Founder: Rachel Carrell
Founded: March 2016 (launched July 2016)
Website: www.korukids.co.uk

According to mother of two Rachel Carrell, the childcare industry is broken.

The options available to parents are expensive, inflexible and of a patchy and unpredictable quality – the search for a provider that meets their needs can be “exhausting and emotional”.

Enter Koru Kids, Rachel Carrell’s start-up solution to London parents’ childcare woes.

A key USP, Koru Kids makes childcare cheaper by cleverly assigning one nanny to two families at a time.

As the nanny looks after both sets of children at once, each family pays a much-lower-than-average fee which, when put together, still makes for higher-than-average pay for the nanny. Not to mention the fact that the children get to make new friends!

Alongside these benefits, Koru Kids recruits, trains and vets its own quality nannies in-house, offering ongoing support and development through its active nanny community.

To date, the business has received a whopping 15,000 nanny applications and has accepted and trained more than 1,200 of these.

At its heart Koru Kids says it is a tech business, building and using its own software, automating much of its process and thereby boosting efficiency.

The start-up’s unique approach has definitely made an impression on parents and the business now provides around 14,000 hours of childcare a month, growing by an average of 10% each week.

Investors have also taken note, and the business has raised a total of £4.1m from VCs – notably, its latest round was oversubscribed by four times. Last year, the business was shortlisted for Tech Business of the Year and The Start Up Loans Inspiring Entrepreneur of the Year at the Startups Awards 2017.

“I want to build something that helps mums, dads, children and childcare workers all at once; something lasting and beneficial; something sustainable that people love,” Carrell tells us. “We’re building the world’s best childcare service.”

Founder: Peter Watson and Bradley McKenny
Founded: July 2015
Website: www.distract.co.uk

Whilst studying marketing at university, Peter Watson was baffled at the lack of focus on digital marketing on his course:

“Our university course didn’t touch on digital marketing and traditional marketers seemed to act as if nothing had changed. It was almost frustrating to see businesses ignoring social media.”

Watson had been involved in marketing since the age of 16 after honing his skills in social media, Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and email marketing while working for an events company in the football industry.

This experience had given him an in-depth knowledge of the medium and he joined forces with co-founder Bradley McKenny to come up with a winning business idea.

With McKenny, who has previously “made a killing though affiliate networks”, the pair started their business Distract in July 2015.

Buoyed by a young team (23 is the average age), Distract specialises in performance marketing and creative social media, with clients paying a fixed fee each month.

It has amassed a diverse range of almost 50 clients since launch including a growing tea brand, one of the largest accountancy companies in the Midlands, a major regional law firm, and a leading marshmallow brand.

Started while they were still at university with £5,000 from their previous businesses, the pair are evangelists for student entrepreneurship: “You’re in a supportive environment where you can easily meet experts in any number of fields, you’ve got a roof over your head and a big loan that covers your living costs.”

And the duo evidence just what can be achieved as young entrepreneurs with Distract said to be the “fastest growing” digital agency in the East Midlands.

Looking to the future, plans are in place to expand beyond its Lincolnshire boundaries and launch its first internal brand – we can’t to see what Distract does next.

Founders: Ben Chatfield and Ollie Povey
Founded: January 2017 (founded May 2017)
Website: www.heytempo.com/talent

Ben Chatfield and Ollie Povey have plenty of experience working in recruitment. Chatfield working in hiring for City pantry and Hambro Perks, and Povey as head of operations for Jobandtalent.

Using their combined knowledge of what people don’t like about using an agency, they created Tempo to “dramatically reduce” time and cost to hire at the same time as improving quality.

Their approach uses video profiles, ‘rich-format CVs (including ratings and reviews, salary expectations and skills), combined with artificial intelligence (AI) to match candidates to jobs that fit their skills and experience. Tempo claims its service works out four times cheaper than a traditional agency; and its fast: 27 minutes to the fastest placement.

For temporary placements, the start-up takes 20% of the candidates wage and charges a £2,500 flat fee for permanent placements regardless of salary.

More than 550 organisations have already hired through Tempo including Monzo, Goodlord, Hostmaker, Nested and Hello Fresh, as well as enterprise customers like The Boston Consulting Group and the Daily Mail Group Trust.

For job-seekers, Tempo enables them to choose how much they earn, get rated for each job, and get paid every week. It currently has more than 10,200 candidates in its talent pool with 1,263 minutes of video recorded.

For the time being the business will continue to scale within London and conquer its office and admin sector before it sets its sight on new geographies and verticals. It also has plans to launch a video interviewing service so “companies can skip the phone screen”.

The estimated $400bn recruitment industry hasn’t much changed its process in the last few decades and Tempo might just be the platform to drag it into the 21st century.

Founders: Katie Buckett and Alex Pearmain
Founded: November 2015 (Launched January 2016)
Website: www.onefiftyconsultancy.com

Katie Buckett is a digital brand communications expert who’s worked for global and UK organisations. Alex Pearmain was one of the early UK pioneers of brand social media adoption.

With plenty of experience working in marketing inside large brands between them, the pair saw how brands often made decisions about how to engage customers based on their view, instead of basing it on human behaviours – behaviours which can be seen by the way consumers interact every day online.

With the help of “some wine”, the duo started OneFifty Consultancy.

A digital consultancy, the business uses data and an understanding of human behaviours to “have more effective brand and commercial interactions with the people who actually matter”.

The company helps organisations to develop strategies, models and capabilities, and extract answers from social data to inform decision making. This means it is able “bridge two different worlds” in a truly unique way: fusing digital data analysis and insight, behavioural psychology and creative thinking.

Since launch in January 2016, the business has worked with 28 clients including BP, Sage, Sainsbury’s, O2, Unilever, Mazda, Mercure Hotels, Airbnb, and Green Cola.

Holding the view that “the days of monthly retainers are numbered”, OneFifty instead charges clients for their time based on hourly estimates of the tasks it needs to carry out to fulfil project commitments.

Pioneering a new approach to digital marketing can be a lonely place, but OneFifty has confidence: in five years it hopes to be the most influential brand marketing consultancy.

For Buckett and Pearmain this ambition isn’t enough. The pair say they know they’ll have truly succeeded when other consultancies start imitating what they’re doing.

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

This is the second appearance in the Startups 100 index for Floom, the online marketplace for independent florists.

The business was borne out of founder Lana Elie’s frustration of trying to buy beautiful flowers from independents and larger online destinations.

Independent florists suffered from an outdated offline buying process, whilst online conglomerates often gave bad customer service because they’d monopolised the market and knew the customer had nowhere else to go.

Floom, a Startups Awards People’s champion finalist, allows florists to upload images of their own products so customers can see exactly what they are buying from source.

This nifty solution has won the start-up a wealth of fans in the form of the general public, celebrities like Naomi Campbell, Jamie Oliver and Amanda Holden, and businesses such as L’Oréal and Barclays.

Elie, who has written about her experiences of starting a business in a blog for Startups.co.uk, has a history in the fashion industry. She began her career as a personal assistant at Burberry before working as a digital producer, eventually becoming head of brand solutions at “one of the most venerated fashion institutions of the past three-plus decades”.

This fashion background has no-doubt helped Elie’s business thrive with a keen eye for detail and an understanding what makes for a winning bouquet in the UK and abroad.

2018 has already seen Floom launch in New York, and Elie tells us that she plans to consolidate Floom’s position in the $20bn market there by expanding its supply offering.

There are also hints of launches in other cities across the Atlantic by the end of the year.

Alongside this, a number of key hires will bolster its tech for both customers and florists and improve its marketing.

While these are big ambitions, Elie doesn’t plan on stopping there and is intent on replacing FTD (Interflora) as the dominant online flower provider. We’re sure Floom will be coming up roses!

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

If you’ve ever exhibited at a conference, exhibition or event then you’ll know that you need a lot of kit, and time on your hands, to get your exhibition stand sorted.

In the past, you would have had to search around for graphics, displays, furniture etc. and then would’ve had to source these items from multiple suppliers.

Thankfully, three year-old start-up ExpoCart is bringing exhibiting into the 21st century with a one stop shop platform which pulls everything together.

ExpoCart covers all the major UK exhibition venues and has the UK’s leading and highest quality exhibition suppliers on the platform – meaning they have the best choice of products.

Backed by almost £1m in funding, the business enables exhibitors to order everything they need for all of their exhibitions without needing to source quotes and order from multiple suppliers.

Created by 24-year-old founders Jasmine Eilfield and Ryan Farquharson – graduates of the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy – ExpoCart has already helped over 2,500 exhibitors to organise their stands at major venues such as ExCel London, Olympia, NEC Birmingham, and Manchester EventCity.

The business has an exciting time ahead for its team of 12 as Eilfield and Farquharson plan to launch a new vertical; an online printed displays shop.

They also intend to launch ExpoCart in a few European cities in the next few months.

And, while the founders say breaking into a market that hasn’t changed for hundreds of years has been challenging, their ambition for ExpoCart is to make it the easiest and largest platform that exhibitors around the world use to order all the equipment that they need.

Founder: Ibi Thomson
Founded: October 2016
Website: issoriachange.com

Founded by Ibi Thomson, Issoria is rapidly on its way to disrupting the management consulting industry.

Having left school at 16, Ibi built a successful career helping businesses to implement transformative growth strategies.

During this time however, he and his business partner Matthew Chalk realised there were faults in the system. Too often, clients would pay hefty fees to large firms and receive poor results. Businesses were looking for a better, more cost-effective way to manage transformation.

So, Thomson founded Issoria – a network which now connects 6,000 independent management consultants across 100 countries.

Issoria provides teams of consultants, in a managed service model, that bridges the gap between management consulting and contract resourcing. Clients benefit from having “one hand to shake” and a coherent managed solution, in addition to receiving elite consultants at 30% to 50% less cost than the pyramid staffing models of the established major consulting firms.

Thomson says the business “provides the scale and resources of a major global firm but, due to our networked business model, retains the speed, agility and low fixed-cost base of a small business.”

It’s a unique approach that has attracted high-profile, multi-billion-pound clients including Jaguar Land Rover, Cargill Inc, G4S, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Land Securities and more.

But success hasn’t come without challenges. Determined to self-fund the company, Thomson invested his life savings in the business, turning down offers from venture capitalists. Unable to afford employees at the start, he says he would typically spend 80 to 100 hours a week working.

Now, though, his commitment has paid off, with the start-up projecting £3m turnover in for 2018.

Looking ahead, Issoria’s “big hairy audacious goal” is to have served half of the world’s biggest companies by 2030. Considering the start-up’s current success, it looks well within reach.

Founders: Alex Chin and Christopher Moon
Founded: January 2016
Website: www.pad.co.uk

After years of terrible rental experiences Alex Chin and Christopher Moon felt there was absolutely no reason for the waste, conflict, hassle, and lack of trust that seemed to have become par for the course with modern renting.

Their solution, Pad, enables you to find, view, and rent your next home all through your phone, but the real USP is that you can rent deposit free and without agency fees.

What’s more, you’re covered for maintenance issues for the duration of their tenancy.

Moon’s second fast-growth business – check out fellow Startups 100 2018 company Tribe – renters pay £9.99 per month for Pad’s services.

And it’s not just the renters who benefit; landlords and estate agents reap the rewards from reduced hassle and tradespeople can “tap into the ecosystem” to access fix or repair issues which are 90% covered by Pad.

Whilst the start-up expected agents to be its main competitors, they have in fact become its “friends” and now list all their stock through the platform.

After 18 months, Pad had thousands of properties listed and thousands of renters buying into its “rent revolution”.

Projected turnover for 2018 is £5.8m, with £2.6m gross profit – all of which will be reinvested into global scaling. Pad is currently in the process of securing £2m in investment that will allow it to launch in five cities in the UK.

Beyond that, the next 12 months will see it raise a Series B round to take its solution global as it looks to become the Airbnb for long term local renters and cut out waste on the supply side for landlords.

Chin and Moon’s passion for the business is clear: “We won’t rest until Pad scales globally and we have seen that we have the demand and supply to do so. Everyone in the market believes that, with the right funding, this will be the rental market unicorn.”

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

In his late teens Luke Johnston suffered a serious sports injury to his knee. Little did he know at the time, but this accident would lead to the creation of now two-time Startups 100-featured business PACK’D…

In order to speed up his recovery, Johnston began focusing more on his nutrition but it wasn’t until after finishing university that he began to realise the lack of high quality, nutritious juices and smoothies.

A product that he wanted, and wanted to enable others to benefit from, Johnston teamed up with friend Alex Stewart and set out to solve the problem.

Launched in 2015, PACK’D specialises in frozen smoothie kits that are developed with sports nutritionists and can be prepared in under one minute.

Each kit contains six precisely portioned flash-frozen fruit and vegetables and a bespoke blend of four superfoods. October 2017 also saw the launch of a protein smoothie kit range.

Today, Startups Awards-nominated PACK’D has secured 1,500 listings nationally including Sainsbury’s Tesco, Ocado, Whole Foods, Iceland, Lidl, and Amazon Fresh, as well as food service at the Compass Group and KPMG.

While its list of stockist are formidable, Johnston admits it has been a hard road.

He and Stewart worked three jobs, while he lived in a shed for two years, to fund the business and try to make it work. That’s not to mention the 3am starts they had hawking their product on Chatsworth Road Market in the cold and wet when they were looking to get initial orders.

In the end, the hard slog has been worth it and now Johnston and Stewart believe the growth of PACK’D proves “frozen is the future”.

And the pair don’t intend on stopping at frozen smoothies either.

They tell us they have “plenty of innovation” in the pipeline and are determined to make a positive and lasting impact on the world by empowering individuals with elite nutrition at their fingertips.

Founders: Ed Barton and Ben Kidd
Founded: January 2016 (launched October 2017)
Website: curiscope.co.uk

Over recent years, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) has burst onto the market as an exciting medium for entertainment – think Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR… even Pokémon Go.

Yet while gaming sits on the cusp of a virtual revolution, what about other public interests like education?

Enter Curiscope, the Brighton start-up combining VR and AR’s entertainment factor with educational experiences to encourage exciting and immersive learning.

Led by former web developer and filmmaker Ed Barton and BAFTA-nominated 3D visual artist Ben Kidd, Curiscope’s journey began on YouTube.

The start-up’s 360-degree shark dive video gained over 29 million views – making it one of the most-viewed VR experiences ever.

Buoyed by the positive reaction to their work, the duo launched their first product: Virtuali-Tee, a t-shirt which, when worn and viewed through a connected app, displays a life-like 3D animation of the internal organs. Users can actively ‘explore’ human anatomy through their smart devices or a VR headset.

Excited by this unique educational product, over 1,500 backers invested in the Virtuali-Tee crowdfunding campaign, which raised over £74,000 and shipped in October 2017.

Following this success, Curiscope has partnered with HTC to launch virtual deep-sea dive experience Operation Apex, and is working with Dorling Kindersley to create All About Virtual Reality: a book containing five educational VR experiences for readers to explore.

To date, Curiscope has raised £750,000 funding and harbours plans to expand into the US. The business has been lauded by the media, with Barton gaining Forbes’ 30 Under 30 status earlier this year.

With a catalogue of accessible products enabling users to learn about the lesser-seen parts of our universe, we’re excited to see what this start-up does next. As Barton and Kidd say, “for us this has always been about bringing this incredible technology to everybody”.