Forget Shoreditch: the best place in London to start a business is .... Richmond

If you were asked to name London’s best place to launch a business, Shoreditch would definitely crop up. Perhaps King’s Cross too, and Soho. You probably wouldn’t name Richmond. But according to new research from American Express, once you set aside the City of London, the capital’s most entrepreneurial corner is indeed this leafy borough, ordinarily better known for its deer park than its disruptors.The study, by Development Economics, ranked 317 local authority areas on two measures: how many businesses start up, and how many are still standing two years later. Richmond’s secret is staying power - it has London’s highest business survival rate, with almost three quarters of new firms still trading after two years. Sutton and Kensington & Chelsea were also chart-toppers on the start-up and survival leaderboard.The pattern is that outer London is holding its own against the centre. Starting a company is the easy bit; keeping it alive is the real test. And nationally, London was outdone by Stratford-on-Avon, where 81.4% of new businesses survive two years, followed by Uttlesford in Essex and Waverley in Surrey. Food for thought for this week’s ScaleUp Standard, where we meet founders inspired by NHS work in Covid to build a mass-scale recruitment platform, and Ana Martins, whose snack brand Froot Pops is backed by Active Partners and former Sainsbury’s CEO Justin King. She opens the lid on how a value-led supply chain covering fair labour practices and environmental protection can still balance with profitability. The Covid scramble that spawned an AI recruiterWhen Sam Dhesi thinks back to his work in the early stages of Covid-19, his lasting memory is the scramble to find people.Dhesi had been a surgeon before pivoting into tech. He was working as the Government's head of emerging technology when the pandemic struck and, as part of the NHS’s Covid crisis team, met James Cochrane-Dyet, a former military-intelligence officer.Today the pair run AI recruitment platform Popp - after both realised the hardest part of their complex roles was rapidly pulling together teams to stand up new response units, and decided to do something about it.They were tasked with finding teams to cover work from testing and contact-tracing operations to clinical support. "The hard part was never a shortage of willing people," Cochrane-Dyet says, “it was getting the information you needed out of thousands of people - were they available, did they have the right documentation, where were they based - as fast as humanly possible, and under pressure none of us had seen before."Applicant information was scattered across myriad spreadsheets, email accounts and phone calls, with no central system to see availability and checks.So in 2023, Dhesi, Cochrane-Dyet and Ilyès Benmansour, a healthcare software engineer, founded Popp, a platform built to help recruiters hire at volume.Read More"People racing to place the right candidate, but the race is hamstrung by manual work," said Cochrane-Dyet. "Recruiters spend as much as 75% of their time contacting applicants, checking qualifications and availability, chasing documents and booking interviews, long before anyone makes a decision. That means the rapport-building and negotiation that agencies win work on are squeezed out as the admin piles up."Popp analyses and shortlists thousands of applications, audits for bias, then organises screening questions, interviews, and document collection via AI conversations on WhatsApp, SMS and email, in 50-plus languages. Popp raised a £3.6 million seed round in November 2024, co-led by Emerge and SuperSeed Ventures. After initially focusing on the high-volume, time-critical healthcare sector, Popp now brings in almost £3 million turnover across sectors, with customers including recruiters Robert Walters, Harvey Nash and Pertemps. It’s targeting £10 million turnover in the next year. Cochrane-Dyet said Popp’s work could spread across geographies and sectors. “The aim is to remove bottlenecks in hiring processes to make them more efficient, so that real people can get into jobs faster." How to marry purpose and profit - by Ana Martins, founder of Froot PopsWhen Ana Martins launched frozen chocolate-covered fruit snack brand Froot Pops in 2024, "I was very conscious of the fact that my two key ingredients are closely tied to farming communities: cocoa and fruits," she says. "I was always hearing how running a profitable business and sourcing our raw materials ethically and sustainably could pull in opposite directions." However, her own experience has shown that "when it’s done properly they actually push the same way." Here she shares her tips for other founders on putting profit and purpose on an equal footing:Ana Martins, founder of Froot PopshandoutTreat the people you trade with as partners, not suppliers"We have long-term contracts in place with all our key partners: paying fairly and committing early to volumes gives them the confidence to invest in the harvest and the workforce behind it, and gives us better fruit and reliable supply. The whole supply chain works more efficiently and the farming communities benefit so much from having that certainty around volumes for the next season."Build fairness into pricing from the start"If sourcing ethically is a cost you try to add later in the journey, it will mean a margin sacrifice and likely require a strategy shift to try and fit it into your P&L. Far better to include it as part of your costings from the start.""Reducing waste is good for the planet and good for margins. We have created a chain of partners for whom our waste is a necessary ingredient or material. I always recommend going through the trouble of finding that, as hard as it may be, because once you do it solves problems all around.""We can’t fix everything all at once. We choose a couple of commitments that we can afford to do properly today, make sure we do a good job of that, and then we will keep on adding more as we grow. For example, having fully at-home recyclable packaging was a non-negotiable for me - we went through a lot of hoops to find the packaging partner that would be able to do that early on."