Product, operations, AI and strategy, for founder-led startups and scaleups.
We work with founder-led startups and scaleups, bootstrapped or funded. We are based in London and work internationally.
You have conviction and domain knowledge, but the product is not moving. Some of the founders we meet have no product function at all, just an offshore team with no one directing it. Some have a technical idea and nobody who has taken something from zero to revenue. Others have a product function that lacks leadership, ships slowly, or ships the wrong things. You know the product should be AI-native, but you don’t know how to make it reliable.
Growth has outpaced the operating model. Decisions still run through you, and there is no time to change that while running the business day to day. Most of the founders we meet are also being asked about AI by their investors and their boards, and are watching competitors claim to have it worked out.
You’re raising soon. Maybe there’s no robust financial model yet, or maybe there is one, but you can’t say with evidence why the economics get better as you grow and you’re struggling to tell the story.
Sanara is led by Huw Bevan. We charge a monthly fee, set by the size of the company.
Startup leadership teams rarely have time to step back and think about how the business runs. We look at who makes which decisions, how work passes between teams and what holds it up, then make the changes with your team.
Sometimes there’s nobody to run product or operations yet. When that’s the case, we run it as an interim head of product or operations. We take the standups, manage the engineers, own the roadmap and the release plan, and hold the function until we’ve hired someone permanent and handed over.
If you need us to build the product, or write the financial model and investor materials, we scope and price that separately.
We usually begin with a diagnostic. We spend time in the business, talk to the team and look at the data, then come back with a plan for the next few months or quarters.
If you’re raising, we can start there instead. We can help you do the market and competitor analysis, build the financial model, or write the board pack and investor materials. Huw has raised £750k as co-founder of Koyo Healthtech and £300k of debt and equity as CEO of Gyre.
The client was a bootstrapped firm serving crypto exchanges, with no product and no operating model. We decided what the product should do and built it: an AI-driven compliance engine that does the regulatory analysis junior analysts used to do. It runs an 80-step prompt-chained workflow and is 95% accurate against analysts’ answers. We also built an AI tool that checks whether an image counts as a financial promotion under the FCA’s rules, and RAG chatbots that answer questions about those rules. We hired the product and engineering team, and set up finance, FCA reporting, marketing, people operations and supplier management. Revenue grew from zero to more than £3m in two and a half years, at a pre-tax profit margin of 56%.
STAR (Socio-Technical Allocation of Resources) is a method developed by Professor Gwyn Bevan and colleagues at the London School of Economics for deciding how to spend a health budget. Commissioners, clinicians and patients look at one chart of every treatment the budget pays for, ranked by the health each pound buys, and agree where the money should go. In Mid-Nottinghamshire it showed that nearly half of a £4.5m back pain budget went on care with no measured benefit. The local group’s plan could buy 7,661 healthy years instead of 4,571 for the same money. We rebuilt STAR’s 2016 web tool from scratch and moved every live project across. Working with the people who use it, we made it easier to use and added carbon emissions beside cost and health benefit. You can read more at star.gwynbevan.com and gwynbevan.com/star.
We built a working prototype to gather feedback from potential users, then set up and directed an engineering team to turn it into a native app on iOS and Android. It has more than 100 video and audio sessions, plus playlists and live calls, and enterprise sign-in through Microsoft and Google.
The founders had spent two years building with an offshore team and no product function, and the scope kept growing. We fixed the data-structure faults causing drift between the graph and NoSQL databases, cut the roadmap down to what the launch needed and rebuilt much of the product, including its AI search, and shipped it with the same team. We added evals that measure how good the search results are, so the team can see when a change makes them better or worse.
Huw spent six years at Uber, launching cities and then leading rider operations and product as a general manager on the UK and Ireland leadership team. Since then he has been COO, CEO, co-founder and product director in startups, and has shipped production AI in regulated finance, healthcare and construction. When a piece of work needs a specialist, such as data or engineering, he brings in people he has worked with before. He also does one-to-one executive coaching, which you can read more about at huwbevan.com.
If any of this sounds like your company, get in touch. We’ll talk it through and tell you whether we’re the right people to help.