Ambarish Mitra

The story of Ambarish Mitra, artificial intelligence and augmented reality expert, is one of real rags to riches. The Indian entrepreneur is best known for being the founder and CEO of Blippar, a visual search, artificial intelligence and augmented reality company. Ambarish grew up in a middle-class Indian family and led a comfortable life, but disagreed with his father about his career path. While his father wanted him to go into engineering, Ambarish was passionate about technology and the internet, and wanted to pursue this instead.

Aged 17, he left home and ended up in the slums of Delhi for seven months. It was here that he came across an ad for an e-business competition and he submitted his idea to empower women by connecting them to the internet for free. Three months later, he found out he had won and Ambarish set up his internet portal for women in poverty, Women Infoline. This start-up provided him with the launchpad to get out of the slums of India and to England, where he got a job with start-up insurance company, Swiftcover.

Swiftcover was acquired by AXA insurance in 2007, and Ambarish met Omar Tayeb, with whom he would create Blippar after an idea came to them via a joke over drinks at a pub. The app allowed virtual reality to augment what was actually real, and has since won several awards in the technology and innovation industry. In 2015, the company ranked nineteenth in CNBC’s Top Distributor List, and moved up to ninth in 2016.

In January 2016, Ambarish was named in the list of top UK business innovators, and Blippar was recognised as one of the most innovative companies by Business Insider. Blippar’s partnership with Max Factor in 2016 also won the Mobile Campaign or Strategy of the Year at the 2017 Drum Marketing Awards. Ambarish was also one of the early investors in Magic Pony, which was sold to Twitter in June 2016 for $150million, and was a lead investor in Global Gene Corp.