52. Nuji

Founders: Dean Fankhauser, Vincent Thome and Anton Meryl Nithianandan
Founded: November 2011
Website: www.nuji.com

Nuji made our 2013 list for the rich potential of its ambitious proposition, which is to build the internet’s largest department store with social and personalisation built into its very core. Its public wishlist system allows people to create, follow and track lists of their favourite products, with users then offered discounts using a smart affiliate model. Approximately 200,000 shoppers now use the site, a number which is growing all the time as Nuji continues to post extremely impressive month-on-month growth figures of 20%.

As you might expect, this kind of performance has not gone unnoticed by investors, and in March of this year the site raised $2m in seed funding from the Accelerator Group, Seedcamp and others, helping to finance the launch of a new iOS app the following month. This app will be the start of what the founders cryptically refer to as a “mobile strategy that is unlike anything else”; time will tell whether the site becomes the next Amazon, but its excellent performance over the past year is certainly hugely promising.