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The five millennial entrepreneurs you need to know about right now

Us millennials have all done it. Standing in our underwear with our Snapchat Spectacles perched on our noses, smashing avocado with one hand while Googling a famous figure or celebrity on our smartphones with the other.

You scroll through their enviable achievements on Wikipedia before stumbling across their date of birth. Twenty? Twenty years old, are you kidding me?

I’d wager many of you out there felt similar pangs of regret at your own paltry achievements when news broke last week of Improbable’s erm improbably massive $502m funding round.

The capital raise made instant paper millionaires out of its founders, including 29-year-old Chief Executive and Co-Founder Hermann Narula, and catapulted the tech startup into the realms of unicorn status.

But such stories can also be a source of inspiration as well as regret. So with that in mind, Bdaily London has pulled together a list of the five millennial overachievers you need to know about in London right now to jolt you out of your mid-May malaise.

Hermann Narula (29), Improbable

Who better to start with than Hermann Narula? Co-founder and Chief Executive of tech firm Improbable, interest in the Cambridge graduate, who founded the company alongside Rob Whitehead, has exploded in the last week following Improbable’s massive Series B.

A computer whizz from an early age who took his IT GCSE four years early, his initial ambition to shake up online games with real agency-based simulations now looks positively quaint considering some of the potential uses for Improbable’s tech. From simulating cities to the UK’s web infrastructure, Narula’s joke that he wishes to ‘create the Matrix’ might not be so wide of the mark.

Alice Bentinck (30), Entrepreneur First

It has been a busy decade or so for Alice Bentinck of Entrepreneur First. Since graduating from Nottingham University Business School with a BA in Business Management, as well as interning at Tony Blair’s office in 2008, Alice set up Entrepreneur First with co-founder Matthew Clifford, established Code First: Girls and received an MBE for her services to business. Phew.

Its an enviable list of achievements, and one that will certainly grow over the next decade. Not least because her work with accelerator EF, which takes promising graduates from technical backgrounds and fosters their business aspirations, will no doubt continue to spit out millennial entrepreneurs at an ever greater rate.

Davide Fioranelli (29), Freetrade

While any of the three co-founders of commission-free trading app FreeTrade could’ve featured here, Fioranelli’s age lands him slapbang of the millennial sweespot, not to mention that fetching cardigan (pictured left).

Fioranelli, along with co-founders Adam Dodds and Andre Mohamed, is gearing up the app-only stockbroking platform for its launch later this year. Targeted directly at young investors, the app offers zero-commision on portfolios of less than £10,000 and managed to raise £1.1m on Crowdcube earlier this year.

Jessi Baker (32), Provenance

Jessi Baker has grown her blockchain startup Provenance from a part-time endeavour she kept ticking over as a student to a hotly tipped company that has done more than most to demonstrate the potential of the nascent technology.

The London-based startup has already entered into an agreement with Co-op to explore how the blockchain can help to track and verify the sources of Fair Trade goods, while its work with the seafood industry to identify fish caught using slave labour highlights how ably the tech can function in different contexts.

Yasser Khattak (21), Den

At just 21, Yasser Khattak has already achieved some runaway success with his smarthome startup Den. Not only has he sealed major distribution deals with the likes of Tesco, Amazon and Sainsbury’s, but he’s also convinced former Amstrad boss and Sir Alan Sugar ally, Bob Watkins, to get on board with his vision for easy to fit and use smart switches and plugs.

Not bad for a self-professed ‘troublesome pupil’ who got his break selling Chinese electronics to his pals on Facebook.

Ok, so who have we missed? We’re always on the look out for entrepreneurs (millennial or otherwise), so feel free to drop our London editor billy.wood@bdaily.co.uk an email if you want to get your’s or someone else’s story out there.

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