The Exeter Entrepreneur: The Up.co

The Up.co began life as Charged UP, emerging from the University of Exeter’s Student Start-up programme, part of the university business incubator SETsquared Exeter.

CEO Hugo Tilmouth and his co-founder met on the Renewable Energy Engineering MEng degree programme on the Penryn campus. They went on to establish a network of mobile power banks within hospitality venues to increase footfall, dwell time and improve the customer experience.

Charged Up was the UK’s first mobile phone charging network of its kind, growing to 1000 stations across the UK, and has received much acclaim with the co-founders named in the Forbes 30 under 30 and the business dubbed the “Boris Bike of Phone Charging” by the BBC.

Following the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the company pivoted and created CleanedUp; utilising their existing contacts in hospitality, they rolled out a network of hand sanitiser dispensers to increase confidence for customers visiting venues. Continuing to seek ways to support the hospitality industry, they created ServedUp, an order-to-table system to speed up customer service, boost customer satisfaction and increase revenue. Following their success, ChargedUp rebranded as TheUp.co to unify ChargedUp, CleanedUp and ServedUp under one parent company.