This year, the awards saw a record number of submissions from incredible startups and founders in the industry. With so many strong entries, the judges had the difficult decision of choosing their top three in each category.

Every year, we ensure the Hustle Awards have a specially curated judging panel, featuring a cross-section of business specialists relevant to the award categories they judge. Each group of judges had both expertise and diversity, so that every entry was assessed accurately and from a mix of viewpoints.

After two weeks of reading all the submissions and comparing applications, the judges shortlisted their favourites, which were then brought to the table for judging day and narrowed down to their top three candidates in each category. You can see the shortlist here.

Judges included the likes of one of the founding members of Black Seed Ventures, Yvonne Nagawa, Innovation Expert, Advisor, and Venture Partner at Molten Ventures, Bindi Karia, CEO of AllBright, Viviane Paxinos, and Uber Operations Lead, Shammi Rauchura.

The group of independent judges came together at the judging day, with a healthy amount of debate, and many opinions shared. Overall, a number of startups shone through, and the judges agreed on the winners from the bunch.

Commenting on the day, Bindi Karia, one of the judges, commented: “It’s been quite great to hear different perspectives because all the judges in the room I’m in, they’re coming from different stages of investing and different levels of industry that they’ve worked in, but I’ve made a new network which is always fantastic.”

Returning judge, Shammi Raichura, Operations Lead at Uber, said: “I’ve been really lucky to be doing this for a third year. I’ve been a judge for the Hustle Awards two previous years and this is actually one of my favourite days of the year.”

The Hustle Awards was created as the unrivalled badge of excellence and the benchmark for all startup businesses to aspire to. The awards will take place on 18th July 2024 at The Steel Yard London, where we will not only be announcing the winners, but also bringing you the networking event of the year as we gather the entire tech startup community under one roof to celebrate the very best of the industry. Grab your tickets here.

A massive thank you to the MYO for hosting us, and of course to our sponsors of the Hustle Awards – Anglia Unicorn, Northern Data Group, Dell Technologies, 514 Media, and Small Business Research and Enterprise Centre.