RISING STARS ALUMNI

James Courtney is Founder & CEO at LUX Rewards. Describing himself as an entrepreneur at heart, he was the first student to win the University of Bath Business Plan competition twice, as well as the University's Dragons' Den competition, he went on to be awarded an Entrepreneurship Scholarship from the University to start his own business. He founded LUX Rewards whilst completing his full-time degrees. During his studies, he raised his first investment round of £82,000 via equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube, developed his premium rewards scheme mobile app and signed up the first 20 restaurants to begin the project. He has been accepted on multiple accelerator programmes, including SETsquared, Natwest and Just Eat. The latter involved an investment by the FTSE100 firm. Since the pandemic, he pivoted the business and shifted to a B2B proposition, raised a total of £700,000 in investment, and formed major enterprise partnerships with the likes of Barclaycard, British Airways and Mastercard, generating millions of pounds of additional revenue for the hospitality sector by promoting restaurants, bars and pubs to his audience of high-spending customers.