City profiles

Ambarish Mitra The founder of the red-hot tech start-up Blippar is heading to Monaco this week to represent Britain in the prestigious EY World Entrepreneur of the Year awards, said Kiki Loizou in The Sunday Times. Being inventive is vital to business building, especially if you’re in the “augmented reality” game (the Blippar app allows you to scan or “blip” realworld objects, and provides relevant digital information). But Ambarish Mitra, 38, has been a little too inventive. He was “recently exposed” for falsely claiming that he had studied at the London School of Economics, and for saying that he had previously floated a business in India, when he hadn’t. “I don’t know what got into my head and I take full responsibility for it,” says Mitra – who has raised more than £77m for Blippar from investors including Qualcomm, Lansdowne Partners and the property tycoon Nick Candy. “There was no agenda.” The “founding myth” of Mitra’s career is certainly seductive, said Kadhim Shubber in the FT: his “frequently told tale of triumph over adversity in the slums of Delhi” prompted the BBC to dub him a “real-life slumdog multimillionaire”. Has this story, too, perhaps been “augmented”? Still, what matters now is Blippar, which lost £26m in the 16 months to March 2016, but reportedly has some 65 million users, along with corporate clients such as Mcdonald’s and Heinz. “It is a shame that my CV is in question,” says Mitra, who admits the bad press hasn’t helped his capital-raising efforts. “I’ve never hired anyone based on their grades and stuff like that.”