Living the slums of New Delhi, he ran away from home aged 15, two years later he had 55 people working for him. Today, nearly 20 years on Ambarish Mishra, founder and boss of Blippar, a mobile phone app business is valued at $1.5bn or £1.2bn.
Blippar, launched in 2011, is an augmented reality app using the mobile phone's camera, it superimposes animation or graphics onto the surrounding world. For example, focus on a limited edition can of Coca-Cola, a tie up partner of Blippar, and it becomes an animated jukebox that enables you to play music. Or point the camera at an apple and a picture will appear on the screen along with a detailed guide to its history. The app also suggests related things to find out more about.
With the continuing popularity of augmented reality games like Pokemon Go, Blippar's launch five years ago seems prophetic. Blippar is also quite popular, with claims the app has racked up over 65 million users from 170 countries since 2011.
Raised in a middle class family in a mining town called Dhanbad, in Jharkhand. Ambarish decided to run away from home after he started failing classes at school. He was also unhappy that his dad pressured him to take up engineering, while he wanted to work with computers. After weeks of planning, one day, he wrote a letter to his parents, packed a bag and left. Instead of Mumbai as he intended, Ambarish went to New Delhi and shared a "classic Indian shed, made of clay", with no sanitation in a slum of Delhi. While juggling his 2 jobs of selling magazines and working in a restaurant, he glanced through a newspaper and saw an advert offering $10,000 for a winning business idea.
At 16 year’s old, his idea was to provide free internet to women earning below a certain wage, motivated by the disparity he felt between the strong women in his family and the culture in wider Indian society. His idea won and he launched Woman Infoline from the prize money. The firm's business model was to provide internet access for free from the money from its advertising. Ambarish had 125 people working for him at its peak, but he eventually floated the company and resigned in 2000.
With the money from Women Infoline, Ambarish moved to the UK, as he wanted to start a UK-based technology company, but success proved elusive. He says "Almost nine years went by and everything I did was a disaster. All the ideas were very cool - but I couldn't pull it off. I was not left with any money.”
Ambarish become frustrated, and started drinking "quite heavily". But then, one afternoon in a pub in Surrey, with drinking with Omar Tayeb, Blippar’s co-founder, everything changed. “The last round of drinks was £15 - I put the money on the bar and made a joke, saying 'imagine if Queen Elizabeth came out of the bank note?’.” Omar made an app prototype of Ambarish's face superimposed over the Queen’s. It was a trick they would show people in bars, until it dawned on him that they should build an app that "looks at everything in the world, and give you content on top of it”. And so Blippar was born and the rest history.
Blippar has offices in 12 locations globally, including London, New York, San Francisco, Delhi and Singapore."We are big for a young company," says Ambarish. While the pace of growth has been challenging, especially while hiring staff, Blippar has had no difficulty in raising funds. The firm and its 300 employees has secured $99m of investment, including $54m from the Malaysian government's investment arm in early 2016. However, Blippar’s wealth comes by doing tie-ups with major global brands, which include Conde Nast, Jaguar, Unilever, and Nestle among others.
67,000 schools around the world use the app, including in the UK, US, India and Canada. In future, Ambarish wants the app to recognise everything in the physical world. One of his other aims is for Blippar to help educate and inform illiterate people, like providing audio guides for train networks.
