In April 2016, Hippo was founded in Leeds with a simple, guiding principle: “We set up Hippo to be the company we wanted to buy from.”
Informed by founders Adam Lewis and Rob Coop’s experience buying from other consultancies, Hippo was born from a desire to fix a broken model where suppliers prioritised selling technology over solving actual human problems. This journey began as a small team of people with a vision for a more impactful digital landscape.
As Hippo celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2026, that “herd” has grown into one of the UK’s largest independent digital services consultancies, now with over 700 dedicated specialists across six national offices in Leeds, London, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, and Glasgow.
A decade of impact and evolution
The journey from a Leeds startup to a nationwide digital powerhouse has been defined by a relentless focus on evidence-based digital delivery and human-centred design. By aligning with the public sector digital service standards from the outset, Hippo established itself as a trusted partner for the UK’s most critical infrastructure.
Reaching almost 700 people in ten years required deliberate choices. Hippo acquired specialist data-analytics and cyber security provider Converging Data in 2019, and in 2023 brought in Leeds-based data consultancy The Data Shed, a move that strengthened its data and engineering capability and broadened what it could solve for clients. Private investment partnerships, first in 2021 and most recently with Exponent in 2025, have provided the backing to continue investing in capability while retaining the independence to make the right decisions for clients and employees.
By its eight anniversary, Hippo surpassed the 500 employee milestone maintaining an enduring culture and set of business values through a period of rapid growth. At its core this has meant fostering inclusivity and a strong sense of community, coupled with a people-centric approach that prioritises users’ needs.
Hippo has helped the Department for Work and Pensions modernise how millions of people access critical support services. It has worked alongside the NHS to improve the digital systems that underpin frontline healthcare. And within the Department for Education, Hippo continues to shape how school leaders and families interact with the services they rely on. This experience has seen Hippo succeed in delivering exceptional services for brands like Virgin, the BBC, and more recently expanding further into the financial services industry.
A human-centred philosophy
Even as Hippo scales at pace, its leadership ensures the organisation designs, builds and delivers digital services in a different way to traditional suppliers. Hippo is a digital services company yet it is also, first and foremost, a human services company. This philosophy applies both to the systems it helps to build for millions of citizens, and to the internal culture shaped by employees.
“We set up Hippo to be different,” says Adam Lewis, Founder and CEO. “It’s an understanding that we put people first and design systems around people. The intent is really that we take people into account across all phases of our delivery.”
Mike Tattersall, Chief Delivery Officer, echoes this sentiment, emphasising the importance of this philosophy and the role it plays in recruitment and culture:
“Build the right thing right isn’t just a mantra – it’s how we run products, services and programmes. On a recent education and health joint initiative, it meant spending time with frontline workers in lots of different settings before writing a line of code, so the service we built reflected how they actually work, the outcomes trying to be achieved, not how a spec assumed they would. That’s the difference between a digital service that gets adopted and one that gets worked around.”
Marking the milestone
To mark this decade of impact, Hippo is launching a series of celebrations in 2026, bringing together clients, partners and friends to reflect on the business’s work in delivering critical digital transformation across government, health and the private sector.
It is only fitting that the first of these celebrations takes place at the Brew Society in the centre of Leeds – a key part of the Hippo origin story. The coffee and beer house is situated directly below Hippo’s office headquarters and provides access to the Hippo Campus event space which, as part of a wider renovation facility, is positioned as a continuation from a social space into a collaborative working environment.
Offering a destination for Hippo’s to socialise and meet customers, the Brew Society will play host to the Hippo and Friends 10th anniversary party later this month, with more events across the business’s nationwide network planned throughout the year.
A future of purpose
As Hippo enters its second decade, the focus turns to what comes next for public and private digital services. The company has evolved from its research and design foundations into a full-service digital consultancy – strategy, research, design, data, engineering and AI delivered as one cohesive system. Hippo now operates on some of the largest and most important services in digital government.
The 10th anniversary coincides with Hippo securing significant new contracts across health, government and private sector in the first quarter of 2026, combined with a continuous increase in recruitment across the business’s professions. The new contract wins ensure that Hippo will continue to play a critical role in the digital modernisations of services.
With the acceleration of AI, Hippo has invested in embedding intelligence into service delivery from the start: grounded in strong data foundations, responsible design and measurable outcomes. The aim is practical – helping clients use AI where it creates genuine value for users, not as an afterthought or a headline.
Adam Lewis concludes. “As we look toward the next decade, our ambition is the same as it was on day one: to make services work better for people. The tools and the scale have changed, but the intent hasn’t. And the best proof of that will be the work we deliver next.”
