Technology

Posted on November 8, 2018 by staff

UK Business Tech Awards: Young Entrepreneur of the Year

Technology

BusinessCloud’s inaugural UK Business Tech Awards are set for November and will recognise the individuals and businesses who are making the most impact in the world of technology.

Every day we are highlighting a different category ahead of a glitzy ceremony at London’s Montcalm Marble Arch on November 20.

There will be 18 gongs up for grabs including ‘Young Entrepreneur of the Year’ with four names in the frame after they were shortlisted by our stellar line-up of judges: Chloe Barrett, Jordan Appleson, Mike Anderson and Dr. James Gupta.

We profile them below. Tickets are available at the Business Tech Awards website.

Anyone interested in sponsorship opportunities should contact [email protected].

The judging panel included David Hardman, MBE, managing director of Innovation Birmingham; Louize Clarke, co-founder, ConnectTVT; Elizabeth Clark, CEO, Dream Agility; former director of Tech North Richard Gregory; Tom Cheesewright, founder of Applied Futurism Practice; former Vodafone exec Rob Mukherjee, director of Greater Sport; Chris Dymond, director, Sheffield Digital; and Scott Henderson, managing director of Jumpstart.

YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR SHORTLIST

Chloe Barrett, Founder & CEO, DigiDentistry

At 16 Chloe Barrett became the youngest rider in the Young Horse of the Year Championships. Now 29, she is the founder of DigiDentistry, a visual learning platform based at co-working space The Landing in Salford’s MediaCityUK which uses augmented reality and animation to train the dentists of the future.

While working later as a dressage coach she was forced to take on a side job as a dental nurse when the recession hit in 2008. Several years later she took over a failing training provider called the Smart Dental Academy and rebuilt it, opening five additional bases and establishing apprenticeship and postgraduate courses.

She took that experience into her DigiDentistry venture, an edtech firm which offers training towards dental qualifications and for which she won an Enterprise Vision Award this year.

Barrett took part in a two-week accelerator programme in Silicon Valley in July through the Women’s Startup Lab and also toured India to explore overseas markets.

Jordan Appleson, CEO, Hark

Hark founder and CEO Jordan Appleson has a cloud-based sensor business that is driving efficiencies for many UK companies including one of the nation’s leading supermarkets.

He began his career at 14 fixing broken mobile phones before progressing from lead software developer to head of product development at Branded3 by the age of 20.

Founded in 2016, Hark now employs ten people and is looking at a serious raise in the next 12-18 months. The start-up is on track to hit potentially seven-digits in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2018.

Initially built to monitor, store and analyse temperature and humidity data for the life sciences sector, its cloud platform is now being used more widely. The supermarket it ran a trial with last year is now rolling out the technology across its whole estate, collecting and processing data around energy and buildings.

Mike Anderson, CEO, Padoq & Nothing But Epic

Serial entrepreneur Mike Anderson’s first venture Jolly Goods was sold in 2017. He then started award-winning digital agency Nothing But Epic, which now employs ten staff and is on track to turn over £500,000 in 2018.

His latest venture Padoq offers a platform for organisers of communities of all shapes and sizes, giving them a dedicated space –  ‘a Padoq’ within which they can plan events, share files and photos, make decisions and collect money.

They have a tough stance on data privacy, with the platform not collecting personal data for commercial gain, and giving control back to administrators of communities in a GDPR compliant way.

Padoq has been created as native apps for both iOS and Android, with a web-based application to be launched later this year. They raised £800k seed investment in 2018 and are currently finalising further investment plans for 2019.

Dr. James Gupta, Founder & CEO, Synap

Dr James Gupta was studying medicine from textbooks at Leeds University when he had the idea of making the learning experience more interactive. He and colleague Dr Omair Vaiyani set up a crude mobile app which allowed them to upload questions to practise with each other in bitesize chunks.

In the four years since, the revision platform has grown to help users including students, airline pilots, martial arts instructors, special needs teachers and even hobbyists answer 20 million questions.

Synap has designed custom features for the likes of the US Air Force and mytaxi black cabs, while the highly regulated nature of financial services and healthcare means Synap is especially useful in those sectors.

The firm currently employs four people and is looking at turnover of almost a quarter of a million pounds this year. CEO Dr Gupta says he is looking to expand that to 8-10 staff in the next year.