InMobi Group: This Make-in-India innovator is raring to go places

Mobile advertisement and software company InMobi is all set to enter a phase of hyper-growth, and with this multiplies the tasks for founder and CEO Naveen Tewari.

Glance, the home-grown firm’s newest business, has just received major funding from an unexpected source — Google — vaulting the 18 month-old-unit to Unicorn status (start-ups that are valued at over $1 billion), the second one from the InMobi Group. The investment is unusual, because the Mountain View-headquartered internet major is one of the primary competitors of InMobi Marketing Cloud, the main and most matured business of the Bengaluru-based company, apart from Facebook and Apple.

InMobi Marketing Cloud, which is the group’s mobile advertising platform, has been profitable for over five years, is on its way to hit $1 billion in revenue soon and is also looking for a public listing sometime next year. In fact, this business has a strong strategic collaboration with software major Microsoft, which makes it an interesting proposition. The third business unit,
TruFactor, that InMobi built with the acquisition of Pinsight Media, a unit of US telecom major Sprint Corp in 2018, is raring to go places, signing up with newer telcos, helping the firms with data-driven decisions through its big data and analytics engine.

All these mean that the company will get into a hyper-scale of activities over the next couple of years. And Tewari, an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur and Harvard Business School, is no stranger to such challenges. In fact, he has changed course several times, having starting the firm as a SMS-based marketing platform, mKhoj, back in 2007. Not to mention that the grind that Tewari and his co-founders went through in early years bootstrapping the firm from a two-bedroom apartment for months before securing the first venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Ram Shriram’s Sherpalo Investments in 2008. Both these funds had also backed Google in the early phase of its journey.

“That was a period of uncertainty. One always has a feeling as if he/she will die the next day, so you have to do everything for survival. Then, once you come out of that survival phase, you have to go to the scaling phase,” recalls Tewari who belongs to a family of academics. “It is a marathon. You get tired, burnt out, but none of that affects you because you are trying to go after something beautiful in life.”

After the seed round, InMobi had just done one more round of funding: $200 million from SoftBank back in 2011, which valued the firm over $1 billion, making it the country’s first Unicorn. As the InMobi group enters the next phase of its journey, it will have two distinct businesses — business-to-business (B2B) on which both InMobi Marketing Cloud and True Factor are focused; and a business-to-consumer (B2C)-focused consumer technology business.

Experts believe that the backing of Google to the B2C-focused Glance is probably one of the biggest validations for the firm given that lock-screen based content delivery technology, which it is pioneering, is still nascent. This AI-based technology allows a phone’s lock-screen to show up information nuggets and auto-play video containing news and information that are personalised to a user’s preference. So far, the proliferation of Glance software was dependent on device makers, so the company had tied up with leading handset manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Samsung and Vivo. The strategic backing of the Android king Google is now expected to take it to a new level since Glance would no longer be dependent on only hardware makers. “This is the greatest endorsement that @glancescreen or any Android platform can ever get. Super thrilled!” Tewari tweeted soon after the announcement.

This funding may also see the beginning of Glance’s entry to some of the global markets including the US; till now it was largely confined to India and some South East Asian markets. “Glance is an example of how a make-in-India innovation is seeing huge success in the consumer internet space,” says Tewari. “Just as Google dominates search, YouTube rules video and WhatsApp messaging, Glance intends to become synonymous with lock-screen,” he adds.

Glance now also has the support of Roposo, a short-video platform it acquired in December last year. Roposo today claims to have more than 33 million monthly active users. The Roposo app has also been downloaded more than 100 million times on Google Play Store. This app positions the overall Glance platform on a much stronger wicket with the support of strong user-generated content delivered on the idle lock-screen that has so far remained largely unexplored.