At MOHARA, we exist to help startups and corporate innovation teams build products that fulfil user needs and deliver an extraordinary return on investment.
We believe building great products is the result of following a process. Most product teams fail to achieve their goals because they don’t follow a proven process. Every market is different and requires unique product innovation. This should happen through a process.
There is a mistaken belief that knowing users, being a great developer and addressing a strong pain point is enough to deliver a winning product. It helps, but these parts need to be joined up to succeed – at MOHARA, we specialise in helping teams join the dots and bring products to market.
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August 2011
The Beginning
Richard Sams was a teacher when in 2011, looking to fulfil a creative urge, he started a digital agency with Patcharada Rattana. The agency specialised in building products and became a success. Richard quickly built an international client base and a reputation for quality and solving complex problems – one FTSE 100 company called him Winston Wolf because he always solved their toughest problems.
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August/September 2011
The Perfect Team
Richard met Ben Blomerley when working for Ben’s startup, AskHerFriends. They immediately clicked, each delivering an important and complementary skill-set. Richard provides creative juice, tech skills and a great development team; Ben brought a decade of financial services experience, an MBA and wide-ranging startup experience.
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November 2014
The Seed of an Idea
The new MOHARA management team was often asked to step in and help on projects that had gone awry. They met lots of people who had suffered bad code, stolen code, poor products and many broken promises. So many good ideas and great businesses weren’t getting started because they couldn’t deliver a product to market. MOHARA helped these businesses’ get back on the right track, but it made Richard and Ben ask a question – why can’t we help startups avoid problems in the first place?
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September 2015
The Startup Model is Broken
The corporate side of the business was going from strength to strength, but we felt on the startup side, there may be a better way to add value. Startups were finding it hard to get products developed (driven by high competition, less seed-stage cash and low supply of the right talent). So instead of the agency model, we set up a partnership one. In this model, we take equity and provide product development resources at cost-rate, solving the problems of limited cash and lack of expertise.
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November 2015
The First Investment
Our first partnership was with a business called Next Step Heritage, which had great ingredients: a strong market need, a passionate savvy founder and a big opportunity. It was perfect; our experience in product development enabled the founder to examine underlying assumptions and build a product that users needed – avoiding the common pitfalls.
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July 2016
15 Employees
With demand growing from startups and corporates we enhanced our engineering and product management capability with new team members in London, Brighton and Bangkok.
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November 2017
Ten Investments
We reached the milestone of ten investments within two years; we looked at over 500 startups and invested in ten that had strong potential and were a good fit for our expertise, including Study Rocket, Better Schools Project and DraftFit.
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March 2019
Cape Town Office Opens
To meet the demand for engineering in European business hours and to further develop our capability we opened in Cape Town. The team in Cape Town bring incredible experience, work on a range of blue-chip projects and add IoT expertise to MOHARA.
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May 2019
First Exit
The acquisition of portfolio company Quick Release by Alten was our first exit and a great moment! It validated not only our investment thesis but the value we add as a partner; we played a key strategic role in the Quick Release technology - an important element of the acquisition.
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July 2019
50 Employees
With the team growing in Brighton, London, Cape Town and Bangkok the breadth and depth of expertise is continually improving. Individual expertise is being combined with the MOHARA process and as new team members get up-to-speed we’re delivering better and better outcomes on our projects.
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August 2019
20 Investments
In August 2019 we made our 20th startup investment and we’re proud to work with a range of diverse startups that are all using technology to solve interesting problems. We can’t wait for the next 20.
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January 2020
Released Our First E-book
Released The Marketplace Blueprint E-book. Written by MOHARA COO, Ben Blomerley, this book serves as a valuable resource to start your online marketplace.
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March 2020
Addressing The Pandemic
MOHARA decides to go fully remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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September 2020
New Bangkok Office
MOHARA Bangkok has a new office. As we transitioned to a new way of working, we needed a space that offered more flexibility.
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October 2020
24 Investments
To this date, MOHARA has made 24 investments.
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October 2020
Dallas Office Opens
MOHARA USA is officially open for business in Dallas, Texas.
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December 2020
65 Employees
65 employees. Throughout 2020, 15 new employees have joined MOHARA, bringing their experience and expertise to the team.
Building on Success
Now we’ve successfully delivered 100+ products and built an incredible team. We’re ready for the next chapter. We have a diverse client base of blue-chip corporate clients and a portfolio of startups that are trying to change the world. The next stage in our evolution is a fund that provides the best startups with capital to grow, which, combined with our expertise, will be a winning combination.
A winning proposition + a savvy founder + appropriate capital + the right product team = the best chance of startup success
Here is to the next ten years cementing our position as the best place for startups and corporates to build world-class products.