When better than London Tech Week to showcase the tech wizards who made the shortlist of our business awards? Here are our judges’ picks of the best this year:
Graphcore
Named after the Bletchley Park code-breaking computer, this two-year-old business designs chips to power artificial intelligence, from voice recognition to self-driving cars. Co-founders Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles have developed technology which is 100 times more powerful than the present generation of processors. It recently raised £157 million from investors including Microsoft and BMW, which values the firm at £1.3 billion.
Oxbotica
This start-up which designs the operating systems for driverless cars raised £14 million in its first funding round last year. In 2016 Oxbotica became the first business to test a driverless car on a UK road, with a modified Renault, and its driverless delivery vans have been tried out by Ocado.
PensionBee
PensionBee is a platform allowing people to locate and consolidate their pension plans. Customers can manage their pension from their smartphone, adding more pensions as they switch job, check their live balance, make one-off payments and use a sophisticated calculator to plan ahead.
After a while in the doldrums over abuse in its content, Twitter is back on the up, with brands returning as it avoids the worst of the social media scandals. Recent results beat expectations with revenues growing, net profits up and the number of daily users climbing.
Keywords Studios
Keywords makes the tech behind some of the world’s most popular video games including Fortnite. Customers include Sega, Nintendo, Google, Microsoft and Warner Bros and the firm has 50 studios in 21 countries. It offers help with art, software, audio, language and player support. Big money beckons from Apple’s and Google’s gaming plans.
Muzmatch
Muzmatch is a marriage-broking app to help Muslims find a spouse and has close to one million users globally. It is the brainchild of former Morgan Stanley banker Shahzad Younas and iOS engineer Ryan Brodie. With roughly 400 million single Muslims, there is a huge market for the app which already claims to have resulted in 20,000 marriages. Turnover is £4.5 million.
The Evening Standard Business Awards, in association with London City Airport, will be held at the Landmark London on June 28 from midday. Click here for any booking enquiries.
