london-startup
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Artur Stepaniak
Artur Stepaniak is the co-founder and CEO of Tagvenue, a London-based online marketplace for booking event venues. He and university friend Maksim Kondratjuks started the company in March 2015 after struggling to find spaces for events, and grew it - largely by word of mouth - into one of the world's leading venue-hire platforms, now covering six countries and used by more than a million event planners each month. Before startups, Stepaniak spent his early career as a derivatives and proprietary trader.
Christian Facey
Christian Facey is the co-founder and CEO of Audiomob, the London-based company that built the first non-intrusive audio advertising platform for mobile games. A former Google agency strategist and Facebook marketing science partner, he combined his advertising background with hobbies in game development and hip hop/jazz production to spot a gap: the mobile gaming and audio ad industries had never been connected. He launched Audiomob in 2020 with co-founder Wilfrid Obeng, raised a $14M Series A at a valuation north of $110M, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021.
Danyal Özdüzenciler
Danyal Özdüzenciler is the co-founder and CEO of Capsa AI, a London- and New York-based startup building what it calls an AI operating system for the private capital industry. A former private equity and investment banking professional with Turkish-German roots, he founded Capsa AI in 2024 with Callum Downie after a first failed startup taught him hard lessons about grit. In June 2026 the company raised an $18m Series A, bringing total funding to about $20m, on the back of 14x year-on-year revenue growth and a 100% customer renewal rate.
Humphrey Bowles
Humphrey Bowles is the founder and CEO of Truvi (formerly Superhog), a London-based risk management platform for the short-term rental industry. After entering the home-sharing sector in 2011, he identified trust, insurance and safety as the biggest barriers to the growth of peer-to-peer accommodation, and built a group of companies - Guardhog and Superhog/Truvi - to close that gap. Truvi provides guest screening, identity verification, damage protection and deposit services to property managers and hosts, and raised a £5.5m Series A in 2026 led by 6 Degrees Capital and Hambro Perks to expand into the US.
Nicolai Baldin
Nicolai Baldin is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesized, a London and New York-based DataOps and AI-powered test data automation platform he launched after a PhD in machine learning and statistics at the University of Cambridge. Synthesized generates synthetic, compliant, production-like data that enterprises use to test software, train models, and share information across regulatory boundaries. In September 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Redalpine to expand into automated software testing for the age of 'vibe coding.'
Sam Ryan
Sam Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Zeelo, a smart bus platform that runs shuttle routes for frontline workers and independent schools across the UK and US. He founded the company in 2016 with Barney Williams and Dani Ruiz after selling their student ride-share app JumpIn to Addison Lee, and has since grown Zeelo into a business moving roughly 150,000 riders a month with a fleet of more than 10,000 vehicles.
Manny Medina
Manny Medina is the co-founder and CEO of Paid, a London-based platform that lets companies bill for AI agents based on the value they deliver instead of per-seat fees. Before Paid he built Outreach, the sales engagement company he grew from a near-dead recruiting marketplace into a business worth $4.4 billion with roughly $250 million in recurring revenue. An Ecuadorian computer engineer who was an early employee on what became AWS and spent six years at Microsoft, Medina is now betting that the seat-based SaaS pricing model is obsolete and that the agent economy needs a way to get paid.
Matthew Wilson
Matthew Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of Jack & Jill, a London-based startup building two conversational AI recruiters - Jack for job seekers and Jill for employers - to replace the resume-and-keyword model of hiring. An Oxford-trained theoretical physicist turned serial founder, he previously co-founded Veratrak and scaled the global-employment company Omnipresent to a roughly $600M valuation in three years before its acquisition by Deel. In October 2025, six months after starting Jack & Jill, he raised a $20M seed round led by Creandum with backing from over 75 angels including Nico Rosberg.
Nelson Jones
Nelson Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Kular, a London-based AI lead generation platform that only charges customers when it delivers actual sales leads. An Oxford law graduate who started building businesses before he finished his degree, Nelson moved from legal-sector sales at Luminance into Entrepreneur First, where he met co-founder Saaras Mehan in the LD16 cohort. The pair launched in 2021, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, and pivoted from an AI business-development tool for law firms into Kular, which today generates leads for over 1,000 companies via email, LinkedIn, and AI voice notes. Kular's signature bet is radical alignment: pay only for results.
Filip Auksztol
Filip Auksztol is the CEO and founder of Quantum Boost, a London-based deep-tech startup that uses machine learning to help chemists formulate better products faster. A trained quantum physicist who earned a PhD at Singapore's Centre for Quantum Technologies and studied materials science at Oxford, he turned the math of atomtronic devices toward a more stubborn problem: the slow, trial-and-error grind of laboratory formulation. Quantum Boost's platform applies Bayesian optimization to experimental data, promising to cut formulation development time by 50 to 80 percent across inks, paints, pharmaceuticals and specialty chemicals.
Matthew Goldhill
Matthew Goldhill is the founder and CEO of Picnic, a London-born adtech company that pioneered 'social display' advertising - Stories, Posts and Carousels dropped mid-article on Google AMP pages, a format that didn't exist before he built it. He left AppNexus at 25 to start the company, bootstrapped it for years, delivered 600+ campaigns for brands like EE, L'Oreal and Amazon, then raised £1m in 2023 and moved to New York to crack the US market. He builds user-first, low-carbon ad products and is unusually candid about the near-disasters along the way.
Paul Bennett
Paul Bennett is the co-founder and CEO of PerchPeek, a London-based, AI-powered relocation platform that helps companies move employees across borders. He started his first venture at 17 selling hand sanitiser outside supermarkets, studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, then spent three years at Amazon launching its Treasure Trucks in the UK before founding PerchPeek in 2018. What began as a 'Tinder for renting' property app pivoted during the 2020 pandemic into an end-to-end relocation service now operating in 150-plus countries, backed by roughly $17-18m in funding.
Reza Javan
Reza Javan is the CEO and co-founder of Telescope, a London-based AI prospecting platform that automates B2B outbound across email and LinkedIn. Before he sold software to salespeople, he was Dr. Reza Rezaei Javan, an Oxford DPhil microbiologist who sequenced thousands of pneumococcal genomes and discovered new families of antimicrobial peptides. He swapped the lab bench for a startup at Entrepreneur First's LD17 cohort, where Telescope was born in 2021. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Soma Capital and Entrepreneur First.
Charlie Woodward
Charlie Woodward is the CEO and co-founder of Natter, an AI-native conversation intelligence platform that runs thousands of simultaneous 1:1 video conversations to capture the voices of employees, members, and customers at scale. A former Uber business development executive and BBC head of commercial partnerships, Woodward started Natter in 2021 as a remote-work 'virtual watercooler' and pivoted it into an enterprise tool that replaces surveys and focus groups, returning themes and sentiment within hours. In April 2026 Natter raised a $23M Series A led by Renegade Partners and moved its headquarters from London to New York.