Skyscanner

Skyscanner was founded in Edinburgh in 2003 by Gareth Williams, Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes, who wanted one place to compare every flight. Ctrip, now Trip.com Group, bought it in 2016 in a deal valued at £1.4 billion, and Skyscanner still runs from its Edinburgh headquarters.

Its app and websites search flights, hotels and car hire across more than 1,200 travel partners, with features such as Search Everywhere and price alerts; bookings are made directly with the provider. Skyscanner says more than 100 million people use it every month and that it searches over 80 billion prices a day.

Around 1,500 people work at Skyscanner, from offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Barcelona, Miami, Shenzhen, Singapore and Tokyo, and staff can work from another country for up to 20 days a year. The product runs on AWS, with services mostly in Java and Python, web front ends in React, and Backpack, its open-source design system.