The Founder
Blackmere was founded by Mo Battah—a software engineer and operator, not a consultant. The distinction matters. Consultants observe systems and write reports. Operators build systems, inherit broken ones, and are accountable when they fail at two in the morning.
Mo was the principal executive leading Alpine Investors' largest software roll-up, Actabl—integrating four companies into a unified platform. That meant inheriting four codebases, four infrastructure environments, four engineering cultures, and one board expecting a coherent product on a PE timeline. Prior to PE, he scaled engineering through VC-backed hypergrowth—Series A through a $1B+ valuation—managing full-stack engineering, cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP, SRE, DevOps, and cybersecurity across multi-product portfolios.
Mo also invests directly. A SAFE investment in Kodiak Robotics (autonomous trucking, now Nasdaq: KDK) generated a 4.8x MOIC in under a year, exiting via SPAC merger. As an LP in Aviso Ventures, his portfolio includes exits to Palo Alto Networks, Dropbox, and Anysphere—the parent company of Cursor. An operator who also deploys capital and frames technical risk in the language of deal economics.
Blackmere was built entirely through private equity demand. A fund approached Mo during his transition out of Alpine, and that first engagement became buy-side diligence. They asked for more, and that became post-close execution. Then sell-side representation. Every service offering exists because a PE client needed it.
The gap that created Blackmere is structural. Diligence firms deliver reports. Portfolio companies need execution. The translation loss between assessment and action is where value creation plans go to die.
The Model
Blackmere operates on four design decisions that are deliberate constraints, not scaling limitations.
No juniors. No delivery team. No subcontractors. The person who presents findings to the investment committee is the person who reviewed the codebase, sat in the management presentations, and accessed production infrastructure.
Three concurrent mandates, maximum. This is the model, not a limitation of it. The depth required to move from assessment to execution on a single engagement is incompatible with a bench optimizing for utilization. Fewer engagements, higher density of attention per deal.
The same operator who identifies risk owns the fix. The remediation plan is written by the person who will execute it.
Post-close execution is never upsold during diligence. Every diligence client to date has retained Blackmere for post-close work—voluntarily, not pitched.
Published Work
Writing on private equity, technology, and operational value creation. Structural analysis of the tech diligence market and the operator-led alternative.
AI Readiness Ladder, Tools to Outcomes, and the Intensification Thesis—frameworks for PE firms evaluating AI strategy across portfolio companies.