philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Slumdog ‘Adtech’ Billionare: Bringing Augumented Reality to the World

[Philip Lelyveld comment: interesting bio of Bippar founder]

Had Ambarish Mitra not dropped out of his school at 16, he probably would have been an engineer living off a handsome six-figure salary, which he never wanted because of his love for the Internet. So he started with being a runaway teen, a slum dweller, a magazine subscriptions seller on Delhi streets to a tech entrepreneur at 17 in 1997. His story, now with UK-based Blippar – a global $1.5 billion valuation visual discovery app, is nothing short of a classic rags-to-riches tale.

After doing a couple of tech start-ups including an IPO in 2000, few tech jobs in start-ups and an insurance company AXA in London, Mitra’s next big eureka moment came in 2010 in the form of augmented reality, image recognition and machine learning. He along with his friend Omar Tayeb (now co-founder and CTO, Blippar) were having drinks in a pub in one of south-west England’s remote village when the duo came up with the idea.

“Blippar was literally born out of a joke. Looking at the £20 bank note that I put down for the bill, I cracked a joke to Omar that imagine if the Queen of England came out of it; but Omar, who had a dark sense of humour, took the joke too seriously and built the first prototype of Blippar app,” says Mitra.

See the full story here: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/274223