50. Steer

Founder: Amelia Humfress
Founded: December 2012
Website: www.steer.me

Even someone with the most cursory knowledge of the enterprise landscape in the UK will know that the tech sector is enjoying a vogue – to put it in the mildest terms. The surge of the sector has meant people with coding and app development knowledge are in increasingly high demand, but as Amelia Humfress discovered when trying to code herself, in the absence of a specialist degree people are often left trying to learn to code themselves.

In response to this, the young entrepreneur set up Steer, which offers simple five-day courses in front and back-end web design for £1,500 and is a firm proponent of the mantra that learning to code can be simple. Backed by £100,000 seed funding, the start-up has already taught over 350 people to code since launch, generating £174,000 in the process – with over £81,000 net profit. With 2014 the government’s official ‘Year of Code’ – the young start-up expects to have a landmark 2014 as it increases these figures fourfold organically.