Lottie Crowned 2025’s #1 Startup in the Startups 100 Index

Lottie has been crowned winner of the prestigious Startups 100 Index for 2025, having risen from 8th place in 2023 to 2nd place in 2024 (and awarded with the Exceptional Founders Award). We’re so proud to have been included on this list for the last three years, following in the footsteps of well-recognised brands such as Monzo, Deliveroo, and HelloFresh.

Lottie was founded in 2021, with the goal of helping families find the UK’s best care options across care homes and home care. By only working with trusted, high-quality providers, users can feel confident about finding the perfect care for themselves or their loved ones when using Lottie.

Keep reading to learn more about Startups 100, and how we’ve grown to achieve 1st place.

What Is The Startups 100?

The Startups 100 Index annually ranks the UK’s fastest-growing and most successful startups. It features highly promising and rapidly emerging companies that have shown notable growth, innovation, and promise within their industries. These top 100 up-and-coming companies are picked based on five key areas of analysis:

1. Finance
2. External validation
3. Size of opportunity
4. Innovativeness of idea
5. Strength of concept

You can check out the full list of the top 100 startups here.

How Has Lottie Grown To Become The UK’s Top Startup of 2025?

To reach the top, startups must showcase true innovation and originality. Editor of Startups.co.uk, Zohra Huda, has said:

“As someone who has recently experienced the stress of finding acceptable care for my elderly parents, it’s no surprise that Lottie has risen through the ranks to top this year’s Startups 100 index. With its offering of quality care, delivered in an exceptionally user-focused way, the Donnelly brothers have managed to turn a passion project into a hugely successful business that addresses a pressing societal problem.”

You can find our full profile here.

1. An original idea fixing a real problem

Our founders spotted a problem many face when trying to find suitable care for their loved ones. We’re the UK’s first care directory to offer families complete visibility of residency fee information and service availability. This means care-seekers no longer have to call individual care providers when trying to gather information.

2. Innovation beyond the original offering

We’re evolving to become the world’s first end-to-end marketplace experience. Through Lottie, customers will be able to find, book, and pay for care. Through the acquisition of Found CRM, we’re getting ready to make purchasing care services online easy. We’ve also expanded to offer Seniorcare by Lottie which offers support to employees caring for an elderly loved one.

3. Transparency and quality

Every care provider on our platform is assessed via "The Lottie Score" and vetted by our team of in-house care experts. Based on 19 unique data points, these ratings are updated weekly.

As a result, we’re the UK’s best-rated care-finding service in the UK, with a Trustpilot score of 4.9/5.

4. Social impact

Our innovative technology is now used by over 5,000 care providers in the UK. As a result, bed blocking times in the NHS have decreased, as hospital discharge teams now have access to real-time bed availability.

What’s more, since launching in 2021, we’ve already helped an estimated 56,000 families book care for themselves or a loved one.

Will Donnelly, Co-Founder of Lottie, Has Explained Lottie’s Journey And Why It’s Mission Is So Important

From being featured in 'Just Started' right after launching Lottie to winning the Startups 100 in 2025, Will reflects on this achievement and shares his advice for other scaling businesses

As someone who grew up part of an entrepreneurial family, I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been an avid reader of the Startups 100 Index for as long as I can remember. Never in my wildest dreams did I think Lottie would be featured on the index - let alone be ranked #1 and follow in the footsteps of past winners, including Revolut and Multiverse. I’m generally so proud of Lottie’s team and so thankful to Startups for allowing us the opportunity to fly Lottie's pink flag for the social care industry on such an acclaimed list.

In terms of advice for other business owners - I’d honestly say half the battle is just finding something that you’re genuinely passionate about and ready to spend the next 10+ years devoting your life to. Building Lottie has been incredibly challenging and has involved some very low moments throughout the journey. What’s kept me going, especially in the tougher days, weeks and months, is my unwavering passion for helping families and my deep desire to fix the world’s broken social care industry.

Starting Lottie during turbulent times shaped the future of the company

While I don’t think this is the case for every industry, I believe that the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the health and social care market for the better. With the industry being forced online during COVID-19, the pandemic paved the way for introducing technology in the health and social care sector, including Lottie.

In turn, this new technology has already delivered huge operational efficiencies and long-term cost savings for the Government and the NHS.

For example, Lottie - a pandemic-adopted technology and now used by more than 5,000 care providers in the UK - has helped reduce bed blocking in the NHS by giving hospital discharge teams access to real-time bed availability, as well as fee transparency and instant booking capabilities.

Lottie is tackling the social care crisis beyond its role as a placement service

Finding care is complicated, emotional, and hugely time consuming. It’s also one of life’s biggest financial events and the problem is widespread! Everyone you know, whether that’s a family member, a friend or a work colleague, will someday be faced with the reality of having to organise care. Yet no one is prepared, with over 44% of families regretting their care decisions and feeling let down by the social care system. However, families' difficulties stem from the underlying problems faced by the global social care market - an offline, fragmented, and underfunded industry with next to no consumer transparency or central infrastructure connecting the industry.

Lottie was created to make finding care easier for families and solve one of society’s biggest macro problems. By merging real human expertise with industry-leading technology, Lottie is expertly positioned to be a family’s trusted guide to best understand, find, and fund later life care. Proudly rated the UK’s most loved eldercare finding service, Lottie’s marketplace allows families to easily compare local services and make an informed decision about their loved one's care.

However, having acquired Found in 2022 and subsequently another three software businesses since then, Lottie is now primed to pioneer the world’s first end-to-end marketplace experience for finding, booking, and paying for care. Powered by Found’s real-time availability data and payment processing software used by care providers, families, and other stakeholders, users will soon be able to instantly purchase care online via Lottie and in a similar seamless manner to reserving a hotel stay via Booking.com or Expedia.

This vastly improved customer experience will be a global first. It will also pave the way for Lottie’s booking engine infrastructure to be used by partner organisations such as Local Councils and NHS Trusts. In turn, this innovation will relieve NHS bed blocking pressure by allowing elderly patients to get discharged more quickly from a hospital setting and, therefore, simultaneously save the government billions in wasted taxpayer money.

Outside of product development, I also see Lottie playing a hugely important role in combatting misconceptions in care and advocating positive change for the industry. For example, Lottie was key in advocating for policy change and raising awareness for important government matters such as the Carer’s Leave Act. Equally, we really enjoy injecting fun into the sector by challenging outdated perceptions of ageing through creative and thought-provoking campaigns such as Lottie's “Senior Swifities” - which aimed to demystify life in a care home and showcase that being a Swiftie (Taylor Swift) has no age limit. The viral campaign was viewed more than 25 million times and has been featured by global media outlets including the likes of ITV and Lorraine. You can watch the heartwarming ITV segment or view Lottie’s viral Instagram and TikTok posts.

Lottie has taken steps to guarantee transparency and build trust for families navigating the often-complex process of selecting care options

Lottie has successfully installed transparency into the social care industry by becoming the UK’s first directory to offer families full visibility of residency fee information and service availability. We made this possible by making it compulsory for providers listing on Lottie to showcase their service availability and fees to care seekers for up to eight care categories, including residential, dementia, nursing, and respite care services. This was an industry first and previously a massive stumbling block for families, who would find themselves contacting an average of six services before finding a provider with availability that could meet the care needs of their loved one and their budget requirements.

In addition to this and to instil confidence in families using Lottie, we made it an onboarding requirement that our team of experts vets every service provider listed on Lottie’s marketplace and is continually monitored by our quality control measure - the Lottie Score - which assesses a service out of 100 based on their care quality. The Lottie Score is updated weekly and is ever-evolving, but currently factors in 19 data points, including industry-accepted metrics such as regulatory ratings and customer review scores, as well as Lottie’s own proprietary data, including how responsive a care provider is to enquiries - given we’ve learned how important speed is to families when searching for care and the huge discrepancies that exist between providers.

To date, Lottie has helped hundreds of thousands of families find care and the dissatisfaction rate of our service is less than 0.5%. This data point shows that we’re doing something right at Lottie - especially when comparing our dissatisfaction rate to the industry-wide statistic of 44% of care seekers regretting their care choice. This is a shocking statistic and one of the key reasons we launched Lottie in the first place!

We firmly believes there’s more employers could do to support caregivers in the workplace in 2025

Consider adding an eldercare support service to your company’s employee benefits package like Seniorcare by Lottie.

The eldercare support we deliver to employees via Seniorcare by Lottie is truly outstanding and the value returned to companies - whether that’s through reduced absenteeism, cost savings, or protecting an employee’s mental health - is unmeasurable versus the small fee they pay for their workforce to access the service.

Since launching Seniorcare by Lottie nearly three years ago, we’ve never experienced an employer partner churn from the service.

Lottie matches care seekers with the best care homes for their needs. You can request a free list of care homes from our care experts, who will share homes matching your budget, location and type of care needed. You can also search for a care home through our easy-to-use directory.