5. Simba Sleep

Founders: James Cox and Steve Reid
Founded: 2015 (Launched February 2016)
Website: www.simbasleep.com

Launched at the beginning of last year, SIMBA Sleep is the fast-rising rival in the e-commerce mattress market. Entering the fiercely fought “battle of the beds”, SIMBA’s a direct challenger to fellow UK heavyweight eve Sleep and US champion Casper with an offering that claims to be “the most advanced mattress in the world”.

Despite spending up to a third of our lives in bed, for many of us, buying a mattress is an expensive and confusing process – James Cox and Steve Reid set out to solve this with their one-type-fits-all solution.

Some people like firm, some like soft, some like springs and some like foam. SIMBA’s technology combines a layer of both foam and springs, which it says adapts to the weight and size of a person and shapes itself to ensure they get the right support – even if they’re sharing a bed with someone of a wildly different size.

SIMBA says this technology is backed up by none other than the Sleep to Live Institute – an organisation that operates the world’s largest data bank of body profiles, mapping 18 points of the body on 10 million people, allowing it to work out a bell curve of 180 million data points.

Now backed by £17.5m in funding, after closing £5m last October and a further £9m round in February, SIMBA promises it will continue to innovate and evolve, as it looks to create a mattress that allows you to sleep longer and more comfortably than any other product on the market.

Creating what it claims is world’s most advanced mattress is “just the start” – the next year will see the company attempt to not just double, but triple output, as it accelerates growth across Europe, Asia and the Middle East…