New research from American Express has identified Richmond as London's most entrepreneurial borough, once the City of London is set aside. The study, conducted by Development Economics, ranked 317 local authority areas based on how many businesses start up and how many remain operating two years later.
Richmond's staying power
Richmond's success lies in its staying power, boasting London's highest business survival rate, with almost three quarters of new firms still trading after two years. Sutton and Kensington & Chelsea also ranked highly on the start-up and survival leaderboard. The pattern indicates that outer London is holding its own against the centre.
Nationally, London was outperformed by Stratford-on-Avon, where 81.4% of new businesses survive two years, followed by Uttlesford in Essex and Waverley in Surrey.
AI recruiters born in Covid
The findings come as the ScaleUp Standard newsletter profiles Popp, an AI recruitment platform founded by Sam Dhesi, James Cochrane-Dyet, and Ilyès Benmansour. Dhesi, a former surgeon, was working as the Government's head of emerging technology during the pandemic and met Cochrane-Dyet, a former military-intelligence officer, while part of the NHS's Covid crisis team.
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. In 2023, the trio founded Popp, a platform built to help recruiters hire at volume.
"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.
Marrying purpose and profit
The newsletter also features Ana Martins, founder of frozen chocolate-covered fruit snack brand Froot Pops, launched 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." Her experience has shown that "when it's done properly they actually push the same way."
Martins advises treating trading partners as partners, not suppliers, with long-term contracts that give farming communities certainty around volumes. She recommends building fairness into pricing from the start, focusing on waste by creating a chain of partners for whom waste is a necessary ingredient, and picking battles by choosing commitments that can be afforded properly today.
