Tech City: Huddle gets down with the East End vibe

As part of this week's Tech City feature, V3 met Alastair Mitchell, co-founder and chief executive of Huddle, to get his views on the development of the Old Street area, and how moving to the East End has affected his business.

Huddle is an enterprise collaboration platform which boasts 95,000 organisations as customers. Huddle helps companies to manage content, share files and work with people inside and outside the business.

Mitchell explained that Huddle moved to the East End from offices in south London because of the area's "cheap office space" and "good vibe for tech".

"We chose Silicon Roundabout because it's becoming a centre for our industry. The day I moved into our offices, I had more meetings in that first week than I had in the previous two weeks," he said.

"We know everyone in the space and the five companies in our building. It is basically a great place to network, to share ideas, meet other companies, do business and really create a shared vibe in early stage tech in London."

Mitchell added that the area is quickly developing from a start-up hub to being the centre of London's IT industry.

"More established companies are infiltrating the area, such as Huddle, Moo and Yammer. They are all quite large start-ups," he said.

"I think you will find a consolidation of technology in this area, from early stage start-ups to proper businesses building big companies."

However, Mitchell is less confident that the area can rival Silicon Valley anytime soon.

"We have a long way to go before that happens, but there is a real vibe going. There's money coming in. There's more and more established start-ups, and people coming in from the US and starting their businesses here," he said.