The Founder
Blackmere was founded by Mo Battah.
Mo was the principal executive responsible for Alpine Investors’ largest software roll-up, Actabl, integrating four companies into a single platform.
That meant four codebases, four infrastructure environments, four engineering cultures, and one board expecting them to become a coherent company on a private equity timetable.
Before private equity, he scaled engineering through VC-backed hypergrowth, from Series A through a $1B+ valuation. He has run full-stack engineering, cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP, SRE, DevOps, and cybersecurity across multi-product portfolios.
He still builds.
CI/CD pipelines. AI ingestion engines. Agentic systems. Production software built from zero and running today inside portfolio companies.
Mo also invests directly, with more than 20 private-market investments and exits involving Palo Alto Networks, Dropbox, Veracode, and SpaceX. A SAFE investment in Kodiak Robotics generated a 4.8x MOIC in under a year through its SPAC transaction.
This matters because technical diligence is ultimately an exercise in capital allocation. The question is rarely whether a codebase contains flaws. Every codebase does. The question is what those flaws will cost, which ones matter to the underwriting case, and what the buyer will have to spend after close to discover that the diligence report was wrong.
An operator who deploys his own capital tends to understand the distinction.
Why Blackmere Exists
Blackmere was created entirely by private equity demand.
A fund approached Mo during his transition out of Alpine. The first engagement became buy-side technical diligence. They asked him to remain after close, which became post-close execution. Another transaction required sell-side representation.
Every service Blackmere offers exists because a private equity client first asked for it.
The underlying problem is simple. Technical diligence and technical value creation are generally treated as separate professions.
They should not be.
Assessing a software company properly requires somebody who has run one: organizational design, delivery, architecture, security, cloud economics, engineering management, and the less glamorous business of determining whether a product organization works.
Executing against that assessment requires the same judgment after the transaction closes.
The person diagnosing the problem should possess the ability to fix it.
Most firms separate those functions because their economics require them to.
The Economics of Expertise
Private equity understands incentives rather well, so the consultancy model deserves to be stated plainly.
A consultancy’s overhead determines what it can pay. What it can pay determines whom it can hire. Its utilization model then determines how those people must be deployed.
An operator with a credible alternative running software companies has little economic reason to become a salaried consultant. A consultancy charging conventional diligence rates has little economic ability to change that fact.
This creates an awkward feature of the market.
The people examining the technology underlying a multimillion-dollar investment are often several steps removed from having been accountable for technology at that scale.
Blackmere removes those steps.
The person examining the asset is the person whose judgment carries the engagement.
From Risk to Value
A useful value creation plan contains two things: remediation and acceleration.
Remediation is familiar. Security work. Infrastructure correction. Architecture. Reliability. Engineering process. The accumulated technical obligations that somebody eventually has to pay.
Acceleration is more interesting.
It is the engineering work that changes the economic capacity of the company: removing an operational bottleneck, opening a market the product could not previously serve, reducing structural COGS, creating proprietary data, or building a capability customers will pay for.
Technical diligence should identify both.
Finding defects is easy. Determining which technical facts alter enterprise value is the work.
The Model
Blackmere operates on four deliberate constraints.
No juniors. No delivery pyramid. No subcontractors.
The person presenting findings to the investment committee is the person who reviewed the codebase, sat through management presentations, interrogated the architecture, and accessed the production environment.
There is no telephone game between the person who discovered the fact and the person explaining why it matters.
Next availability: April 2027.
Capacity is deliberately scarce because execution requires it to be.
A firm built around utilization needs a bench. A firm expected to enter a portfolio company after close and take responsibility for the work needs room on the calendar.
Those are different businesses.
The same operator who identifies the risk owns the fix.
The remediation plan is therefore written by somebody who may have to execute every sentence in it.
That tends to improve the quality of the prose.
Blackmere does not sell post-close work during diligence.
Every diligence client to date has nevertheless elected to retain Blackmere after close, including clients whose diligence concluded that no material remediation was required.
There are many ways to describe client satisfaction.
Voluntary continuation is among the harder ones to manufacture.
Published Work
Writing on private equity, technology, technical diligence, and operational value creation, including analysis of the traditional diligence market and the operator-led alternative.
The AI Readiness Ladder, Tools to Outcomes, and the Intensification Thesis. Frameworks for private equity firms evaluating AI strategy and operating maturity across portfolio companies.
Entrepreneurial Finance: private equity, AI, and private credit. May 2026.