There are entrepreneurs who build businesses, and there are those who build them twice. Ritchie Nanda belongs firmly in the second category, though he would be the first to tell you that the distance between those two versions of himself taught him everything worth knowing.
PressHop, which Nanda launched less than a year ago, connects a fast-growing network of verified contributors, known as ‘Hoppers’, directly with news publishers. When a newsworthy event occurs, publishers post an assignment through the platform and receive verified, rights-cleared content from someone already on the ground, within minutes.
It is the infrastructure layer that sits between what is happening in the world and the newsrooms trying to cover it, and it is a direct challenge to the traditional photo and video bureaux that have dominated news content supply for decades.
What makes the story of PressHop unusual, though, is the story behind it.
In 1992, Nanda founded a modest security services company in Mumbai with three employees and a belief that there was a better way to run a services business in India. What followed was three decades of relentless expansion. At its peak, his company employed more than 97,000 people across 200 offices in seven countries, with revenues of £140 million and an enterprise valuation of £270 million. He had, by any measure, built something remarkable.
Then came the years he describes simply as the most challenging of his entrepreneurial life. A series of business setbacks led to financial difficulties he could not reverse. In 2022, he was declared bankrupt in the UK, and was cleared the next year.
What is striking about London-based Nanda, is not the scale of what he lost, but the clarity it seems to have given him. He has said that he rebuilt not just his circumstances but his entire relationship with failure, coming to understand it not as an ending but as information. The willingness to start again, he reflects, is not a weakness but a form of discipline.
His own experience of watching inaccurate stories circulate without consequence, and finding no meaningful way to correct the record, left a permanent mark. The lesson, as he tells it, was not bitterness but purpose. If the existing structures of media could cause that much damage through inaction, then building something better was not merely a commercial opportunity but an obligation. PressHop is that obligation made tangible.
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The network has grown to more than 65,000 Hoppers across the UK, and growing populations in the US and India. 375 media publishers now using the platform. Metro and Newsquest are among its early adopters in the UK. The pace of growth, particularly given that PressHop is barely seven months old, has attracted attention from investors and award panels alike. The platform has been shortlisted for two prizes at the National Tech Awards 2026, including Start-up Tech Company of the Year and Innovative Enterprise Product of the Year.
Earlier this year, PressHop secured a US provisional patent protecting the core technology behind the platform, a milestone that Nanda regards as one of the most significant in the company’s short history. Patents in media technology are notoriously difficult to obtain, given both the complexity of what must be proved novel and the speed at which the field moves. Securing one at this stage establishes PressHop’s intellectual foundations on terms that will matter as the platform scales.
The technology itself addresses a problem that is becoming more acute by the month. Every submission is processed through AI-powered deepfake detection built on Google and Amazon technology, followed by human editorial review, with full metadata including geo-tagging, timestamps, and device authentication.
Where traditional bureaux have relied on the professional credibility of their photographers as the primary guarantee of authenticity, PressHop layers automated verification with human editorial oversight to catch manipulated or synthetic content before it reaches a newsroom. In an era when the line between real and fabricated imagery is increasingly difficult to discern, that combination is fast becoming a selling point in its own right.