Founders: Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis
Founded: September 2016 (launched January 2017)
Website: www.perlego.com

These days, there’s an online subscription service for just about everything.

Yet students – who are arguably some of the most avid internet users – are still finding themselves spending hundreds of pounds a year on outdated, cumbersome physical textbooks for their studies.

This is where Perlego comes in.

Founded by 25-year-old school friends Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, Perlego is a subscription service which gives users unlimited access to over 220,000 e-textbooks for £12 a month – less than a third of the cost of the average physical textbook.

Where competitors charge for each e-textbook used – or only list titles of a particular genre – Perlego offers a variety of books covering a range of subjects, and the single monthly fee means users can access as many textbooks as they want or need without breaking the bank.

Alongside the B2C market, Perlego also operates B2B; giving corporations access to skill-building and training literature.

While its founding duo say convincing academic publishers to consider alternatives to their traditional model has been a challenge, 1,500 publishers have already signed up to the platform.

And, with investors including LOVEFiLM co-founder and centrist political party leader Simon Franks and Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman, the business has raised £850,000 funding to date.

Named earlier this year as young entrepreneurs to watch, Van Malderen and Davis began testing in the Spanish market in March with a view to expanding Perlego’s operations into Europe.

The business is also looking to introduce five new features to its platform: collaboration, AI-enhanced discovery, text-to-speech services, an in-house CMS and a dyslexia style guide – all of which are designed to improve the learning experience.

With a vision of becoming “the world’s online learning library”, we’re expecting great things from this disruptive edtech start-up.

Founder: Cathy White
Founded: December 2016
Website: www.cewcomms.com

A PR professional and former marketing manager for Seedcamp, Cathy White was all too aware of how much trouble the traditional agency model could cause PRs and their start-up clients.

Agencies would often over-promise while cutting down to meet start-ups’ limited budgets. Meanwhile, start-ups would question why they weren’t appearing in national press for their low fee.

White envisaged an agency with a difference; one that would give clients realistic expectations from the start, making everyone more satisfied with the relationship.

And so, in December 2016, CEW Communications was borne.

Over the past 18 months, CEW has worked with more than 30 innovative digital UK start-ups such as Gift Wink, Blooms, and fellow Startups 100 company Monese.

Acting as “more than just an agency”, the business provides strategic input that contributes not only to marketing objectives but also to the wider business.

Aiming to ensure clients are “heard and seen where they should be” at lower costs than charged by traditional agencies, White describes CEW as “an add-on CMO”.

But it’s not been an easy road to growth; a fact that makes White and her venture all the more inspiring.

Starting as a solo founder, White says it was hard to be taking seriously – often being perceived as a freelancer. Alongside this, she has battled self-doubt, anxiety and depression; an illness she has suffered from since the age of 14.

Despite these challenges, the entrepreneur has begun to scale CEW into a success – and says this is down to resilience: “It’s only by realising that both myself and the company were better than any negative thoughts in my head that we were able to really expand and grow.”

Over the next year, White aims to double revenues, grow her team, and take steps towards expanding across Europe.

Further down the line, CEW hopes to provide clients with everything from a co-working space to a community engagement programme, becoming the go-to partner for accelerating growth.

With White at the helm, we believe this is entirely possible.

Founders: Tom Gatzen and Robert Imonikhe
Founded: October 2015 (Launched December 2016)
Website: www.idealflatmate.co.uk

You move into a flat share and everything seems hunky dory, but then it all starts to fall apart a few months, or even weeks, down the line.

Annoying habits or behaviours start to emerge and the person you thought your flatmate was, or was pretending to be, vanishes to be replaced by a veritable monster…

Sound familiar? It’s an experience all renters will have gone through at some stage and one that Ideal Flatmate looks to solve.

Best friends, and former flatmates, Tom Gatzen and Robert Imonikhe had experienced their fair share of toxic flat shares.

They realised that, with generation rent booming, there was nothing on the market matching compatible living partners to make for a harmonious living environment.

In December 2016, the pair launched started Ideal Flatmate to plug this gap – and the business does just what it says on the tin.

Flat-hunters are asked 20 questions about their living habits to find a match. Future flatmates can then message each other within a group and browse for their home together.

The start-up operates on a freemium model, with landlords able to list their properties for free and other features accessed through a paywall. It also has a ‘Preemium Flathunter’ option.

The platform currently sees 100,000 active monthly users and 50,000 registered flat hunters, while more than 5,000 landlords and letting agents have already uploaded properties onto the site.

Thanks to a £500,000 seed funding round in July 2017, these users will soon be able to access a more streamlined messaging service as Ideal Flatmate continues to develop its platform and launches a specially created app.

Currently only available in London, plans are already afoot to take the platform UK-wide; after all it’s “who you live with that has the biggest impact on your happiness rather than simply where you live or how nice your house is”.

Founders: Rachel Hugh and Neil Potts
Founded: July 2016 (launched August 2016)
Website: www.thevurgerco.com 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that veganism and vegan food is sweeping the nation.

In fact, veganism is growing at such a rate that January 2018’s ‘Veganuary’ movement (where Brits go vegan for a month) had 160,000 sign-ups; up from just 3,000 sign-ups in 2015.

So, what’s high on the menu for Britain’s vegans right now?

Last year, demand soared for vegan hotdogs but 2018 is the year of the vegan burger, particularly if London-based The Vurger Co’s rise to food fame is anything to go by.

A 100% plant-based restaurant concept, The Vurger Co is disrupting the fast food industry with an indulgent vegan menu.

Initially launched via pop-ups at festivals and markets, the business opened its first full-service restaurant in Shoreditch in March with burgers made from vegetables, seeds, nuts, grains and legumes that promise to be anything but “dry, tasteless or boring”.

Founders – Rachel Hugh and Neil Potts – attest that their vegan burgers are London’s best. And this is a claim which the public seem to agree.

Since opening its restaurant doors, The Vurger Co has attracted roaring trade with strong revenue figures, a 4.5 TripAdvisor star rating, and an army of social media fans with almost 25,000 on Instagram alone (arguably due to the lip-smacking photos of juicy burgers).

The idea behind The Vurger Co is close to its founders’ hearts too.

Having suffered with chronic stomach issues for 10 years, Potts decided to go vegan in June 2016 and saw his stomach issues disappear in a matter of weeks.

However, when he went to a chain restaurant in London and requested a vegan burger, he received a dry, bland mess as a substitute.

This, he says, was the moment that inspired him and Hugh to take the plunge and make veganism mainstream in London with their own range of vegan burgers.

While Hugh and Potts recognise that the pressure is to keep the business thriving in a volatile industry, the duo are determined to prove The Vurger Co is not niche and has the potential to become just as popular as London’s meat equivalents.

With an ever-growing vegan market, we believe them.

Founders: Sara Trechman and Maria Trechman
Founded: February 2015 (launched February 2016)
Website: www.wellandtruly.co.uk

Over the last few years we’ve seen several healthy versions of our favourite snack foods launched (healthy ice cream and popcorn anyone?), and now Well & Truly has made it possible for you to chow down on cheese sticks and tortillas without the ‘Is this bad for me?’ worry.

The brainchild of sisters-in-law Sara Trechman and Maria Trechman, the pair came up with the idea for Well & Truly after noticing that snack products often compromised flavour for health credentials.

With years of experience in the food and consumer goods market, the duo decided they wanted to develop snacks that would challenge the notion that healthy and delicious couldn’t go together, while simultaneously combatting the unrealistic standards of the ‘clean eating’ movement.

Their first aim was to improve the nutritional profiles of tortilla chips; creating their own version with all-natural ingredients, 40% lower fat, gluten free, and no-added sugar, which they launched to the market in February 2016.

Today, Well & Truly retails a mixture of loaded tortilla chips and crunchy corn snacks in cheese, paprika and sour cream flavours and is stocked in 1,500 stores nationwide.

These stockists include Tesco, Ocado, AMT Coffee, Wholefoods market, Simply Fresh, Sourced Market, As Nature Intended and several independent stores, with plans to launch in Holland & Barrett and WHSmith later this year.

The brand also retails internationally to four European countries, and has a corporate arm – providing snacks to the likes of HSBC, KPMG, and Google.

With an all-female team backed by AllBright, a brand-new look, a growing product portfolio, a swelling customer base and a greater focus on the international market, Well & Truly is forecasting an astonishing 600% growth in sales over the next 12 months. So now we can all embrace snacking sans guilt!

Founders: Alex Cowan and Colin Cragg
Founded: December 2014 (Founded May 2017)
Website: www.razorsecure.com

Minutes not months. That’s how much faster cyber security firm RazorSecure can detect a breach compared to the industry average.

Alex Cowan had experienced cyber security issues first-hand throughout his 15 years working in the gaming industry, finding that it took an average of six months to detect a breach while false positives were measured in thousands of alerts per minute.

He wanted to take a different approach to cyber security: focusing on “what is normal” and treating each system as an individual as opposed to focusing on networks and training for attacks.

In 2014, Cowan joined with Colin Crag to put this approach into action with RazorSecure.

Launched in May 2017, RazorSecure partners with system suppliers and transport builders, integrating into their solutions to provide first line customer support.

One such partnership is Icomera, which provides connectivity to thousands of trains and tens of thousands of buses including operators in the UK such as South Western Railway, Greater Anglia, and Arriva Northern. It also works with VT Miltoper, a supplier of wireless access points to the aviation industry.

With the EU bringing in a new set of cyber security regulations for operators of infrastructure such as rail, aviation and roads (mandating just the kind of security monitoring and anomaly detection that RazorSecure provides), the next 12 months will be vital for future growth.

Beyond that, the start-up has plans to secure all of the new European trains over the next five years and “make significant inroads” into inflight entertainment. RazorSecure also sees major opportunities for its software in communications and smart cities as well.

In the ongoing arms race against the cyber criminals, RazorSecure’s unique and innovative solution is streets ahead of its competition in helping clients protect their data.

Founder: Rajeeb Dey
Founded: September 2016
Website: learnerbly.com

Where do you go if you want to find a coach or great sales course for yourself as a start-up founder, or for your senior leadership team?

This was the question award-winning entrepreneur Rajeeb Dey was faced with when he wanted to invest in his, and his employees, development but realised he didn’t know where to go or what courses would be best to spend out on.

As creator of jobs platform Enternships – which has helped over 7,000 companies hire interns and graduates – Dey was also noticing how the companies he worked with wanted to develop their own people but were allocating personal learning budgets “with no idea of how effective that investment was”.

Inspired, and with data estimating that by 2025 half of the jobs we see today won’t exist, Dey realised the need for continuous learning. And he sought about looking for ways to create a shortcut to help people find learning content that they could trust, without having to spend hours researching.

This lightbulb moment has culminated in Learnerbly, the workplace platform which curates trusted content from experts and entrepreneurs such as Baroness Martha Lane Fox, and Unilever chief HR officer Leena Nair, alongside recommendations for the best conferences, coaches, and classes.

Backed by £1.6m seed funding from the likes of Frontline Ventures and Playfair Capital, and angel investors such as Eventbrite co-founder Renaud Visage, London-based Learnerbly has grown quickly in the 18 months since launch.

Its roster of clients includes IDEO, GoCardless, Duedil, carwow and ustwo, while the start-up has won accolades at the Duke of York’s esteemed Pitch at Palace competition and was named by EU-Startups as one of 10 new businesses set to disrupt the education industry.

With a goal to become the global destination for professional development, the next 12 months will see the start-up expand its offer internationally and scale up its partnership function.

Founders: Michelle Kennedy and Greg Orlowski
Founded: October 2016 (launched February 2017)
Website: www.peanut-app.io/

Michelle Kennedy knows a thing or two about what makes for a successful app.

The serial entrepreneur, and mum to four-year-old ‘peanut’ Finlay, has been involved in the creation and growth of two of the country’s most popular dating apps. She helped to launch millennial dating app Bumble and previously served as deputy CEO of $100m+ Badoo.

Created with Deliveroo co-founder Greg Orlowski, her latest start-up venture – London-based Peanut – draws on her technical background and business experience.

Having spent five years connecting people for romantic relationships, CEO Kennedy has built Peanut to address a different area of relationships; targeting the issue of maternal loneliness and isolation to help mothers connect with one another so as to ‘meet as mamas, connect as women’.

Using algorithms more commonly associated with dating (such as the act of ‘swiping right’) to offer a great user experience, the app enables mothers to build relationships with one another while simultaneously bringing together valuable information and content relating to motherhood.

The free-to-use app is able to show its users content that is trending among its community while also highlighting content that’s most relevant to who the user is as a mother.

With a team of seven and seed investment from notable investors including Sweet Capital Investment; the fund from Candy Crush inventors King.com, and Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm Sound Ventures, Peanut has already seen over 300,000 mums sign up across the UK and US with over 17 million swipes.

While Kennedy asserts that starting and scaling Peanut has not been without its challenges (the app has received criticism for only being open to mothers and not fathers too) her primary focus for the business is to “create a platform for mothers which is long overdue, and much deserved”.

The ultimate goal? “To have Peanut become synonymous with modern motherhood and to challenge, and change, perceptions around motherhood.”

Founders: Max Whicher & Alex Bodini
Founded: 2016
Website: www.spindigital.co

Social media has changed marketing unrecognisably over the last decade – but many start-ups and small businesses just don’t have the time or skills to properly take advantage of it.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Max Whicher & Alex Bodini in 2016, Spin Brands identifies businesses with big ideas and helps them turn their social media headaches into their best assets.

Spin Brands takes recurring revenue on a monthly retainer from its 60 regular customers. They span everything from business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C), to mass and niche markets across six different countries.

Clients include minimalist sport shoe start-up Vivobarefoot, fellow Startups 100 business Feast It, White Line Hotels, Modern Baker, and Shore Projects.

Its services include helping brands handle their day to day social media, creating bespoke content to engage users, growing their communities, using performance marketing for brand building, logo-redesign and brand guidelines, and bespoke digital strategy.

Its has a range of packages and plans to suit its client’s individual needs, ranging from £150 per month for its basic pay-per-click package, to £800 per month for its ‘step on the gas’ plan.

In the next 12 months, Spin Digital is intending to triple in size by continuing to innovate and not just “doing more of the same”. It will hire “great” people, increase its own marketing and build on the platform it has already created.

Already hitting revenues of £800,000 (and netting a comfortable £250,000 in profit), the founders want to create a £1m revenue business in its third year.

Started with just £100 from each of the founders and having raised no external finance to date, Spin’s steady month-on-month growth has been achieved by sticking to its target customers and its core ideas. We can’t wait to see how it develops.

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

Baby2Body is the only data-driven platform dedicated to optimising women’s health and wellbeing before, during and after pregnancy.

Launched three years ago, the start-up was created by sport psychologist and fitness trainer Melinda Nicci after she experienced frustration at the lack of positive and empowering resources for staying active and healthy during pregnancy.

Nicci wanted to have a healthy baby and be happy and healthy herself, and knew all expecting and new mothers would want this too. And yet, according to Nicci, the information that is out there is “outdated, not always credible, and confusing, which leads to uncertainty and anxiety”.

Recognising the problem, Nicci wanted to help women live happier, make healthier choices and ultimately have healthier babies – and this would become a mission statement for her start-up Baby2Body.

Using artificial intelligence, Baby2Body delivers a hyper-personalised coaching experience, with the most up to date and evidenced based advice, based on a woman’s exact stage of pregnancy or new motherhood. The platform is also able to integrate multiple data points, such as whether it’s the first or second baby and what their current lifestyle is, in order to personalise the advice.

The business then provides each woman with this personalised advice right when she needs it, delivered through its mobile app, Alexa voice service, and website.

Its a service which new mums and mums-to-be have quickly bought into and already Baby2Body has nearly 700,000 users.

Investors have also backed the start-up to the tune of £1.3m to help Nicci achieve her goal of making Baby2Body the go-to brand for all women to optimise their health and wellbeing.

While Nicci highlights that Baby2Body is only focused on pregnancy and new mothers for now, expansion is also in the pipeline. She tells us the service will be “expanding to all women, in every country and in as many languages.”