a £10m to £15m Series B round, as it looks to launch in four new cities in the next year and launch new verticals in the five cities it’s already live in.

While its customer and investor base are laudable, so to are the aims of the business – Syft’s personal ambitions come with a philanthropic edge. The business is committed to raising the wages of workers across the UK and matching them with trusted employers.

It also has plans to launch its own charity focused on helping the homeless find jobs by giving them the necessary skills and social support and matching them with employers.

This commitment to fairness and high standards is something the start-up will hold close to its chest, even as it scales to fulfil its aim of becoming “the world’s largest provider of temporary recruitment”.

Founder: Mark Wright
Founded: June 2014 (launched January 2015)
Website: climb-online.co.uk

Making its third, and final, consecutive Startups 100 appearance is the now multi-million pound revenue business Climb Online.

Up six places from 2017,  Climb Online is the creation of Mark Wright – the self-taught digital marketing specialist and former BBC Apprentice winner – which, with backing from Lord Sugar, has become one of the UK’s fastest growing digital marketing agencies.

Working with brands to help them reach customers through campaigns utilising Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and social media, Climb Online launched in January 2015 and has seen its client base, and finances, skyrocket ever since.

The start-up now works with more than 400 businesses from across the UK and overseas, including well-known brands such as C.V. Library and Groupon, has a team of 45 staff, and is projecting turnover of £10m by the end of the 2018/2019 financial year.

Its strap-line ‘Do Digital Differently’ is something the business has been reflecting in the campaigns it creates and manages for its clients, and also in the alternative services it offers.

In January 2018, the start-up launched an online academy to help tackle the UK’s worsening skills gap. Offering digital marketing courses to help learners and professionals advance their careers, ‘Climb Academy’ will help candidates who complete the courses to access roles with businesses or agencies.

More recently, Climb Online added another string to its bow with the launch of ‘Crypto Climber’, a digital marketing solution for the cryptocurrency sector.

International expansion is still on the cards too. The Climb Online sales team have been pro-actively targeting Australian ba-based business owners for a number of months now, and expect to be ready to launch in the country by Autumn 2018.

While Wright proudly announces that the business has “exceeded growth objectives and so much more”, he won’t stop until  Climb Online is the largest provider of digital marketing solutions for UK businesses:

“We have a great team, great product and a booming industry. Nothing can stop us.”

Founders: Pete Dowds and Tom Brooks
Founded: October 2015 (Launched December 2015­)
Website: www.elder.org

Pete Dowds and Tom Brooks both had “terrible experiences” finding care homes for their grandparents and so the duo decided to adapt the business model they’d used for their successful cleaner booking app Mopp to build a better way.

Their answer was Elder Technologies.

On a mission to create a better alternative to the UK’s ailing care industry, instead of “only buiding a bridge” as other businesses have done, Elder Technologies is a platform which matches those in need of full-time care with live-in carers that possess the necessary experience and skills.

Elder charges a weekly fee of £795 per week with the option of a live-in care plan provided by lifetime mortgage specialists Key Retirement. This allows customers to release some money from their home to cover care costs.

Launched less than three years ago, the business is already looking after hundreds of customers across the UK. In fact it has grown so rapidly that Dowds and Brooks claims their soaring customer numbers are equivalent to the creation of a new care home every 15 days.

Elder has taken advantage of marketing channels to build its brand image, with its first television campaign resulting in a significant uplift. Last year saw the start-up achieve 500% growth and it has “no intention of slowing down now”, with plans to scale-up customer acquisition considerably over the next year.

Ultimately, Elder wants its customers to be able to live in their own homes, living their own lives, for as long as they possibly can – a commendable goal and one we’re sure everyone will support.

Founder: Pip Murray
Founded: June 2013 (Launched January 2015)
Website: www.pipandnut.com

Pip & Nut‘s start-up story is an astonishing one.

In the crowded nut-butter market, and in the space of a mere three years, the business has launched in over 5,000 stores in the UK and Europe.

Stockists include Sainsbury’s, Tesco, ASDA and Morrisons in the UK, alongside major supermarket chains in the Netherlands, Ireland and Norway.

Founded by keen marathon runner and 2017 Young Gun Pip Murray in 2013, the business operates on the basis that health food should never be boring.

But how does it ensure it isn’t? With innovative flavour combinations.

These combinations have helped it create its much-lauded Coconut Almond Butter (which won a Grocer new product award), a constantly rotating cast of limited edition flavours and a variety of sizes, from 30g squeeze packs up to 1kg tubs.

It also has a range of almond milks sweetened with honey and vanilla, which no other brands are yet to create.

In a traditional industry with a number of established players, Pip & Nut – which won the Women in Business Award at the Startups Awards 2016 – stands out with “youthful, playful and emotive design-led” branding. This branding hasa helped it win partnerships with Nike and Made.com, and secure more than 130,000 social media followers and counting.

It’s not unlike any other start-up though in that’s its had to weather some storms. Murray says Brexit and a weakening pound forced her to increase prices, but she remains determined and has recently secured new UK manufacturing partners and a stronger supply chain.

Targeting £7.3m in sales for 2018, Pip & Nut will look to strengthen it existing listings in the UK and Europe over the next few months and will invest heavily in digital to boost its online sales.

Behind it all is the inspiring Murray who’s no doubt brought the perseverance needed for marathon training to bear on building and growing a successful start-upsthat has all the makings of becoming a household name.

Founders: James Griffith, Josh Shires, Will Mullen, Lucy Hutchinson and James Day
Founded: March 2015 (launched November 2016)
Website: www.mous.co

A phone, camera, social media feed, shopping centre, search engine and gaming system that we can fit into our pocket – the smartphone has become an essential item to fulfill all of our needs.

Unfortunately, protecting these sleek devices from damage usually means buying a bulky case with all the elegance of a tractor tyre.

Entrepreneurs James Griffith and Josh Shires understood this and, spotting a gap in the market in 2015, began developing slim, stylish cases that could also effectively protect phones from damage.

Launched in November 2016, their tech brand Mous Products offers cases that deliver just that.

Spearheading innovation in the phone case market with tech-informed research and development, each Mous case is made from unique, impact-absorbing AiroShock material which can protect your smartphone from all levels of of damage.

To market the product, Mous unleashed a social media campaign which saw the team drop phones in Mous cases from windows, cranes and iconic London bridges. Crucially, the phones lived to tell the tale.

As a result, when Mous launched on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo in 2016, the business received a record $2.4m worth of pre-orders and attracted 50,000 backers.

This marked the most successful mobile accessories crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, and the biggest crowdfunding round for an iPhone case, ever. So impressive was this feat that the start-up was awarded Crowdfunded Business of the Year at the Startups Awards 2017.

And the business has continued to get noticed.

Picking up clues from leaks and speculation surrounding the then-upcoming iPhone X, in 2017 Mous’ team designed a case for it ahead of the launch. They then snuck into A London iPhoneX launch, bought a phone, slotted it into their case, and threw it 20 feet into the air in front of aghast Apple fans.

Again, the phone survived, the stunt went viral, and Mous’ sales skyrocketed.

With multi-million pound turnover and a hugely creative advertising team, this start-up looks set to shake up the smartphone accessories market long into the future.

Founders: James Cox and Steve Reid
Founded: 2015 (Launched February 2016)
Website: www.simbasleep.com

In the ongoing ‘battle of the beds’, the now two-time top 10 Startups 100-listed Simba is refusing to lie down.

The start-up claims to be Europe’s leading sleep brand and has sold 100,000 mattresses in the UK alone.

Unlike its simple memory foam-based rivals – including Startups 100 2017 business eve Sleep – Startups Awards People’s Champion finalist Simba integrates technology into the design process from the start with mattresses combining memory foam and springs.

The Simba mattress was created based on research from the Sleep-to-Live institute, which has a data-bank of body profiling data from 10 million people around the world.

75 prototypes, and one year of research and development, later, founders James Cox and Steve Reid had a mattress to satisfy the sleep needs of the majority of the population.

Investors have also been satisfied. In December 2017, Simba landed £40m in Series B funding in a round led by Atami Capital, alongside existing backers Nigel Wray, Wharton Asset Management and Swiss bank Lombard Odier.

This funding brought Simba’s total investment to £58.5m and is now being used for further diversification of its product range which currently includes mattresses, duvets, pillows, beds, and accessories. It will also help Simba drive global growth as it looks to bring perfectly engineered sleep to the world.

£58.5m funding and 100,000 unit sales is a major achievement for any start-up but Simba’s success is hardly surprising.

Its founding team are veterans of mattress manufacturing and have more than 30 years’ of experience in the industry, with one million mattresses sold through previous companies. Cox also has plenty of experience with start-ups, having helped them with funding and strategy.

Now set to enter the £10bn US market and expand into the £11bn Asian market over the coming months, it seems that Cox and Reid can rest easy knowing that they’ve created a business with big brand potential.

Founders: Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka
Founded: August 2015 (Launched April 2016)
Website: bulb.co.uk

Inefficiency. Poor service. Expensive tariffs. There’s no prizes for guessing which outdated industry that describes.

For Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka, these were just some of the issues they wanted to rectify in the energy market.

Having worked in the sector, and witnessed first-hand how improvements could be made, they decided it was about time that an independent business took on the Big Six to bring clean and affordable energy to British households.

Their solution? Bulb, a technology-led energy supplier providing 100% renewable electricity and 10% green gas.

Launched in April 2016, Wood and Gudka’s lightbulb business idea gained huge momentum early on, securing over 30,000 customers with prices 20% lower than its competitors. And it was this staggering growth which saw the business rank among the top 10 in the Startups 100 2017.

One year on and Bulb’s customer numbers have skyrocketed by 10 times – buoyed by a team of 104 – meaning the business now supplies energy to more than 300,000 homes in Britain.

This figure equates to 1% of the energy market or, to give a better idea of the scale of Bulb’s impact, enough homes to fill the size of Leeds.

Oh, and did we mention that Bulb is now the number one rated supplier on Trustpilot?

These are all amazing feats for a business in its infancy, particularly when you consider the dominance of the Big Six, and proof that the start-up is a deserving recipient of the esteemed number one position in the Startups 100 2018.

Having also won judges hearts at the Startups Awards 2017 scooping the overall prize of The Start-Up Loans Start-up of the Year, Bulb is keen to do the same with consumers and wants to get more of the public on side by putting customer service first.

For instance, Bulb has publicly promised to add £10 to a member’s account if they have to wait more than five minutes on the phone or if an email takes longer than five working days to garner a response.

Customer happiness also features heavily in the start-up’s plans for the next year. Over the coming months, the start-up will be launching new products including a pre-pay offer so that customers can access affordable renewable energy.

Bulb believes “business can be a force for good” and is “out to show that to the world”. That’s a cause we’re happy to get behind.