Where we came from

Both founders, Richard Sams and Ben Blomerley, are Co-CEOs. Every good idea deserves a genuine chance to shine, and we have been in this industry long enough to know what goes wrong and why, long enough to have pioneered a better model, watched it work, and refined it.

What was broken

The gap between idea and product used to be filled with the wrong things. Slow agencies billing hours. Plans that dissolved on contact with reality. Software that worked in demos and failed in the world. Teams that vanished at go-live and left you holding something fragile.

MOHARA exists because that model was broken, and because we knew how to build a better one.

The model we changed to

By 2016 we had been building for five years and could see the flaw in the standard arrangement: the people doing the thinking were never the people carrying the consequences.

So we changed the model. The decision was made over a table in Bradley's Spanish Bar in London: rebrand to MOHARA, and become a venture studio and an innovation studio in one. Building software we were willing to put our name on rather than deliver and walk away from. Ben joined as co-founder that year, and we made our first investment in the same year.

Three principles came out of that table and have not moved since. Thinking comes before building. The people doing the work are accountable for the outcome. The product you end up with is one you can trust in the real world, not just in a presentation.

Bradley's Spanish Bar, London.

The AI turn

When AI arrived, most of the industry treated it as a threat. We treated it as the point.

AI changed not just how software gets built but who gets to build it, how fast it moves, and what a small team that knows what it is doing can do. We redesigned how we work around it, starting in 2023. Not to cut corners or sound current, but to compress the distance between an idea and something real.

The caution that anchors all of it: speed without judgement is just a faster way to build the wrong thing. So we did not simply adopt AI. We built models around it that put the right thinking first and keep humans accountable for quality. Those models are Built With, Built By, SPARK and Corporate Innovation.

The standard

We are not here to be the biggest, to win awards, or to fill a slide with logos. We are here because building something that works, holds up, creates real value and makes the people behind it proud is worth doing properly.

We back pioneers: the ones with something real to build and the drive to see it through. We have watched ideas that started as conversations become companies.

Timeline

MOHARA's founding date is 2011, and the 15-year figure follows from it. 2016 is the year the model changed, not the year the company began.

Around the studios

Teams based in London, Cape Town, Bangkok, Guadalajara and Portland.

Bangkok

Cape Town

Guadalajara