Leeds-based Hippo announces its team has grown to 500 people just eight years after founding

The business now expects to post revenues above £50m for the full year, up from just over £38m last year.

Speaking on the company’s early stages, Mr Lewis, who is now CEO of Hippo, said: “We always said that we wanted to start the business we wanted to buy from.

“We hadn’t been particularly overwhelmed with the quality of suppliers we had worked with at various points, and we thought that was our opportunity.

“That was our philosophy - let's try and be the partner for the other firms like us that are out there. We wanted to start a business that was user centred and would do the delivery, and that wouldn’t be exploitative or rate gouge.”

The company would go on to win a number of big contracts in its first few years, a time Mr Lewis described as “like being strapped to a rocket”.

“Everyone had a job that spanned the entire business,” he added, “In year one and two I was doing things like invoices, timesheet systems, going out and billing work, doing pitches and having to run the company. We didn’t even have a HR team.”

Hippo was one of the first firms of its kind to focus on user centred digital design, something which Mr Lewis said he believes gave it an early edge against competitors.

Reflecting on the firm’s success in Leeds, Mr Lewis noted that he believes the city has the opportunity to become a world leading centre for the technology sector.

He said: “I think there's a great opportunity for Leeds, it's already doing well and there is a real feeling of momentum about the place.

“I think Leeds could genuinely be a world-class tech centre, it just needs a bit more weight behind it and it could really get there.

“There are other things the UK is great at - manufacturing for example - and we’re getting very grandiose here, but I think there is nothing to stop Leeds from being a world leading tech centre. It really could get there, we just need someone with the power to really give it a shove, and I think the UK needs it frankly.”

Despite the loss of a large contract slowing down progress for the business in Autumn of last year, Hippo has now seen three months of consecutive record-breaking growth.

Last year, Hippo also acquired fellow Leeds firm, The Data Shed, in a move which saw the company gain 70 new staff members.

“It's been very interesting, in a very positive way,” said Mr Lewis.

“We bought The Data Shed because we were looking at the capabilities we had - product management strategy and user centred design. The things we thought we needed were data and a managed service offering, both of which The Data Shed have.

“You add those on to what we had, and we now consider ourselves end to end for our typical customers. We can take something from concept through to reality.”

The Data Shed rebranded as Hippo Data following the purchase.

The acquisition also saw Hippo’s client list diversify from around 90 per cent public sector to 70 per cent public sector and 30 per cent private, a shift Mr Lewis notes the company had been looking to achieve.