Founders: Hugo Tilmouth, Hakeem Buge, and Charlie Baron
Founded: 2017
Website: www.chargedup.green

Hugo Tilmouth was at Lord’s Cricket Ground, expecting a phone call for an important job interview – but his phone was dying.

After buying a portable charger from a cornershop, he decided he didn’t need that new job. Instead, the then-23-year-old started ChargedUp, which provides portable charging packs to anyone with a smartphone.

All you need to do is download the app, see which of the company’s locations is nearest you, scan a QR code, and then you’re free to take a battery pack for £1 per hour, or £3 for the day. Just drop it off at a different ChargedUp station when you’re done.

The company – which now has more than 2,000 locations in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands – compares the idea to the rentable bicycles you can find all over London.

This sums up the innovative aspect of ChargedUp: you can take the charging pack with you. No longer will you have to wait impatiently at a charging port. Just pick it up and go.

And since the charging packs are powered by Octopus Energy, ChargedUp is able to supply users with 100% green power.

The company has also joined the fight against COVID-19, creating a company called CleanedUp that has supplied more than 3,000 hand sanitising stations to places across the UK, from the London Underground to Costa and NHS buildings.

With their product range expanding, revenue coming in from battery rental, sponsorship from large corporates, and advertising, ChargedUp’s model seems pretty secure. After all, everyone needs power.

Founders: Gerard Keeley, Alex Morris, and Archie Campbell
Founded: 2015
Website: www.vidsy.co

Vidsy’s co-founders all separately realised there was a gap in the advertising industry. Companies built to create content for TV were struggling to move into the new, digital age.

Archie Campbell had the epiphany while freelancing as a director of photography for the BBC, Gerard Keeley learned the hard way by setting up a failed start-up, and Alex Morris saw the potential of Facebook to build communities after setting up a student events company at university.

So the London-based team, none of whom had a direct background in advertising, decided to stake their claim.

After graduating from Founders Factory, they won Facebook’s Innovation Spotlight award for Creativity Around Video in 2017, and now Vidsy is The Financial Times’ 44th fastest growing company in 2020.

The company uses more than 7,000 vetted creators around the world to help brands from Unilever to PepsiCo usher in a new age of mobile-centric advertising.

Speaking to Startups in 2017, the Vidsy founders explained that they had seen an opportunity to make the world of advertising better, and taken it with both hands.

“We’re disrupting an industry that needs to change, allowing more creativity to come from existing sources,” they said.

“There’s just so many people able to challenge standard TVC ads with their mobile content.

“We also wanted to show that, as an agency, you don’t need a Cannes Lion before you can work with Fortune 500 companies.”

In just five years, Vidsy has managed to become an exclusive creative partner of basically any social network you can name, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and Quibi.

With clear authority and clout in this ever-growing market, Vidsy’s success only looks likely to go one way – up.

Founders: Jake O’Keeffe and Alex Hatvany
Founded: 2017
Website: www.atomlearning.co.uk

Squeezing into the top half of our list (up 14 places from its place in the 2019 rankings) is Atom Learning.

Led by Jake O’Keeffe and Alex Hatvany, Atom Learning is an online educational platform for students. With content built by teachers and underpinned by ground-breaking machine learning processes, Atom Learning delivers a daring, data-driven approach to education.

Yet, Atom Learning was faced with an early roadblock familiar to so many businesses that have tried to scale in the education sector – parents won’t buy if the school doesn’t, and the school doesn’t have the money to. So, just as in the famous case of its namesake, Atom Learning split its offering – a free version for use in the classroom, and a premium platform which parents can subscribe to on a monthly basis.

Students aged seven to 11 can brush up with over 40,000 bespoke practice questions and more than 500 video and text-based teaching resources from the comfort of their own home, while a unique algorithm keeps them on their optimal learning path.

As for Atom Learning, its ambitious, forward-facing vision for education’s future is borne out in even bigger plans. Within 12 months of launching, it’s working with more than 400 schools, and boasts over 5,000 parent subscribers on the books. It’s also partnered with Galore Park (a subsidiary of Hachette), and is in talks with two national governments to roll out the Atom Learning platform across even more countries.

Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or just an avid follower of history in the making, you’re set to be hearing a lot more about Atom Learning.

Founder: Jimmy Williams
Founded: 2016
Website: www.myurbanjungle.com

Urban Jungle emerged in 2016 as a response to a stark dichotomy. Though housing prices were continuing to rise – keeping more and more millennials in the renting game – the insurance industry was still moving along at a snail’s pace. Brokers and providers weren’t successfully leveraging the technology available, and amidst it all, Generation Y were being left behind.

Enter Urban Jungle. Led by founder Jimmy Williams, Urban Jungle offers affordable, pay-monthly insurance policies to people living in rented accommodation. Targeted at a younger demographic all-too-easily forgotten by traditional forms of insurance, Urban Jungle is cutting through the foliage to provide millennials with transparent, tailored policies that are as flexible as their living arrangements.

Insurance companies and ethics aren’t always mentioned in the same sentence, but Urban Jungle takes a different approach. Led by its core values of transparency, responsibility, disruption, and a steadfast customer-focus, Urban Jungle is dragging the industry forward in more ways than one.

And it’s clear that it’s doing plenty right. Since starting up just four years ago, Urban Jungle’s customer base has ballooned to 20,000, while its Brixton-based team is 22 strong. The future looks bright, too – despite lockdown, Urban Jungle recently raised £6.2 million in a round of funding fuelled by high-profile backers, to continue its shake-up of the industry.

With money in the bank and a forward-thinking approach, Urban Jungle is one to watch out for.

Founder: Jeremy King
Founded: 2015
Website: www.askattest.com

Whether you’re launching a new product, investigating a new market or developing a new marketing campaign, any good business knows that customer feedback is essential for a successful data-driven approach. Gathering said feedback has historically been an expensive or slow process, which is why Attest is really making waves among businesses both big and small.

Attest has access to the insights of over 100 million people across 80 markets, and businesses can create surveys to tap into these insights in just 90 seconds, enabling them to check in regularly when creating new projects, and avoid costly mistakes.

Attest was founded by Jeremy King in 2015, and also featured in the Startups 100 in 2019. It now has a growing team of more than 50 expert employees, who deliver tailored ‘next steps’ advice following the results from any survey. In this way, the company has managed to merge the tried and tested methods of both surveys and research agencies, landing on a happy medium.

Attest wants to help companies futureproof their growth, and has really found its footing within the food and beverage, consumer tech, and consumer finance sectors, boasting big name clients including TransferWise, Heineken, Walgreens Boots, Discovery, Gymshark, and Propercorn.

With marketing getting smarter each day, Attest is at the forefront of modernising this industry and truly getting businesses to put the consumer first.

Founders: Thomas Walker, Gareth Booth
Founded: 2017
Website: www.holymolydips.com

The product of a wine-fuelled argument between two friends over coriander, it’s fair to say that Holy Moly Dips, founded by Thomas Walker and Gareth Booth, had a slightly unconventional start.

But with smashed avocado forming the base of Holy Moly’s curated selection of four dips, here we have a company who put itself in the right place at the right time – delivering riffs on the stereotypical millennial foodstuff that are as good (read: better) as the stuff you’d make at home, and without any unwanted extras found in convenient supermarket versions.

Holy Moly dips are made using sun-ripened Hass avocados from Mexico, and contain no dairy, gluten, sulphites or preservatives. It’s the first UK company to make use of an innovative HPP or ‘cold pressing’ technique – “a game changer” – that gives their products a 30-day shelf life, the natural way.

This commitment to what goes in (and, crucially, what’s left out) of their dips has seen Holy Moly scoop the highly coveted title of number one rated guacamole in the UK, and with partnerships with Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Wholefoods and Ocado already under its belt, the company is showing no signs of slowing down.

The Holy Moly team is currently busy testing out new products, all of which will follow their strict ‘no nasties’ approach. Watch this space!

Founders: Giles Humphries, Myles Hopper, Robert Grieg-Gan
Founded: 2015
Website: www.mindfulchef.com

The idea for Mindful Chef was born, as many great ideas are, from a clear need experienced first-hand – Giles Humphries, Myles Hopper and Robert Grieg-Gan were leading busy professional lives, and needed quick access to convenient, fresh, nutritionally-balanced food to fit their busy schedule.

Using quality ingredients from British Farms, Mindful Chef’s recipe boxes come with carefully pre-portioned ingredients, and serve a very broad range of dietary requirements. There’s even a line of healthy frozen meals, and smoothies, for added convenience.

The Mindful Chef founders believe that consciously fuelling your body with nutritious food is essential for a happy and healthy life, but their quest for mindfulness doesn’t stop there; as a business, it takes a mindful approach to every stage of the process, from the suppliers, to packaging, and workplace ethos.

A certified B-Corp, Mindful Chef has also partnered with food charity One Feeds Two to donate one school meal to a child living in poverty for every meal purchased. It’s currently the only recipe box service to offer this ‘one for one’ charity model, and has donated over 2.5 million meals to date.

So what’s next for Mindful Chef? Becoming the first entirely plastic-free recipe box, an ambitious goal it plans to achieve by the end of this year.

Loved by time-poor professionals, health-conscious parents and celebrity athletes alike, this is the third consecutive year Mindful Chef has featured in the Startups 100, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Founders: Alex Stephany, Seb Barker
Founded: 2017
Website: www.beam.org

Appearing for the first time in the Startups 100, Beam is a London-based social enterprise that supports homeless people by finding them stable work and accommodation.

Founded in 2017 by Alex Stephany and Seb Barker, Beam is an online crowdfunding platform, which allows the public to fund training and professional qualifications for homeless people. Each Beam user is paired with a dedicated case worker, who creates a bespoke employment plan for them and supports them through training and into stable, paid work.

Recent figures show that there are 320,000 homeless people in the UK, a rise of 60% since 2011. Most are living in hostels or emergency accommodation and face various barriers that stop them from entering stable, well-paid work. It’s a devastating cycle that is truly hard to break. And even harder to break for good.

So, Beam thinks long-term. It tailors a homeless person’s career plan to their specific goals and aspirations, rather than just getting them into any old job.

The results so far are impressive: 80% of Beam users have found work, and the average salary is £28,000, which is well above the London Living Wage. Beam has plenty of success stories, with one particular story making the national press: Javad, a refugee from Iran who fled religious persecution arrived in the UK in the back of a lorry, unable to speak English. When he got his leave to remain, Beam helped him train as a digger operator. He’s now earning £30k a year.

With operations currently based around central London, the team at Beam wants to grow. If they can expand outside of the capital, then it’s sure to be a great thing. Social enterprise has rarely been so accessible, and so needed.

Founder: Ashley Reading
Founded: 2017
Website: www.bouncelife.co.uk

It’s no secret that both life and health insurance can be tricky, opaque beasts. Knowing this, Ashley Reading founded Bounce, with the goal of making insurance a more sympathetic and community-focused process.

Bounce acts as both a life and health insurance referral network, made up of thousands of participants, known as “bouncers.” These bouncers are given a bonus every time they refer a new customer to Bounce, allowing them to make a substantial amount of money by simply pitching the idea to their friends and family.

As for the insurance itself, Bounce offers coverage that seeks to be truly helpful and compassionate to their customers’ needs. And this approach works: so far Bounce has arranged in excess of £2bn of life cover.

The very nature of Bounce ensures that they’re constantly expanding, as their business model hinges on constant recruitment and outreach of more members and customers in both the B2B and B2C space.

With a customer focus at its core, and an experienced entrepreneur at the helm, Bounce’s inclusion in the Startups 100 2020 index is no surprise.

Founder: Toby Harper
Founded: 2015
Website: www.hjsolicitors.co.uk

Appearing for the first time in position 43 is Harper James Solicitors, a full-service commercial law firm on a mission to make legal services more cost effective and accessible.

Having worked as the legal counsel for a leading VC firm, founder Toby Harper saw how many small but exciting new businesses struggled to afford quality legal support at critical stages of their development – and his business was born.

Based in the North East, Harper James Solicitors makes use of modern technology and modern work practices – the majority of the workforce works remotely and flexibly – to offer quality services, priced innovatively. The company works on a subscription basis, with lawyers recruited from the UK’s top firms to ensure that clients feel confident and are well advised.

With a focus on early-stage and ambitious businesses, Harper James provides advice on all aspects of Corporate and Commercial law, IT, Intellectual Property, Disputes, Employment and Real Estate.

As of 2020, more than 350 startups have subscribed to Harper James’s Enterprise model (their monthly plan), with others taking advantage of their one-off services and quarterly plans. With demand and revenue growing year on year, the business is set to continue taking the world of law by storm.

Their approach and service has proved to be mutually beneficial; clients have access to quality advice and Harper James benefits in cash flow terms, and from the job satisfaction of working with a client as it grows.

A startup business with success at its core – Harper James Solicitors is a business to watch.