Founder: Andrew Macleod
Founded: 2016
Website: www.emiliaspasta.com

Emilia’s Crafted Pasta champions the essence of real Italian cuisine – warmth, generosity, freshness, and simplicity lie at the heart of this brand. That, and affordable, delicious pasta made fresh every morning.

Andrew Macleod founded Emilia’s Crafted Pasta in 2016, using his travels around Italy – namely, the Emilia-Romagna region – as inspiration. From his experiences, he created a traditional restaurant business that focuses on serving the best fresh pasta at affordable prices.

There are currently two restaurants, both London-based and each with a different vibe. The St. Katharine Docks site embraces a rustic and intimate atmosphere that harks back to the small trattorias of Modena’s side-streets. The second restaurant, in Aldgate, has more of a city ambience that nods to the more extroverted side of Italian culture.

No matter which restaurant you visit, however, you’ll find a pasta counter in full view of diners and an open kitchen where dishes are prepared with care and precision. Passion is a key ingredient for this startup, but there’s a science behind each recipe too.

The geometry of pasta shapes, and the science behind sauce pairings, lie at the heart of Emilia’s Crafted Pasta right next to the emotive love of Italian cuisine. The attention to detail and careful assessment of pasta’s weight, size, length, and shape when deciding sauce pairings shines a light on why this brand has managed to take pasta to the next level.

Emilia’s Crafted Pasta has moved up the Startups 100 list since featuring last year, and shows no signs of slowing its growth. Macleod has big plans for Emilia’s Crafted Pasta, and is looking to open a third restaurant this year.

Founders: Jide Maduako and Mustafa Mohamed
Founded: 2018
Website: www.yokenetwork.com

TikTok hit the world’s phone screens with a stunning popularity, keeping a whopping 800 million users entertained worldwide. Yoke Network founders Jide Maduako and Mustafa Mohamed saw the potential in the power of TikTok influencers, and started their own influencer marketing network in 2018.

In just two years Yoke Network has built the world’s largest TikTok influencer network outside of TikTok itself. It uses this network to provide marketing services for advertisers looking to collaborate with TikTok influencers.

It’s a match made in heaven – advertisers get to enjoy the benefits of working with a network of over 2,000 TikTok influencers, while receiving tracked and tangible results for their marketing campaigns.

Influencers get paid on a pay-per-results model, meaning the sky’s the limit in terms of how much they can earn through their campaigns.

These influencer campaigns are managed through Yoke Network’s Influencer app – with a network of over 2,000 TikTok creators, the total audience reaches beyond 600 million. You can understand why that’s a tempting prospect for any ambitious advertiser!

Yoke Network is leveraging a powerful media platform to fuel the growth of other brands and apps – its clients include Pretty Little Thing, Shpock, and the Airbrush app, which successfully broke into the Top 20 of the UK App Store after Yoke Network’s influencer campaigns.

Yoke Network’s performance influencer marketing has benefits on both sides. Mobile brands see big results, and influencers get access to products their followers will love. In the middle of it all is Yoke Network, bridging the gap between advertisers’ needs and influencers’ potential – TikTok certainly doesn’t seem to be slowing down, and neither does this savvy startup!

Founder: Christopher Kenna
Founded: 2017
Website: www.wearebrandadvance.com

If you’re LGBTQ+, BAME, have a disability, are a woman, practice a religion, or are aged over 50, the chances of advertising doing a poor job of representing you are high (when it even tries to represent you at all). This, in a nutshell, is why Brand Advance exists, it wants to help brands reach diverse audiences and create campaigns that are truly relevant to them.

It’s an approach that has rapidly proved extremely successful. Founded in 2017 by Christopher Kenna, in the past few years, Brand Advance has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands (Google, Unilever, Diageo, L’Oreal) and developed relationships with major agencies like OMG, Carat and Mindshare.

Powered by a diverse team of creative minds and data experts, Brand Advance offers a comprehensive suite of services – including in-depth research, media planning and buying, partnerships, and content services – and delivers campaigns across digital, events, print, TV, radio and social media.

These campaigns deliver impressions and ROI – with research showing that consumers are far more likely to both notice an ad and purchase the promoted product if that ad is culturally relevant to them.

This is already its second appearance in the Startups 100 list, but we expect the profile of this idiosyncratic agency to keep rising, as more and more brands wake up to the enormous spending power of diverse audiences.

Founder: Brigitte Read
Founded: 2018
Website: www.snagtights.com

For too long, the fashion industry has catered largely to a particular body type, and in no item of clothing is this problem more obvious than in tights. Why? Well, tights sizes are measured in terms of height, with no consideration taken for factors like width and body shape. What we’re left with is a shameful statistic: nine out of 10 women say they are unable to find tights that fit, according to Snag Tights’ own research.

This is the problem that this forward-thinking, body-positive, colourful brand aims to correct. By selling tights that come in sizes based on height, dress size, and body shape, Snag has tapped into a truly underserved market – and is enabling people of all shapes and sizes to find tights that fit comfortably, without compromising on style.

In the two short years since Snag began, founder Brigitte Read has built a brand that not only sells size-inclusive products, but also practices what it preaches in its marketing. Uniquely, instead of hiring models, Snag invites its customers to star in its advertising. From the business’ websites and social channels to its TV ad campaign – look at any one of Snag’s images, and you’ll see a real customer, with their own testimonial often forming the basis of the advertising copy, too.

This customer-centred approach has proved a recipe for success, with Snag’s body-confident philosophy attracting thousands of loyal customers across the UK, US, Australia, and Germany. With a thriving social community of fans who consistently laud the quality and comfort of Snag’s products, it looks like this brand is well on its way to achieving its mission of making everyone feel good about wearing tights.

Founders: Rachel Hugh and Neil Potts
Founded: 2016
Website: www.thevurgerco.com

It can no longer be suggested that widespread veganism is just a passing fad. In the UK in 2020, it’s a permanent way of life for a percentage of the population that isn’t going to stop growing.

But, if we cast our minds back to 2016, we’ll find a very different environment – one in which veganism simply isn’t catered for, and is even actively smirked at. This is the era in which Rachel Hugh and Neil Potts founded The Vurger Co: an indulgent fast food restaurant that’s purely plant-based.

Inspired by the quality of vegan food they came across on a trip to California (and the fact that Potts’ ongoing stomach problems disappeared in response to this new plant-based diet), the duo saw an opportunity for disruption in London. Instead of selling bland vegan burgers, the pair decided to use vegetables and legumes in creative ways – such as mimicking pulled pork with aubergines, and bacon with dehydrated coconut – to create a menu as unique as it is delicious.

It’s an approach that London’s vegans were clearly hungry for. While crowdfunding, The Vurger Co became the fastest restaurant ever to reach its funding target on that site. The start-up made its first appearance in the Startups 100 in 2018, and was named a People’s Champion finalist at the Startups Awards in the same year.

Now, The Vurger Co boasts two restaurants in Canary Wharf and Shoreditch, with plans to open a third and fourth in Brighton and West London, respectively. With a full service production site up and running, the company is also set to sell a range of vegan goodies in shops including Planet Organic, Selfridges, and Daylesford Farm.

It seems The Vurger Co has found a recipe for success – and we’re eager to see what it does next.

Founders: Francesca Carlesi and Leo Grünstein
Founded: 2018
Website: www.molofinance.com

In 2020, there’s not a lot that you can’t do online. But anyone who’s ever bought a property will tell you that that process is still pretty much in the dark ages, with mountains of paperwork, lengthy meetings, and a timescale of weeks required simply to secure yourself a mortgage.

Well, not anymore. Molo is the UK’s first digital-only mortgage lender, which aims to make home buying easier, faster, and more accessible for everyone.

Founded by Francesca Carlesi and Leo Grünstein in 2018, Molo has fully digitised the process of getting a mortgage. By automating the decision-making, Molo bypasses obsolete practises and removes human subjectivity from the equation. The result? Necessary credit, identity, address, and valuation checks are carried out rapidly, but still with reliability and security. As it stands, Molo can deliver a mortgage decision within a matter of minutes.

But all this digitisation doesn’t mean that Molo can’t put people first. The start-up’s team boasts expertise across finance, mortgages, and tech, and has worked together to create a simple and seamless user experience, with transparent, jargon-free decisions that are based on the data that matters. And to make user journeys that much smoother, Molo has partnerships in place with Experian, Rightmove, Zoopla, Starling Bank, and Money.co.uk.

Molo’s “mortgages in minutes” have definitely struck a chord with beleaguered property buyers. Since its initial product offering of buy-to-let mortgages for individuals, which launched in October 2018, Molo has been able to expand to offer multiple limited company products. Portfolio landlord and residential mortgages are now in its pipeline, too.

Molo says that its aim is to help transform the way the home-financing works, for good. We’ll certainly be watching as this intelligent fintech business continues making strides towards that goal.

Founder: Matthew Goldhill
Founded: 2018
Website: www.picnic-media.com

As the world has rushed headlong into a mobile, online media landscape, the advertising industry as a whole has been scrambling to catch up. Banner ads, the most common form of online advertising, are ugly, intrusive and, paradoxically, easily ignored.

So Picnic Media is here to help. It has developed new ad formats that fit seamlessly into editorial content – and more importantly – dramatically increase engagement (in other words, people actually pay attention to them).

Picnic was founded by Matthew Goldhill in 2018, and its key innovation is an ad format inspired by social video. Static, video or slideshow ads are inserted into articles, with the reader scrolling past them as they read. This provides publishers with high-quality ads that are difficult to avoid, and give advertisers a much more intuitive and natural way to capture attention. It’s already being used by the likes of Microsoft, Next, and Sainsburys, who are benefiting from increased ROI and greater visibility.

To support this, Picnic has also built the only ad format specifically designed for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages. This is Google tech that’s designed to speed up the mobile internet, and is already used by over 25 million domains. This assures advertisers that their ads are running on sites optimised for the mobile internet, meaning they will load instantly and generate more attention.

Picnic is already working with leading online publishers and is on track to quadruple its revenue in 2020, all from a small amount of seed funding.

As it continues to carve out its expert niche, we expect the company to continue this rapid growth, and keep improving the mobile internet experience.

Founders: Alexander Limpert, Christian Mischler, and Patrick Degen
Founded: 2016
Website: www.guestready.com

Having debuted at the heady heights of 13th in the 2018 Startups 100 – and reached 9th last year – GuestReady is no stranger to the limelight. Its personalised approach to property rental management has seen it snap up a trophy cabinet of other awards (including Rising Star at the Shortyz Awards for co-founder and CEO Alexander Limpert), while enjoying impressive customer approval ratings across the board.

And it’s not hard to see why. Along with fellow co-founders Christian Mischler and Patrick Degen, Limpert has created a company serving property investors, homeowners, and Airbnb hosts from all over the world, including the UK, Malaysia, and Hong Kong – and filled a big gap in the market, too.

Launched in August 2016, GuestReady helps hosts with guest communication, personalised welcomes, concierge services, and the provision of amenities. It also helps property owners optimise their listings across rental sites such as Booking.com and HomeAway – maximising positive reviews, and taking the hassle out of property letting.

Now managing over 2,000 properties, GuestReady is already knocking on the door of wider global expansion. It aims to extend its reach to 35 cities across 10 countries by the end of this year – generating more than £100 million of revenue in the process.

And, with a truly international team (it speaks over 28 languages collectively), plus key partnerships with Guardhog Insurance, Airlinen, and KeyNest, GuestReady looks to be in a prime position to turn aspirations into reality…

Airbnb, watch out.

Founders: Joseph Welstead and Charles Matthews
Founded: 2016
Website: www.motionnutrition.com

It was 2016, and Joseph Welstead and Charles Matthews saw it all. People everywhere were doing too much work, getting too little sleep, and scraping through the day on a disagreeable cocktail of coffee and cortisol. Out of this heady mix emerged Motion Nutrition – the pair’s ambitious addition to the online organic nutritional supplements market.

Based in South London, Motion’s products are 100% organic, utilising only the most ethically-sourced herbs and botanical extracts. Its commitment to real food is matched by one to real packaging – free of plastic, and entirely biodegradable. With excellent customer approval ratings and products covering everything from sports supplements to sleep remedies, it’s clear the UK is starting to wake up to what Motion has to offer.

Over the past year, it’s shedded its status as a niche London brand to leading the UK market, with its nootropic supplements trailblazing a path into the shelf space of major retailers. 2019 saw Motion’s flagship product, Power Up + Unplug, hit over 100 Boots stores and over 200 Holland and Barrett locations. Meanwhile, Motion has increased its website sales sevenfold, and transformed its Amazon store monthly revenue from zero to £18,000… in just half a year.

And, as the world remains in the grip of a global health crisis, Motion Nutrition’s stock looks set only to rise. With Forbes and Men’s Health both lauding the supplement brand’s products – and with Welstead and Matthews’ eyes set firmly on global expansion – the wheels for this ambitious duo are most certainly in motion.

Founders: Andrea Guzzoni and Dennis Helderman
Founded: 2017
Website: www.rentuu.com

Building on its 54th placing in last year’s Startups 100 rankings is Rentuu.

Founded in 2017 by Andrea Guzzoni and Dennis Helderman, Rentuu is a global, cloud-based software platform with big plans for the equipment hire industry. Through its online interface, businesses around the world can save money by hiring the furniture, catering services, and accessories they need for an event, or the tools and equipment required for a big project.

Motivated by the ‘circular economy’, frustrated by the hassle of planning events, and dismayed at the continual wastage of products, Rentuu burst onto the scene just three years ago. And it didn’t take long for people in high places to start noticing – most notably, easyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou.

Sir Stelios didn’t just invest in the ambitious Guzzoni and Helderman’s plans – he absorbed them into his business, and Rentuu gained exclusive, multi-billion pound brand rights to easyEventhire and easyToolhire. With more than 100 participating suppliers across ten countries signed up  – and with Rentuu already boasting a star-studded client list that includes the NHS, BBC, and Marriott hotels – the deal looks to be an astute one for all parties involved. So what’s next for Rentuu?

With plans to replicate its current success across more markets and industries, Rentuu looks set to continue its disruption of how the world’s businesses search for, source, and supercharge their events.

It really couldn’t be easier.