Founders: Steve Noyes and Duncan Summers
Founded: 2015
Website: www.sync-box.com

The world’s only universally adaptable, invisible wiring system, Syncbox is the developer of a hidden socket that merges power and AV connections all into one unit.

Founded by Steve Noyes – who previously owned an AV installation company – the product was originally conceived as a solution for cinema rooms and television installations.

While flat screen TVs were getting thinner, Noyes found it was still impossible to have them sit flush to the wall – unless perhaps there was some kind of recessed socket….

Noyes and co-founder Duncan Summers sketched out a design on the back of an envelope and quickly found a patent attorney to check they were designing a unique product.

After enlisting a designer to bring “the invention to life”, the Syncbox was launched in 2015.

Syncbox then got its big break after appearing on Dragons’ Den in the same year where it managed to snag £55,000 for 35% equity from Deborah Meaden. The duo credit this appearance with being their “shop window to the world” and enabling them to develop new products.

Come 2018, and Syncbox now sells 3,000 units in a year with “literally no competition” – at least in the UK and Europe, where it has five Design Protections in place.

Its units are now available through more than 1,000 locations in the UK, and retail in over 14 countries.

The start-up says the key to its recent success has been in presenting its ‘Value Engineering’ report to big name companies such as WSP, Centre Parcs, Gansevoort Hotels, Crest Nicholson, Best Western Hotels, and Crown Plaza. The findings from this report detail the time and cost savings of installing its products.

Over the next three years, Noyes and Summer hope to have grown the business by more than £20m and be trading in 50 countries. As a unique idea with backing from high-profile brands and the support of a Dragon, we’ll be watching closely.

Founders: Tim Antos and Robert Hall
Founded: October 2013 (Launched July 2015)
Website: www.kokoon.io

Kokoon has garnered its fair share of Startups.co.uk accolades since launching in 2015. Founders Tim Antos and Richard Hall were included in the Young Guns Class of 2016, it has appeared twice before in the Startups 100 and was nominated in the Startups Awards for Innovative Business of the Year.

Now featuring in the Startups 100 for its third and final time, Kokoon is the company using audio to tackle sleeplessness with the world’s first sleep-sensing headphones.

The truly unique start-up – which also claims its headphones are the best for cancelling out noise – has six patents for its technology which encompasses sensing technology (first consumer on ear EEG), ergonomics (comfort in bed), and system design (intelligent audio).

This patented system design relates to the Kokoon headphone’s sensor-enabled feedback loop which adapts audio in response to the body, environment and context and also learns and personalises audio in response to what is effective over time.

Alongside its headphones, which retail for £349.99 (arguably a reasonable price to pay in return for countless good nights’ sleep), Kokoon is also in the process of launching an app.

Called Kokoon Relax, the app will give users access to a range of free and paid-for content including guided relaxation, soundscapes, relaxing music and more.

With nearly half (47%) of Britons complaining of difficulty falling asleep due to stress or worry, there’s a huge potential market of struggling sleepers for Kokoon to target. Frequent travellers are another key demographic with 75% of travellers regularly complaining of poor sleep.

Over 17,500 people pre-ordered Kokoon headphones ahead of launch and the start-up is on track to turnover £6.5m in 2018 and to net a tidy profit.

With its first product having shipped in April this year, it’s an exciting time for Kokoon but it doesn’t want to stop at sleep and relaxation.

Its engineering team is now focused on version two; how it can further improve health and well-being through technology. This includes exploring ways to tackle health and wellness challenges such as stress, anxiety, meditation, mindfulness, and tinnitus.

Founders: Michaela Jeffery-Morrison, Patrick Lewis and Freddie Lewis
Founded: September 2015
Website: www.maddoxevents.com

Tech, banking, construction, law and sports are a set of industries which have famously had little gender diversity.

Looking to tackle this issue, and having seen the way that conferences could bring people together, events professionals Michaela Jeffery-Morrison, Patrick Lewis and Freddie Lewis came up with an idea – they would run a series of B2B events championing inclusivity in these industries.

Launched in September 2015, their start-up Maddox Events prides itself on “creating the most progressive and forward-thinking diversity-focused events in the global event market”.

With diverse speaker line-ups, content and practical insight, the start-up’s large-scale conferences encourage representation of different genders, races, religions, sexualities, disabilities and ethnicities in businesses by addressing challenges and inspiring change.

Already, Maddox Events’ approach is making huge waves in the events industry.

Notably, its the events company behind “the largest women in tech event in the world”, which it runs annually in the UK and has scaled to run the same conference in Australia, Amsterdam and San Francisco, with one soon to launch in Dubai.

The start-up has tens of thousands of delegates, and an awe-inspiring list of clients and event sponsors including Google, Spotify, Amazon, Sky, Facebook, Microsoft, eBay, JP Morgan, and Disney.

According to its founders, the business’ success has been largely due to the fact that its events are the only ones in the marketplace which focus wholly on diversity and inclusion.

Having begun to break down the barriers in specific industries, Maddox Events is now looking to explore new sectors where inclusion and diversity are hot topics, such as film and media, and will create new conferences dealing with race and ethnicity.

Playing an increasing role in pushing for social change, Maddox Events has merged a enterprising mission with commercial potential (the trio tell us they have “delivered triple digit year-on-year financial growth”), and we suspect 2018 will be a big year for the business.

Founders: Charles Taylor and Michele Trusolino
Founded: May 2015 (launched October 2015)
Website: debut.careers

It goes without saying that job-hunting can be frustrating – particularly for students and graduates looking to get their foot on the career ladder.

Hours are often spent on endless job applications which seem to go ignored, while meetings with recruitment firms can initially appear promising but bear no real fruit.

This was the experience of student Charlie Taylor who, in his final year at university, had applied for 40 jobs and attended 10 assessment days with no success.

Realising that recruitment was the only student service that hadn’t been made accessible through an app, he wondered why such an important sector still remained in the dark ages aka before smartphones.

Fast-forward to 2018, and Taylor and co-founder Michele Trusolino are shaking up the recruitment process in earnest with their student careers app Debut, which makes its second Startups 100 appearance this year.

With its unique Talent Spot feature, Debut enables businesses to get in touch with promising graduates, reversing the traditional direction of communication.

Meanwhile, students can view helpful live-stream content and play psychometric assessment games which uncover and highlight the skills an employer is looking for.

Taylor and Trusolino admit that changing the mindsets of companies and how they go about the recruitment process has been a challenge, with the focus for many recruiters remaining on clicks and impressions on jobs ads rather than real candidate engagement.

Nonetheless, Debut’s innovative offering has attracted over 50 top graduate employers to its service, including EY, Microsoft, Barclays, Capgemini, Rolls-Royce, L’Oréal, and General Electric.

Furthermore, the popular app has been downloaded over 100,000 times by jobhunting students, and has raised £2.2m capital from private investors and VCs.

The future is certainly looking bright for this start-up, which plans to expand into the small and medium enterprise market to match talented graduates with small businesses.

Ultimately, Debut’s vision is to be the go-to app through which students across the globe will be finding work.

Founder: Andrew Needham
Founded: April 2015 (Launched October 2015)
Website: www.headbox.com

HeadBox, the online marketplace for inspiring underused spaces, has now racked up three appearances in the Startups 100 – this being its final – as it continues on its mission to “banish boring ‘go-to’ venues”.

Founded by Andrew Needham in 2015, HeadBox allows you to search and book over 5,000 unique spaces for meetings or events across the UK in cities such as London, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool.

Spaces include prestigious locations such as the ODEON Leicester square and the once hidden Masonic Temple in the Andaz Hotel – where Freemasons would attend their Lodge meetings – as well as your more typical conference and boardrooms, and bars and cocktail venues for evening entertainment.

What spawned this idea? Previously the founder and CEO of insight consultancy Face, Needham found that even large corporate clients with big networks such as Unilever, Nokia, and Coca Cola found it difficult to find “amazing spaces” at short notice.

For Needham, “the whole process was alarmingly out of date, too slow, very inefficient and incredibly time consuming”.

HeadBox simplifies this process with end-to-end booking and payments software, a dashboard that helps clients with budget control, and a dedicated account manager. And with HeadBox 3D, potential guests can take a virtual tour of the venue without leaving their desks.

Hosts are able to increase booking conversions, boost productivity and drive traffic via its two key traffic features: a booking and payment widget that can be embedded into their own website and a CRM dashboard to manage their pipeline of leads and enquiries.

In February 2018, HeadBox launched its social enterprise arm by entering into a partnership with homelessness charity St Mungo’s. This partnership means its corporate clients can now donate part of their commission rebate directly to the charity, while HeadBox helps the charity with its annual events and supplies volunteers from its team.

After raising £1.6m in October 2017 and having built a solid foundation of clients across the UK, HeadBox will now be turn its attentions to major European cities as it looks to reinvent the global events industry.

Founders: Romi Savova and Jonathan Lister
Founded: November 2014 (Launched January 2016)
Website: www.pensionbee.com

Nobody likes to think about their pension. Luckily, Young Guns Romi Savova and Jonathan Lister are here to take care of your pension for you.

Their business, three-time Startups 100-listed PensionBee combines all of your old pensions into one plan, enabling you to manage your pensions just like you manage your bank account.

You then share an annual management fee between the company and the money manager (either BlackRock, State Street or Legal & General).

Savova was inspired to start the business after making a mess of moving a pension from a previous employee, suffering the “painful process” of calling providers, filling out paperwork and understanding complicated products.

Despite being a finance professional, she found the process very complicated and discovered that many others felt the same: 60% of savers have admitted that they don’t know how much they have saved for retirement.

PensionBee makes that concern a thing of the past.

Through its platform you can check your live pension balance, make contributions online, and use a smart calculator to plan your saving.

Over 15,000 customers currently have active accounts at PensionBee, while another 70,000 have signed up (Savova and Lister plan to turn 40,000 of these sign-ups into customers by the end of the year).

Alongside customer acquisition, PensionBee has a number of exciting developments in the pipeline including the introduction of a mobile app, new pension plans and some more innovative partnerships.

By this time next year, the business expects to have combined £500m of pension money for 50,000 customers.

PensionBee thinks managing your pensions should be like the Apple or Amazon experience: simple, easy and fun. So whether you’re worrying about managing your pension or have lost track of multiple pension, PensionBee will make the whole process hassle-free.

Founder: Adam Smith
Founded: January 2015 (launched October 2015)
Website: tvplayer.com

The way we watch TV is changing.

Instead of tuning in to broadcast TV, many of us now prefer to watch TV online with Ofcom’s 2017 report highlighting that the viewing of on-demand TV on different devices is becoming increasingly popular. For 16-24 year-olds, for instance, broadcast TV viewing has dropped by 33% on 2010.

One start-up which is moving with the times to provide a solution to our changing TV consumption habits is TVPlayer.

Launched by Adam Smith in October 2015, TVPlayer is a cloud-based TV platform (i.e. no need for a set top box) with more than 100 broadcast channels.

The first business of its kind to launch cloud-based recording of live TV, the start-up has rapidly become the fastest growing paid TV service in the country. In fact, Smith tells us the business is adding more net subscribers per quarter than Sky, BT, Virgin or TalkTalk.

Unlike competitors that have since entered the market, TVPlayer differentiates itself through content agreements it holds with the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5.

It also has a huge customer base, particularly among the millennial audience, with 11 million desktop users and four million app downloads in the UK to date.

Having secured £7.5m investment from A+E networks – the parent company behind Disney & Hearst – Smith’s end-goal is to see TVPlayer become the TV platform for millennials. The business is certainly one to watch.

Founder: Jef Kofman
Founded: December 2014 (launched September 2016)
Website: trint.com

Anyone that works in the publishing and broadcasting industry will know that transcribing is the worst part of the job.

As an Emmy-winning former broadcast journalist, Jef Kofman shared this sentiment. Having spent thousands of hours manually transcribing interviews, speeches, and news conferences, he’d often dreamt of something that would make it easier.

Surely there had to be a better way?

After attending Mozilla’s MozFest in London in 2013, Kofman came across a team of developers who were previewing experimental technology that glued recorded audio to manually transcribed text on screen in an interactive player.

This immediately caught Kofman’s eye and he wondered at the potential of using the technology to create automated-speech-to-text with a way to allow users to correct any machine-generated errors. He discussed this with the team and that started him off on a journey “to transform and disrupt the workflow of manual transcription.”

Trint was born.

The first automated transcription service to combine a text editor and an audio/video player into one tool, Trint can transcribe recorded content in 13 languages.

It offers a unique collection of features to make the process easier still, such as search of recorded content, easy speaker identification, instant timing, and different formats for export as a text document or subtitles.

So far, Trint has been used by over 100,000 people including those from top media organisations such as The New York Times and Vice News, creating over 500,000 transcripts.

For individuals, the cost of ridding yourself from manual transcripts ranges from £13.60 per hour of audio uploaded to £100  a month for 10 hours of audio uploaded (anything more costs £10 an hour).

While for businesses, you can purchase team accounts for two to 50 users, or enterprise accounts for bigger teams.

With a total of £3.8m raised since the business began, and a team of 25 staff, Trint is intent on transforming into an end-to-end publishing solution.

When will Kofman think the business has really succeeded? When Trint gets into the dictionary: “It will be when people say let’s Trint it or let’s check the Trint”.

Founder: Tamara Rajah
Founded: August 2015 (launched September 2015)
Website: livebetterwith.com

Every two minutes someone in the UK is diagnosed with cancer, equating to almost 1,000 people every day.

And, while those with cancer will receive vital care such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, what often goes untreated are the debilitating side effects that come with it.

For serial entrepreneur and healthcare professional Tamara Rajah, this realisation sparked the business idea for Live Better With.

An e-commerce platform, Live Better With enables cancer patients to review and buy products specifically for their symptoms – products which they might otherwise have never heard about.

Covering nausea, hair loss, brain fog, itchy skin, difficulty swallowing, incontinence, discomfort, difficulty sleeping and more, Live Better With boasts a selection of products for every problem. For instance, you can find lotions and food supplements, mobility aids and informative books.

Patient-focused and community-based, the site – which is making its second appearance in the Startups 100 index – features only products which have been recommended by those also living with cancer. Not only that, but Rajah says a 70,000-strong community of patients, bloggers, charities, doctors, and nurses informs everything Live Better With does.

The website has truly resonated with its audience, with over 40,000 patients having bought products and more than 2.5m people from across 40 countries having visited the site.

And recent months have seen some hugely exciting developments for Live Better With.

It has launched a brick-and-mortar retail store in Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London, and is now focusing in on other conditions with unpleasant symptoms such as the menopause. Live Better With Menopause launched in February 2018.

Balancing a crucial social mission with a for-profit business model, we look forward to seeing Live Better With continue to tackle long-term conditions and provide a long-overdue source of relief for those suffering with awful symptoms.

Founders: Robert Grieg-Gran, Giles Humphries and Myles Hopper
Founded: October 2014 (launched April 2015)
Website: www.mindfulchef.com

In the summer of 2014, entrepreneurs Robert Grieg-Gran, Giles Humphries and Myles Hopper were a world away from the London business scene; working on a fishing boat off the coast of Devon.

Watching villagers line up to buy the day’s catch, the trio were inspired by how fresh the food was compared to supermarket offerings.

They felt that freshness and sustainability should go hand-in-hand with health and nutrition and, with a good dose of convenience added to the mix, their start-up Mindful Chef was born.

Giving consumers access to fresh meat, fish and produce sourced from independent UK farms, Mindful Chef sends weekly healthy recipe boxes, filled with recipe cards and pre-portioned ingredients, to its subscribers.

Unlike services such as Hello Fresh and Gousto, Mindful Chef is the only business of its kind to eschew gluten, dairy and refined carbs from all of its recipe boxes and to cater to every single diet; from vegans and vegetarians to pescetarians and meat-eaters.

Mindful Chef’s offering took the public’s fancy immediately, and in July 2016 the business raised £1m in just 11 days in an oversubscribed crowdfunding round with investors including sporting legends Andy Murray and Victoria Pendleton. Then, in October 2017, it crowdfunded a further £2m in just 12 days.

Today, the start-up has shipped over one million meals to more than 20,000 customers, and is forecasting an impressive turnover north of £10m for this year.

Amidst this success, however, Mindful Chef has kept its twin tenets of sustainability and health firmly at its heart.

Through its partnership with charity One Feeds Two, one school meal is donated to a child living in poverty for every Mindful Chef meal sold.

The start-up’s next goal is to become the first 100% plastic-free recipe box by the end of this year, and it’s also in the process of applying for B Corp status to cement its environmental responsibility.

As its founding trio attest: “If we can continue building a company that puts its customers first and chooses to be a force for good by inspiring social and environmental change, then we think we will have built something we can be very proud of.”