Supplements, supply teachers and software: three UK companies growing fast

Naturecan doubled sales to £35.1m, Zen Educate grew by half to £105.6m and AutomatePro nearly doubled to £4.0m in their latest accounts.

By Bradshaw

5 Nov 2026

Data to 3 Nov 2026

Naturecan sells hemp-derived CBD products and supplements such as vitamins and minerals, and it is live in over 30 countries. Andy Duckworth, a former CEO of Myprotein, founded it in May 2019.

Its CBD oil is a broad-spectrum distillate, and the company says it is tested by third parties. It joined the Association for the Cannabinoid Industry in 2019. Investors have put in £10.5m in total, every round at the same price.

Sales doubled in the year to 31 Dec 2025, from £17.1m to £35.1m, and the team grew from 43 to 127 people.

Zen Educate supplies schools with supply teachers and support staff through an online platform and an app. It calls itself "the UK's leading digital staffing platform for educators" and "a genuine alternative to supply teaching agencies". It says it is used by more than 2,000 UK schools and more than 13,000 teachers and teaching assistants. It promises that new teachers are vetted and approved in under 24 hours, and it also places TAs and support staff.

Zen Educate was founded in 2017, and its co-founder and CEO is Slava Kremerman. The company has offices in Truro, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sunderland, among other places. Sales grew by half in the year to 31 Dec 2025, from £67.9m to £105.6m.

The staffing side grew faster than sales. Average headcount went from 222 to 867 people, and investors have put in £30.0m over the years.

The smallest of them, AutomatePro, works from an office on Regent Street in London and writes test automation for ServiceNow. The product comes as modules named AutoTest, AutoDeploy, AutoMonitor, AutoDoc and AutoPlan. Its tagline reads "For when your ServiceNow can't afford to break", and it bills itself as "Trusted by leading ServiceNow teams". One customer says end-to-end testing of its Change Management module once took two people six days and now runs in the background in 34 minutes.

Paul Chorley is its CEO and co-founder. Sales nearly doubled in the year to 30 Jun 2025, from £2.0m to £4.0m, and the team grew from 31 to 42 people. In October 2026 the company raised £2.5m.

Little else connects the three of them. Naturecan sells to shoppers online, Zen Educate to schools and the teachers who cover for them, and AutomatePro to IT teams that run ServiceNow.

These three are among the equity-backed companies whose sales grew fastest in their latest accounts in our data. Accounts coverage is partial, so this is a list of companies we can see, not a ranking of the country. The accounts also cover different years. Naturecan and Zen Educate report to 31 Dec 2025, while AutomatePro's latest year ended on 30 Jun 2025, so its figures are the oldest of the three.

Sources

Learn more at bradshawdata.com. Corrections are listed with their dates.