Ambarish Mitra: From runaway teen to tech genius and entrepreneur

There's a fairy tale quality to Ambarish Mitra's story.

Mitra, who comes from an academically-minded, middle-class Bengali family, flunked Class 8, ran away from home when he was in Class 11 and lived in a slum in New Delhi's Munirka locality, where he supported himself selling gen-sets and subscriptions of the then newly-launched Outlook magazine. A year later, when he just 17 years old, Mitra founded the Womeninfoline portal, which he took to an IPO and a listing on share markets in 2000.

With what he made from that transaction – enough to have a few houses in Gurgaon 10 years ago – Mitra shifted to London, where he founded Swiftcover.com, Britain's first full purchase mobile insurance site, and Stuck, a mobile social media network. Then in 2011, along with two others, he hit upon the idea that was Blippar.

Today, Blippar is one of the hottest tech start-ups in the world, coming in at number 19 this year on CNBC's list of 'disruptor' companies that could unseat corporate giants. It is valued at $1.5 billion, as per an article in Britain's Financial Times last month.

Blippar today is known mainly as an augmented reality app you can download on your phone to bring alive virtually anything – products, images, magazines – that are blipp-enabled. All you need to do is turn your phone camera on it. For brands, especially, it makes for an enhanced, experiential platform, which is why Nissan, Accessorise, Bobbi Brown, Pepsi, Heinz, Kraft, Pizza Hut, etc. have tied up with it. In India, too, where Blippar entered in October last, it has tied up with several local brands like Tinkle, the children's digest, Kings XI Punjab, the Priya's Shakti comic series, Wipro Chennai Marathon ads, and so on.

"We were in a pub in Cobham. I was drinking, and Omar (Tayeb, co-founder and Blippar's chief technology officer) was not. We ran a bill of 15 pounds and I put down a 20 pound note. As we were waiting for the change, I told Omar, 'What if Queen Elizabeth II (who appears on the currency notes) were to come out and ask for the five pounds?'," recounts Mitra, about how Blippar was born.

Mitra soon forgot the joke, but Omar worked on the idea and, in a few weeks, translated it into reality. The image came to life when he turned his cellphone camera on it, except what you saw was not the queen's head, but that of Mitra's himself! "For about a year, that was our favourite party trick until it occurred to us that we could develop the idea further," says Mitra.

In March this year, Blippar unveiled a new version of its app, which works not by words, but images. Words, believes Mitra, are inadequate to express the real world. "If you want a blue shirt just like this one," he says, "how do you get it? Keying in 'blue check shirt' in a search engine is not going to get you exactly this." On Blippar, in contrast, you could take a picture of the shirt and it would tell you all about it, including where you can buy one just like it. A visual search engine for anything you see around you – that's what Mitra and Tayeb want of Blippar by using cutting edge research in artificial intelligence, image recognition and augmented reality. Google has been working in this area for many years now, but both its innovations – Google Goggles and Google Glass – haven't had much success. Will Blippar nail it?