For the second year in a row, STX Next has ranked as one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies on the Financial Times 1000. But ours is just one spot on the ranking among many others who have chosen Python as their programming language of choice to build rapidly scaling businesses.Here are just a few of our favorite Python-powered companies among the FT1000 in 2019.
1. Deliveroo
- ranked 2nd
- absolute revenue growth: 15,749%
- country: United Kingdom
- sector: Food & Beverage
No need to look far to find the first company using Python on this year’s FT1000 ranking. Deliveroo ranked 2nd this year with an astounding pace of growth: 15,749%!
Even more impressive is the headcount growth. Between 2014 and 2017, Deliveroo grew from just 28 people to 1664.
Keep in mind that the company was founded as recently as 2012, and grew this fast despite competition from other contenders on the UK market.
Deliveroo’s mission is to make you think differently about what food delivery means to you. In their own words: “[i]t’s not a chicken chow mein and a night on the sofa anymore, it’s your favourite local restaurant, it’s a dinner party, a date.”
Deliveroo aims to accomplish this mission through services such as Deliveroo Editions—bespoke kitchens hosting a curated selection of restaurants.
Today, you can order delicious food via Deliveroo in 200 cities in 13 countries. We’re anxiously waiting for them to show up in Poland.
Deliveroo + Python
Deliveroo themselves admit that their “stack is Python-based.” Candidates looking to apply for a Data Scientist position at Deliveroo, for example, will quickly find that Python experience will give them an advantage. That’s no surprise, as Python is famous for its wealth of scientific libraries.
Additionally, Deliveroo runs a GitHub repository with 1 humble Python entry: rds-snapshot-tool.
2. Housekeep
- ranked 6th
- absolute revenue growth: 6,100%
- country: United Kingdom
- sector: Technology
The youngest company on our list, Housekeep has managed to achieve a tremendous pace of growth in a very short time.
Founded in 2014, Housekeep provides quality home cleaning services to thousands of Londoners, with a strong focus on best-in-industry customer service.
Using Housekeep, you can book a visit from trusted cleaners who will keep your apartment tidy and perform extra services like fridge and oven cleaning. For extra convenience, you can even book your Housekeep cleaner to come clean your home while you’re at work.
And the best part of it all: everything is managed online, from booking to payment.
Speaking personally as an individual with acute cleaning aversion, I’m not at all surprised that Housekeep has reached an absolute revenue growth of 6,100%, giving them the prestigious 6th spot within the top 10.
And the FT1000 ranking is only the latest of their accolades. Very recently, they were named Britain's Small Business of the Year 2018; they were also winners at the UK Business Tech Awards 2018 in the “Most Impressive Growth” category.
Housekeep themselves admit that there are 152 other home cleaning companies just in their postcode—and yet, I get the feeling that with such accomplishments, their future is very bright indeed.
Housekeep + Python
Developers at Housekeep are expected to have strong skills in Python or JavaScript. Their Python framework of choice is Django; one of our personal favorites, as well.
Housekeep also hosts a number of GitHub repositories in Python, one of which has 711 forks!
3. Festicket
- ranked 80th
- absolute revenue growth: 1,280%
- country: United Kingdom
- sector: Travel & Leisure
Moving on from the top 10 to the top 100, another company on the ranking using Python is Festicket. They ranked 80th with an impressive growth of 1,280%.
If you’re in the UK, looking to book tickets to your favorite music festival, chances are you’ll find yourself using Festicket’s app very soon.
That’s especially true if you want to package your tickets with accommodation, travel, and add-ons for the best experience possible.
The platform currently has over 1,000 music festivals on offer, and serves a community of 2.5 million festival-goers.
And I bet you’ll never guess who was UK’s 6th fastest-growing technology company on the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 in 2017?
Yep, that was Festicket, too.
Festicket + Python
Festicket is actively seeking to grow its Python expertise with developers skilled in Django and Flask, two of the most popular Python frameworks currently available.
As mentioned in their job offers for Python developers, their backend application is built in Python 3 using the Django web framework. They also use the Django Rest framework for their APIs and Celery for asynchronous tasks.
Their GitHub features 13 Python repositories, many of them oriented around Django.
4. HelloFresh
- ranked 88th
- absolute revenue growth: 1,200%
- country: Germany
- sector: Ecommerce
Just a few spots below Festicket is HelloFresh, another company looking to make your meal experience better. This time, however, it’s less about lunch delivery and more about tailored meal kits to ensure delicious dinners. Hellofresh ranked 88th with 1,200% growth.
HelloFresh has a clear goal in mind: “to change the way people eat, forever!” The way they see it, dinner should be an experience, not just another meal.
Would you hazard a guess how many customers agree with them, and has helped them land among the FT1000?
That number would be 1.8 million customers and 48 million meals served—in Q2 2018 alone.
And it seems that not only German palates enjoy the recipe boxes served by HelloFresh, since the company now serves conscious eaters in 11 countries across 3 continents.
HelloFresh + Python
You may have known that delivering quality meal kits requires farmers and chefs, but did you know that HelloFresh also employs Data Scientists and DevOps Engineers?
And that’s not all. HelloFresh is also looking to attract Backend Engineers as well as more exotic Big Data Engineers. For both of these roles, Python is the tool of choice.
Moreover, in terms of open source, HelloFresh tops the previous two entries on our list with 20 Python repositories on GitHub.
5. Delivery Hero
- ranked 288th
- absolute revenue growth: 518%
- country: Germany
- sector: Food & Beverage
Certainly the most impressive fact about Delivery Hero is that it employs over 20,000+ people around the world. The Berlin headquarters alone employ a crew of over 1,000 Heroes from over 80 nationalities.
Keeping that in mind, this German company’s 518% revenue growth and 288th place on the FT1000 ranking becomes even more amazing.
Striving to transform the way people order food, Delivery Hero works with over 200,000 restaurant partners globally, making it one of the world’s leading online food ordering and delivery marketplace.
And on top of that, Delivery Hero is buying out some of its competition. News broke recently that they are set to acquire Zomato’s UAE business.
Delivery Hero + Python
If you’re looking for evidence of Delivery Hero’s interest in Python, look no further than its 10 Python repositories on GitHub.
Delivery Hero expects a wide range of skills from their Python developers, including:
- Python 2+3,
- Django,
- PostgreSQL,
- Celery,
- Docker,
- building and integrating RESTful APIs,
- developing and deploying applications into cloud services such as AWS.
6. Trustly Group
- ranked 482nd
- absolute revenue growth: 362%
- country: Sweden
- sector: Fintech
Two fintechs close out our list, the first of which is the Sweden-based Trustly.
With a revenue growth of 362%, they ranked 482nd on the list.
The way they present themselves, Trustly’s foundation is a sense of longing—longing for a simpler time when moving money from one person to another was effortless. All you needed was a wallet and some physical cash.
Now, it seems that there’s no shortage of middlemen between your bank account and the person you actually want to pay, for example when shopping online.
This is where Trustly comes in. It’s a payment method that lets you shop and pay from your bank account with no hassle.
Their mission statement is perfectly to the point: “At Trustly, we work hard to make online payments easy.”
Trustly Group + Python
Both of Trustly’s GitHub repositories written in Python are noteworthy:
- the first is trustly-client-python, “an example implementation of communication with the Trustly API using Python”;
- the second is bankapi, “a secure decentralized messaging system to send files/messages between banks and other types of financial institutions.”
Candidates for Senior Database Developers at Trustly will greatly improve their odds if they know Python, and both DevOps Engineers and Systems Engineers must have experience developing in Python or a similar language.
7. Zopa
- ranked 571st
- absolute revenue growth: 304%
- country: United Kingdom
- sector: Fintech
Last but certainly not least, here’s a company that we’ve already featured on the STX Next blog among our top 17 fintech companies with Python in their tech stack.
On top of that, they’re our age!
Founded in 2005, Zopa “built the first ever peer-to-peer lending company to give people access to simpler, better-value loans and investments.”
Using Zopa’s platform, you can either borrow money as a customer or invest as a lender. In each case, the funds are spread out so that no customer has more than 1% of a lender’s investment.
Since the year of Zopa’s founding, over 76,000 investors and institutions have used the platform to lend over £3.92 billion in total.
This year, Financial Times has ranked them 571st thanks to their growth of 304%.
In the near future, Zopa plans to launch a bank based on fair service that will finally earn the customers’ trust—the same trust that high street banks have been losing in the recent years.
Zopa + Python
In terms of software development, what sets Zopa apart from the previous entries is their commitment to open source.
In their own words:
“At Zopa, we in the data chapter love using Open Source tools, particularly the PyData stack, which includes tools like jupyter, Pandas and scikit-learn.”
In case you needed one more argument why Python and fintech fit together perfectly, there it is.
Zopa’s development prowess is constantly growing. They’re actively seeking to build out their pool of Python developers, looking specifically for programmers that place emphasis on unit testing as well as integration, acceptance, and end-to-end tests.
The focus on testing is no surprise. After all, in the world of finance quality and security are key to the kind of long-term success that lands companies among the FT1000.
Final thoughts
Compiling this ranking was a genuine pleasure for us. It’s always great to see successful companies leveraging the simplicity of Python to deliver world-class software faster and put smiles on their users’ faces.
But this is just scratching the surface of what Python’s capable of. For more insight, be sure to read our in-depth guide on what Python is used for. It covers 5 key sectors where Python is used to great success.
On the other hand, if you’d like to see how Python stacks up against other languages, check out Python vs. Other Programming Languages.
Finally, and most importantly...
Should your company be on this list? Feel free to drop us a comment. We’ll be glad to expand the list and highlight more Python-powered companies among the FT1000.
