A product and operations partner for founders.

Product, operations, AI and strategy, for founder-led startups and scaleups.

Who do we support?

We work with founder-led startups and scaleups, bootstrapped or funded. We are based in London and work internationally.

I need help with my product function.

You know your market and what the product needs to do, but it isn’t getting built fast enough. You may have no product function yet, just an offshore team with nobody directing the work. You may have a strong idea, but nobody on the team who has taken a product from first version to revenue. Or the product team you have needs a leader, or builds things customers don’t use. And if you’re building an AI-native product, you may not know how to make it reliable enough to put in front of customers.

I need help scaling the business.

The business has outgrown the way it’s run. Many decisions still come through you, as they did when there were ten of you. Your investors and your board may be asking about AI, while competitors claim to have it worked out, and running the business day to day leaves no time to deal with any of it.

I need help raising funds.

You’re planning to raise soon. You may not have a financial model yet. Or you may have one, but you can’t prove why the economics improve as you grow, which makes the story hard to tell.

How we work.

Sanara is led by Huw Bevan.

Running a startup leaves little time to stand back and see how it works. We find out who decides what, how work passes between teams and where it gets held up. Then we make the changes with your team.

If nobody runs product or operations yet, we can do the job as your fractional CPO or COO. As CPO, we run the standups, manage the engineers, and own the roadmap and the release plan. As COO, we run the weekly operating meeting, manage the operations team, and own the budget, the hiring plan and the numbers the business reports on. We stay until a permanent lead is in place and we’ve handed over.

We charge a monthly fee, set by the size of your company.

If you need us to build the product, or to write the financial model and investor materials, we scope and price that work separately.

Example work

NOVA

Earn up to 12% a year on your crypto

Start earning

Risk warning

Review: financial promotion

Risk warning missing

12% return shown without the risks

Firm and approver named

2 changes needed

01 Gateway 21FCA-authorised AI RegTech

Zero-to-one product and operations build-out

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’s chart of back pain spending in Mid-Nottinghamshire. The 2019/20 spending is drawn first, then the agreed plan, which buys more healthy years for the same money, above a dotted line for 2019/20.

02 STARHealth priority setting

LSE’s health priority-setting tool, rebuilt from scratch

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.

Three screens from the Rob Rea app: the session library, the opening screen and the home screen

03 Rob Rea BreathworkB2B2C wellness

A breathwork brand’s first product, shipped on iOS and Android

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.

Chief investment officer, single-family office, London

Searching 4 sources

Reading 212 profiles

Checking mandates and references

AKChief investment officerSingle-family office, London96%

RMHead of investmentsSingle-family office, Geneva93%

JTPortfolio directorPrivate bank, London89%

04 Maple Drive / Palo Alto StaffingAI recruitment platform · family offices

Product and engineering leadership for agentic search

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.

Led by Huw Bevan.

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.

Begin with a conversation.

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.

Email [email protected] → LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/huwb →

Based London · working internationally

Notes & writing.

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