This startup delivers incident response training for IT professionals to help businesses recover as fast as possible in emergencies.
See our guide to this year’s hottest new businesses and most exceptional founders in the complete 2026 Startups 100 index.
Founders: Hamed Silatani and Joe McKevitt
Year founded: 2021
Website: uptimelabs.io
IT outages are a frequent subject of news headlines, with Amazon Web Services, Marks & Spencers, Co-Op, and Jaguar all hit last year alone.
However, businesses are often under-prepared for these critical situations, not least because they have neglected to train their staff to be resilient in the heat of the moment.
London-based founder Hamed Silatani, explains that he saw how professional and calm health workers were in an emergency situation when his son was born. In his own career as an incident responder at a major financial services firm, he had experienced the opposite – a ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response.
Together with former colleagues Joe McKevitt, Silatani founded Uptime Labs. The company provides incident response training for IT professionals using simulations, as opposed to book or classroom learning, enabling its customers to get as close to reality as possible.
It was a tough journey. McKevitt and Silatani admit that balancing family and startup life was tricky; and they also took a significant pay cut and utilised personal savings to bootstrap the company. Both co-founders worked without salary for the first seven months.
By pushing their seed funding as much as possible, the founders have seen the company grow. The venture now has clients with large engineering teams, including Trainline, Thomson Reuters, Domino’s, and IG Group. Smaller firms like Storio Group have provided “equally rich client experiences,” they add.
A pivotal moment was running a whole virtual incident festival in July, which attracted 300 incident responders and was the first virtual festival in the resilience space. The team continues to iterate using feedback from its Customer Success team and is planning “a variety of products that help incident responders navigate the increasingly digital world”, such as their growing library of cyber and ransomware scenarios.
With these, they hope Uptime Labs will become the ‘go-to’ name in resilience and therefore an essential in the tool-kit of every engineering team.
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