The 39 most creative people in UK tech

Claire Cockerton is the CEO and chairwoman of technology consultancy firm Entiq.

Having previously led the Level39 startup accelerator in Canary Wharf, Cockerton is now heading up a new project in London's Olympic Park.

The project involves turning the former press centre into what she claims will be Europe's largest innovation centre.

Former Googler Sagi Shorrer cofounded brain training app Peak in 2012 with ex-employees of Amazon and EA Games.

The mobile app, which uses a series of games to test your focus, memory, and problem solving abilities, has been downloaded over 15 million times.

This summer, Peak launched a "Coach," which it described as a personal trainer for your brain. Coach is an adaptive learning engine that analyses a user’s performance and tailors workouts with selected games to challenge a user further.

Nick Beighton took over as the CEO of online fashion retailer ASOS last September, having previously been the company’s chief operating officer.

The online fashion retailer stocks a wide variety of youth-focused fashion labels and is popular with 20-somethings on a budget.

Beighton has a financial background and was an accountant at KPMG before joining ASOS.

Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts are the founders of EDITED, the fashion technology startup that works with brands such as Gap, ASOS, and Target to help them understand the data of fashion using real-time analytics. For example, you can track promotions from brands and retailers around the world or monitor how consumers are reacting to trends on social media.

The startup changed its name in 2015, moving from "EDITD" to "EDITED."

Eben Upton is the man behind the Raspberry Pi, the wildly popular — and crazily cheap — single-board computer used to promote computer science education and beloved by hobbyists.

The company launched its smallest and cheapest computer yet in November 2015: The Raspberry Pi Zero, which retails for just £3.30, or $5. Predictably, it sold out immediately.

In February 2016, British astronaut Tim Peake notched up a new first for the Upton’s company — using the “AstroPi” in space at the International Space Station.

It was announced in June that Upton will receive a CBE for services to business and education.

José Neves is the CEO of Farfetch, an online fashion retailer that takes products from independent shops and makes them available online. The company raised $110 million (£87.9 million) in a May Series F funding round, bringing the company's valuation to $1.5 billion (£1.19 billion).

This year, Hannah Blake left her innovation director job at media agency MEC to join Founders Factory as business development lead. Founders Factory is a company-building organisation that was set up by Lastminute.com cofounder Brent Hoberman.

Before joining MEC, Blake used to run a startup accelerator programme for BBC Worldwide called BBC Labs.

Benji Lanyado worked as a journalist and developer at The Guardian, The Financial Times, and The New York Times, but he left his journalism career behind in 2013 to launch Picfair, a photo service that allows photographers to upload their work and get paid by organisations to use these images for commercial purposes.

Picfair has emerged at a critical time, as an increasing number of artists see their work being used without permission when posted to photo-sharing and social-media sites, like Twitter or Instagram.

Picfair launched with a seed round of $520,000 (£414,000), which included Reddit CEO Alexis Ohanian’s first non-US investment. The site relaunched earlier this year with a new design.

Ergatoudis is the head of content programming for the UK at music streaming giant Spotify. He joined the company at the start of 2016 after over 10 years in charge of music at BBC Radio 1. He previously worked as the head of music policy for the BBC's hip hop and grime radio station 1Xtra.

Spotify is rolling out a lineup of non-music content, including videos from NBC and podcasts from the BBC. It’s a good way for the service to set itself apart from competitors like Apple Music, as well as Jay Z’s music streaming service Tidal, which prides itself on exclusive content.

Ní Dhulchaointigh, from Ireland, used government grants to develop her product Sugru, which is a type of self-setting rubber that was invented in 2003. Stick it onto something, then wait overnight, and you have a ready-made fix that can repair holes, change grips, and work as a kind of superglue. Unlike other products, Sugru can be shaped by hand and sets within minutes.

Efe Cakarel is the CEO of MUBI, the movie streaming service that specialises in indy films. The company started in 2007, and has grown to over 100,000 users. The company says it's now buying the rights to screen content on its service first, just as Netflix did years ago. "If this is successful, then imagine us next year in Cannes. We will be a nightmare for those traditional distributors, because this is where the world is moving," said Cakarel.

Ted Nash is the 25 year-old CEO of app advertising startup Tapdaq, which is building a new way to advertise mobile apps. Nash got started by building viral apps such as Fit or Fugly and Little Gossip when he was a teenager. The apps became very popular very quickly, and Nash says he made around $126,000 (£85,000) in just a single day.

Now Nash is taking what he learned from viral apps and building Tapdaq. It creates networks of similar apps and encourages users to circulate between them. It’s a more elegant advertising experience than the full screen ads and popups that plague many users of freemium apps.

Read our full interview with Nash here.

Ed Rex is on a mission to teach computers how to write music.

That’s the premise behind Jukedeck, a British startup that uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate music according to users' exact specifications, even if the user has no grasp of musical theory.

Once the user has paid for a track, it's theirs, no royalties or fees required — making the service popular with YouTubers looking for royalty-free music to soundtrack their videos.

Rex comes from a musical rather than a technical background, having studied music at Cambridge University.

Rohan Padhan, a former senior product manager at Amazon, heads up Deliveroo’s special projects division, which created Deliveroo’s RooBox initiative.

The initiative involves putting shipping containers into car parks and turning them into kitchens that restaurants can use. Each container, known as a RooBox, is designed to help a restaurant process more Deliveroo orders, subsequently boosting Deliveroo's own sales.

Avi Sharabi cofounded personalised children's book startup Lost My Name in 2012.

The company, which creates customised books based around a child's name, has caught the eye of GV — the venture capital division set up by Alphabet (Google’s parent company) — and Berlin-based Project A Ventures.

Lost My Name announced in December that it had sold over 1 million books.

Chad Jennings is the chief product officer of MOO, the London-based design company that specialises in business cards. Jennings is responsible for managing the team that creates the company’s latest products, including NFC business cards that can digitally send over your contact information.

Jennings was previously one of the cofounders of publishing startup Blurb.com before joining MOO in 2015. Now his team have a prototyping workshop right in the middle of their office in London.

You can take a look inside MOO’s London office here.

Taavet Hinrikus is one of the cofounders and current CEO of TransferWise, a low-cost online international money transfer service.

Hinrikus — along with his cofounder Kristo Kaarmann — is Estonian, and the startup was born of their frustration with sending money online, coming up with a novel solution that matches senders and receivers so that cash doesn’t actually have to cross borders — keeping costs down.

The $1 billion (£805 million) startup has the backing of buzzy Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and it is known for distinctive advertising and stunt marketing. Its posters are ubiquitous on the London Underground, and its employees are known to run naked through the streets of London and stage elaborate flashmobs with customers to highlight the perceived injustices of the traditional financial system.

Matt Miller, or “Mills”, is the cofounder of London design studio ustwo. The company’s best-known product is a mobile game called Monument Valley, which was played by Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) in Netflix’s "House of Cards" TV series.

ustwo has also helped Alphabet-owned AI lab DeepMind to develop an app that is being used by clinicians in the NHS. The app is designed to help healthcare professionals to detect kidney disease.

During the last year Mills has put more focus on an ustwo initiative which is designed to support early stage startups. Through the initiative, Mills has backed and helped to set up music ticketing platform Dice, which is based in the same building as ustwo.

Cherry Collins is the creative director of London-based shopping app Grabble. The app lets you find new items of clothing using a swipe system similar to Tinder. Swipe right on clothes you like, left on things you don't.

Collins has been working in fashion since graduating from The London College of Fashion. She has worked at Grazia, Marie Claire, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Selfridges, and Net-A-Porter.

For starters, he’s a knight. And not just the run-of-the-mill, honoured-by-the-Queen-for-services-to-industry knight. Kingsley is a real knight. He’s a keen jouster, breeds warhorses, and spends tens of thousands on custom suits of armour.

When he’s not on horseback, he’s running Rebellion, an Oxford-based gaming company he cofounded with his brother in 1992.

Its main focus is video games, creating titles for a variety of platforms, but also has smaller operations in other areas, including book publishing and comic books. It owns 2000AD, the comic anthology responsible for the famous dystopian Judge Dredd series.

Under Kingsley’s watch, Rebellion is pushing into new mediums — it's launching its first virtual reality game, "Battlezone," this year.

Rob Whitehead (CTO) and Herman Narula (CEO) are the incredibly enthusiastic two-man founder team behind Improbable, a London startup that wants to be the "Google of simulation."

The duo went to the University of Cambridge together, and in 2012 founded Improbable, which builds software that can power sophisticated simulations done by others. It provides the engine to do the heavy lifting, so you can get on with the business of actually modelling whatever it is you want to model.

The company's original focus was on gaming — massive multiplayer game-worlds — but it has applications in science, research, defence, and more.

In November 2015, it officially launched SpatialOS, its operating system. Alongside the launch, it announced an ambitious flagship project — a virtual city run in collaboration with academics to answer questions about modern urban life. "We’re going to have an oracle for an entire city," Narula told Business Insider. "We’ll be able to answer questions like 'what happens when we introduce autonomous vehicles,' or look at interactions between different things that have just been [previously] impossible."

Thread is a London-based fashion startup that uses artificial intelligence to suggest clothes to men. It sources items from lots of different suppliers, and uses a mixture of in-house stylists and machine learning (a form of artificial intelligence) to figure out which clothes are best for each user. The site tracks what people are browsing, and even little things like how long they look at photos of different items of clothing and how many images they view.

CEO Kieran O'Neill started his first online business in 2003 when he founded video streaming website HolyLemon.com while studying for his GCSE. He eventually sold the site for $1.25 million (£814,000).

Natalie Massenet founded online fashion portal Net-a-Porter in 2000 when she was trying to find designer goods for a fashion shoot. The site sells clothes using a layout similar to traditional fashion magazines.

Net-a-Porter was merged with Italian fashion site YOOX last year. Massenet stood to earn £46 million from the deal. However, Massenet left the company in September 2015 following the merger. She reportedly received a payoff of over €100 million (£77 million.)

Before starting Net-a-Porter, Massenet worked as a fashion model in Tokyo, assistant at Tatler, fashion stylist, and also worked with photographer Mario Testino. She’s Chairman of the British Fashion Council, and received an MBE in 2009 for services to the fashion industry.

What3Words is one of those incredibly simple ideas that makes you wonder why nobody did it before. It creates an address for every single place in the world, using just three words. The centre of the Millennium Bridge in London? deal.finger.lucky. The south-east-most corner of the White House? motor.holds.begins. A random 3 by 3 metre square in the centre of the South Atlantic Ocean? drogue.prominence.serene.

It’s a twenty-first century postcode, that couldn’t be possible without digital mapping and instant searches. Its CEO, Chris Sheldrick, says he’s motivated by helping the four billion people who "don’t exist" because they don’t have a traditional address.

As the founder and CEO of Blaze, Brooke has developed a £125 laser bike light that projects the outline of a green bike onto the road, making them more visible to drivers, pedestrians and other cyclists.

The light, specifically designed to help drivers to see cyclists in their blind spot, is in the process of being fitted to the 11,500 Santander Cycles that are available to the public across London.

Independent research from the the Transport Research Laboratory showed a Laserlight decreases the blind spot around a heavy goods vehicle (HGV) by over 25%. HGVs have been involved in several cyclist fatalities on London roads, with drivers of such vehicles often saying they can't see cyclists.

To most people, emojis are little more than a curiosity — a way to inject levity, or flirtation, into otherwise dry text messages. But for Jeremy Burge, they’re quite literally his livelihood.

The 31-year-Australian is on a mission to catalogue and categorise the pictograms. Over the last three years, he has built a 140-million-pageviews-a-year-business around them almost singlehandedly: Emojipedia, an online encyclopedia of emojis.

Emojipedia began as a side-project, but after interest exploded, Burge went full-time in 2015. He works out of Google Campus in London, and the site also has a developer working for it nearly full-time, as well as a designer who comes on when required. In April 2016, Burge also launched Emoji Wrap — a monthly podcast dedicated to all things emoji.

If you live or work in central London then you may have noticed that Deliveroo’s food delivery couriers are sporting new clothes all of a sudden.

The company said the bright kits, which come in a variety of colours, are designed to enhance rider safety. Deliveroo’s redesign was led by Simon Rohrbach, head of product design, and Courtney McNeil, head of brand design.

As the CEO and cofounder of Kano Computing, Klein has developed a DIY computer kit that is designed to help people of all ages to assemble a computer.

The London-based entrepreneur, backed by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, is planning to expand the computer kit so it includes a camera and speaker. He raised $643,030 (£522,436) on Kickstarter in October to help get the new products into production.

The tech world was abruptly introduced to 27-year-old Londoner Julie Adenuga in June 2015, when she was announced as one of three global presenters for Beats 1.

Along with veteran BBC radio DJ Zane Lowe and New Yorker Ebro Darden, Adenuga is the face of Apple’s flagship internet radio station — a global tastemaker broadcasting from a London studio.

And while she may be a new face to techies, she has strong roots in London’s music scene. In 2010, she joined the city’s underground radio station Rinse FM. "We had no DJ experience, but we just played the music and were talking rubbish," she said. "It worked. Luckily."

It seems to run in the family: Alongside Julie, there’s also Joseph and Jamie Adenuga — better known as London grime artists Skepta and JME.

Cherry Freeman and Edward Griffith are the founders of LoveCrafts, the online marketplace for craft goods. You can use the site to find inspiration for knitting and crochet projects, with more hobbies planned in the future. Once you’ve found something to make, you can buy or download the pattern and the things you need to make it, follow the instructions, and then share your finished piece online.

LoveCrafts serves a very different market to normal tech startups, and the site has also started selling its own branded yarn and other craft items, as well as selling products from other suppliers.

David Silver is the unsung hero at DeepMind — a London-based AI research lab that was acquired by Google in 2014 for £400 million.

The Cambridge graduate computer science graduate is the main programmer on the company’s AlphaGo algorithm, which made headlines after it defeated Lee SeDol, the best Go player in the world, in Seoul, South Korea.

Despite contributing to more research papers than any other DeepMind employee, Silver has largely stayed out of the limelight.

Denzyl Feigelson is an advisor to Apple Music & CEO of London startup Platoon, which he cofounded with serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Saul Klein.

Feigelson has spent the last 13 years working on iTunes with Apple and has been working with the iTunes team since its inception, according to his LinkedIn profile, which states that he is currently a "Music Synergist" and works on "Live Events & Artist Relations". He is also a producer of the iTunes Festival in London.

Platoon is yet to officially launch but the company has been working with artists such as Bastille and Maverick Sabre.

British designer Thomas Heatherwick has been tasked by Google with dreaming up the plans for its new headquarters in California. The plans — revealed in March by Heatherwick Studios and Bjarke Ingels — depict a big square campus made up of rectilinear modules described as pavilions.

According to architecture and design publication Dezeen, Google has also asked Heatherwick to do the plans for its new London office, which was initially due to open in 2016.

Kate Unsworth is a model turned entrepreneur with a wearables company in Shoreditch called Vinaya.

Unsworth raised $3 million (£2.4 million) in venture capital for Vinaya last November and $100,000 (£81,000) on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo in June for a new smart bracelet called Zenta, which is designed to help people track their emotions.

The $249 (£202) Zenta device, due to start shipping early 2017, will use a range of biometric sensors to track wellbeing physically and mentally.

Dimo Trifonov is the man behind Feeld, a dating app with a difference. Formerly known as 3nder, it’s focus is on kink and alternative sexualities — something that has had it labelled as "Tinder for threesomes" in the press.

The name change came after the app provoked the ire of Tinder. The Match Group-owned dating app accused 3nder of trademark infringement; it denied it, but ultimately rebranded — although not before Trifonov led a campaign for people to send photos of their dirty socks to Tinder to signal their displeasure.

The app places a heavy emphasis on design, with a distinctive orange colour scheme. It’s what you’d expect from Trifonov: The Bulgarian app developer is a designer who previously worked at Oglivy Group.

Christian Woolfenden is the CMO of online fashion company Lyst. He joined from online bookmakers Paddy Power in 2015 and has set about raising Lyst’s profile as it expands into the US.

Woolfenden was known as a "mischief-maker" at Paddy Power, where he created stunts such as "shave the rainforest" which made people think the company had cut down trees in the Amazon rainforest. People were so angry that the stunt trended worldwide and the bookmakers received death threats.

Now it’s Lyst’s turn to unleash some pranks. It started things off with a fake kidnapping in April, but really got into its stride in May when it pretended to sell dogs as fashion accessories. The stunt was so controversial that the UK ad regulator, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA,) says it received six complaints.

Roland Lamb is the CEO of musical technology company ROLI. The company has developed the Seaboard, a new kind of keyboard that’s like a normal piano but with a soft, continuous surface.

Lamb moved to Japan after leaving high school to study Zen Buddhism, and went on to study Classical Chinese and Sanskrit Philosophy at Harvard University. Lamb studied for an MA in design products at the Royal College of Art, where he came up with the idea for the Seaboard.

The latest product from ROLI is Blocks, a touch-sensitive MIDI controller that's a cheaper, entry-level way to experiment with the company's technology.

Read our full interview with Lamb here.

Sean Murray is the CEO of Hello Games, the small British game development studio that created one of the biggest (and most controversial) games of 2016.

Hello Games used to be known for its "Joe Danger" series which let people play as a stuntman on a motorbike, pulling off stunts and tricks. It was a fairly typical indie game. But Murray had an ambition: To build what may be the biggest space adventure game of all time.

"No Man's Sky" lets players explore a vast universe that was created by an algorithm. Its vast scale has impressed everyone from Kanye West to Elon Musk.

But not everyone was a fan of "No Man’s Sky". The game caused outrage online after it failed to live up to many of Murray’s promises. Cut features included planetary physics, rivers, and large spaceships.

Rohan Silva is the founder of Second Home, the futuristic office space in East London that combines glass pods and plants to make a radically different office space. Second Home recently expanded to include two new floors, and it's planning to build a "giant indoor lake" on the top floor as well.

Across the street from Second Home is Libreria, a bookshop run by Silva and his team. He's also expanding to include a new workspace in Lisbon on December 1, more London locations, and he raised £20 million last month to expand further into Europe and the US. That's not all, though. Silva is also planning to launch living spaces within the next few years as well.