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March 2026
Ritchie Nanda is the kind of entrepreneur who treats adversity as a business plan, and his latest venture, PressHop, may be the most compelling proof of that yet. After three decades of building, losing, and rebuilding across three continents, he has created a platform that is quietly dismantling the way the world’s newsrooms source their content.
Think about what 65,000 people spread across every town, suburb, and high street in the UK actually means. Someone is always nearby, already there when something happens, phone in hand, ready to capture it. PressHop connects those people directly with publishers, who post an assignment the moment a story breaks and receive verified, rights-cleared photos or video within minutes. No traditional photo bureau, however well-resourced, can put a photographer on every street corner in the country. PressHop already has.
For the contributors themselves, known as Hoppers, it is one of the more practical side incomes around, with no fixed hours, no minimum commitment, and earnings of between £100 and £200 a month for fitting assignments around everyday life. Kaine Clark, a 31-year-old freelance content creator in Manchester, had his first payment within a week of signing up, earned £582 in his first three months, and has since had his work picked up by the Manchester Evening News. For students in particular, the model is a natural fit, turning a smartphone and local knowledge into a genuine and flexible income.
More than 375 media publishers are now using the platform, among them Metro and Newsquest, and PressHop is barely seven months old. For picture desks and video editors who have spent years watching editorial budgets shrink while agency costs hold firm, the appeal is not hard to understand.
What gives publishers genuine confidence, though, is the technology underneath it all. Every submission passes through AI-powered deepfake detection built on Google and Amazon infrastructure, followed by human editorial review, with geo-tagging, timestamps, and device authentication attached. At a time when AI-generated imagery is a genuine and growing problem for newsrooms, PressHop has built a verification layer that checks the content itself rather than simply trusting the person who submitted it. That distinction matters more with every passing month.
Earlier this year the platform secured a US provisional patent protecting its core technology, one of the hardest achievements in media tech, where the bar for proving something truly novel is exceptionally high and the competitive landscape moves at pace. The patent, alongside shortlistings for both Start-up Tech Company of the Year and Innovative Enterprise Product of the Year at the National Tech Awards 2026, signals that the wider industry is beginning to understand what Nanda has built.
What they may be less aware of is what it took to get here.
Nanda started his first business in Mumbai in 1992, a modest security services firm with three employees and a conviction that there was a better way. Over thirty years he turned it into something extraordinary, more than 97,000 employees across 200 offices in seven countries, revenues of £140 million, and a company valued at £270 million. Then came a long and bruising period of financial difficulty, the consequence of personal guarantees he had given to protect thousands of jobs when his UK business ran into trouble. In 2022, he was declared bankrupt. He emerged from bankruptcy in 2023.
He talks about those years with a quietness that carries more weight than drama. He came to understand failure not as a verdict but as information, and the willingness to start again not as a last resort but as its own kind of courage. There is nothing performative about it. He has simply thought it through.
The thread connecting that experience to PressHop is a personal one. When inaccurate stories circulated about him at the lowest point of those years, he had no meaningful way to respond, no platform, no recourse, and no route to the truth. The frustration of that, he has said, did not leave him bitter so much as purposeful. If media’s existing structures could do that much damage simply by failing to act, then building something better was not just an opportunity. It was the point.
For an industry still searching for its next chapter, PressHop represents something genuinely rare, a new idea, backed by technology that works, built by someone with every reason in the world to get it right this time.
Also read: Mastering TV Media Buying for Maximum Impact
Image source: Ritchie Nanda – PressHop
